According to a report coming from South Korea it seems very likely that the world’s largest smartphone vendor and the country’s superior consumer electronics company Samsung Electronics might terminate its digital camera business very soon. Since the launch of the Tizen-based NX500 camera back in February this year, the camera division of the company hasn’t made any new announcement whatsoever and if the report is to be believed, it has abandoned all marketing-related activities. In the meantime, ever since the launch of the NX-lineup of mirrorless cameras, the camera division of the company is losing money every single year.
The breaking news receives even further credibility from Samsung associates in Portugal, with the retails partners actually substantiate that their contacts inside the camera division of Samsung company has in fact vanished. According to multiple reports, the official website for Samsung’s cameras hasn’t been updated in months leading to the conclusion that Samsung is really washing its hands off of the company’s loss-making digital camera business. Nonetheless, there’s one good news that comes out of this report and it’s about the employees who are working at the moment in the camera department of the company. They will keep their jobs by being relocated to other divisions of the company.
We can only wait and see if Samsung is really going to shut down its digital camera business once and for all, but current indications seem to point towards that direction at the moment. Of course, Samsung is one of the very few camera manufacturers today that actually makes the majority of its hardware components in-house, such as memory chips, processors, sensors etc. The fore-mentioned NX500 sensor was also acclaimed to be the best at the APS-C DxOmark sensor ranking a couple of months ago. It would be interesting to see if Samsung will re-enter the business at some point during the next year or two, if the current speculations indeed turn out to be true. Thanks mainly to the ever-improving smartphone cameras, the market for point-and-shoot devices is rapidly shrinking thus decreasing financial incentives for holding onto an already loss-making business.
