[stoppingdown]

SonyAlphaRumours recently published two reports from the market:

https://www.sonyalpharumors.com/nikkei-published-the-camera-videophoto-market-share-2023/
https://www.sonyalpharumors.com/mirrorless-market-share-in-china-canon-doubles-sony/

Klaus indeed already posted the former in June, but we did't pick and comment it. The latter report focuses on China only, but it's clearly a very important market.

Both confirm the rankings (Canon first, Sony second, substantially doubled). Now, as I often wrote here, I'm the last person in the world who understands market trends, but a couple of things made me think:

The rate of decline in the global digital camera market share has slowed compared to before, and demand for high-performance mirrorless cameras is increasing, with our magazine describing it as “high-performance mirrorless cameras are strong and the market is recovering.”

and

According to official data, Canon’s second quarter financial report shows that sales of mirrorless cameras represented by the full-frame model EOS R6 Mark II and the APS-C frame model EOS R50 are both good. 

The former seems to confirm that the good strategy is to focus only on high-performance cameras (thus expensive) because it's mandatory to stay in another league with respect to smartphones. But the latter says that the Canon EOS R50 is successful: now this camera is a cheap (700€ on Amazon included kit lens) entry level for advanced amateurs. The current Sony entry level is the a6100, whose kit has the same price — but it sports a much inferior EVF (same as a6000, even worse than NEX-6) and it's four years older, a fact that suggests that Sony is no more interested in this segment. I wonder whether this is at least part of the reason of the gap that Sony suffers from Canon.

(... clearly this opinion in strongly influenced by my own desire of seeing a new cheap entry level Sony camera body...)
EOS R50

[Klaus]

The question is how diluted the Canon numbers are by DSLR sales. Of course, sales are sales, but the only relevant long-term battleground is mirrorless cameras.

In 2023, there were 1.8mio DSLRs sold - so that's basically just Canon and Nikon. Probably at least 1.1mio by Canon.
Which basically means that Sony and Canon are on the same level in the mirrorless segment (2mio for Sony vs 3.34 - 1.1mio = 2.24 mio for Canon).

So, it's not quite as clear-cut. But yes, it's about time for Sony to show some real love to APS-C besides the ZV-E10 II.