Olympus OM/JIP Spin-Off Plans New Stuff (Profits)

Feb 7, 2021 | Bodies, Lenses, MFT, News

One of the more heartening developments in the OM spin-off from Olympus – where the Micro Four Thirds camera manufacturer lumped its money-losing camera business – was the fact that one of the main internal executives negotiating the spin-off with acquirer JIT was the firm’s chief technology officer. Setsuya Kataoka spilled some more details of the process in an interview with AERAdot.

Believing there were technologies in the pipeline that deserved to come to market that didn’t serve Olympus’s increasing focus on medical technologies, a spin-off seemed the best option. Other options were considered, such as shutting down the money-losing camera division, or creating a slightly more independent internal organization.

Micro Four Thirds as a cross-company standard, is showing increased marketshare in Japan, for the first time accounting for the plurality of lenses sold in Q4 2020. This was also affected by shifts in major camera manufacturers’ share figures, with Sony now splitting much of the share once enjoyed by duopoly Canon and Nikon.

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