A new report emanating out of South Korea seems to suggest that Samsung Electronics, the country’s preeminent consumer electronics company and the world’s largest smartphone vendor, may well shut down its digital camera business fairly soon. The report was apparently first carried by a popular publication in the country called Asiae, and comes in the wake of similar reports that circulated back in September, when South Korean website NewsTomato carried a report regarding Samsung shutting down its mirrorless camera division, bringing an end to the company’s ‘NX’ range of mirrorless digital cameras. The company’s camera division of course, has not made any new announcement since the launch of the Tizen-based NX500 camera back in February this year, and has abandoned all marketing-related activities if the report is to be believed. The company’s camera division meanwhile, is continuing to lose money every single fiscal ever since the launch of the NX-lineup of mirrorless cameras.
The latest news gets further credence from Samsung affiliates in Portugal with the company’s retail partners in the country virtually confirming that their contacts within the Samsung camera division has virtually ‘disappeared’ without a trace. If that wasn’t enough to indicate that Samsung is indeed washing its hands off of the company’s loss-making digital camera business, the official website for Samsung’s cameras has also not been updated in months, according to multiple reports. The one good news to have come out of this is the fact that the employees currently working in the company’s camera department will be accommodated in other divisions of the company, thereby getting to keep their jobs.
It remains to be seen if Samsung indeed decides to down the shutters on its camera business for good, but current developments seemingly all add up to point towards that direction as of now. Samsung of course, is one of the only camera manufacturers today that actually produces a lot of its hardware components in-house, which includes sensors, processors, memory chips etc. The aforementioned NX500 sensor was also adjudged to be the best at the APS-C DxOmark sensor ranking not so long ago. If the current speculations indeed turn out to be true, it would be interesting to note whether Samsung will regroup and re-enter the business at some stage over the next year or two, what with a rapidly shrinking market for point-and-shoot devices reducing financial incentives for holding onto an already loss-making business, thanks mainly to the ever-improving smartphone cameras.