Last Updated on 01/05/2017 by Chris Gampat
It’d be pretty insane for any of us to believe that a Chinese company purchased the aging and historical Hasselblad, but according to Kevin Raber over at Luminous Landscape, it seems to be the case. Indeed, DJI has been a minority shareholder for a while now and Hasselblad hasn’t been doing so great. But when the X-1D was announced, it seemed like things would change.
Apparently though, the investors really want their money and Hasselblad still needs to stay afloat in order to get the camera out the door and in consumers’ hands.
According to Kevin:
“Simple, the minority shareholder becomes the majority shareholder. DJI now owns the majority share of Hasselblad. You heard me right. This information has come from numerous, reliable sources. Hasselblad, the iconic Swedish camera company, is now owned by the Chinese drone maker DJI. Sooner or later, this will all become public. Maybe now that I am spilling the beans, it will be sooner rather than later. It seems that everyone inside Hasselblad knows about this, as well as some distributors and resellers. You can’t keep something this big a secret for very long, eventually, it is going to get out.”
There hasn’t been any sort of major announcement yet, but this indeed seems to be the case. Hasselblad is apparently using Sony sensors, and I’m kind of surprised that Sony didn’t try to buy the company even after Hasselblad licensed their cameras. It sort of makes sense though as that would potentially violate Sony’s relationship with Zeiss.
For a while now too, Hasselblad had the optics in their lenses made by Fujifilm. But there are reports that relationship ended, and that’s one of the reasons why the company needed to get into the mirrorless medium format world. Fujifilm followed suit right after.
So what does this mean for the industry? Honestly, I’m not sure. It seems pretty crazy though.