Last Updated on 11/09/2016 by Chris Gampat
As photo industry sales numbers come in for 2016 it’s looking like one of the worst years yet, and many have openly wondered how long many of these camera dedicated companies can continue to weather the storm. Nikon, despite posting higher profits and income but lower sales, has announced a restructuring of their Japanese organization in which 1500 workers will be re-assigned.
This news was leaked ahead of Nikon’s financial call, with many outlets reporting that Nikon was laying off 1000 of their Japanese employees, though it appears now that this is not really the case. It seems, the actual story is that those 1500 employees are being reassigned, and that eventually about 1000 of those will be cut. So while it’s not a direct layoff at this point per se, in the near future 1000 of the effected employees will no longer be working for Nikon.
The purpose of these reassignments is to reduce the fixed costs of one of Nikon’s more expensive divisions. The report states that those 1000 job cuts will occur by March of 2017, so not too far off. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and how, if at all, it affects Nikon’s place in the industry in the near and long term.
More details are available in the official Nikon reporting, here.