Nikon Raises Profit Forecast by 50% – but Cuts Its Camera Sales Plan for the Holiday Half

Industry Insights

by Nino LeitnerToday

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Nikon just raised its full-year profit forecast by 50%, and if you only read the headline number, that sounds like great news for a company that lost more than ¥100 billion last year. Look one level deeper, though, and the camera side of the story goes the other way: Nikon now expects ¥722 billion (about $4.66 billion) in revenue, ¥10 billion less than in August, and it says the cut comes mainly from a lower second-half sales plan for cameras and lenses. Here is what the numbers tell us, and what they don’t.

Nikon published the revised forecast on October 30, 2026, about a week before its full first-half results. Nikon’s fiscal year runs from April to March, so this covers April 2026 to March 2027. In August, Nikon was the odd one out of the earnings season, cutting its camera target on weak demand in China and rising memory prices, while Canon’s camera business was booming and CIPA’s first-half 2026 data showed a market that still grows in value. I was curious whether the second quarter would change that picture. Based on this notice, it doesn’t. (All dollar and euro figures here use Nikon’s own planning rates of ¥155 to the dollar and ¥180 to the euro.)

Where the extra profit comes from

The full-year operating profit forecast goes up from ¥11.0 billion to ¥16.5 billion (around $106 million / €92 million). Net profit for shareholders, which Nikon calls “profit attributable to owners of parent”, rises 60% to ¥16.0 billion (about $103 million / €89 million). Revenue goes the other way, down 1.4% to ¥722 billion.

Almost all of that improvement sits in the half that is already over. For April to September, Nikon had planned an operating loss of ¥5.5 billion; it now expects a profit of ¥9.0 billion. According to the company, three things did the work: higher service revenue in its semiconductor lithography business on strong chip demand, refunds of US import tariffs, and lower costs from spending cuts and postponed expenses. None of these has much to do with cameras.

The holiday half looks weaker

This is the part I find more interesting. If you subtract the first half from the full year, Nikon’s forecast for October to March drops from ¥396.0 billion to ¥387.5 billion in revenue, and from ¥16.5 billion to ¥7.5 billion in operating profit. So the full-year number only goes up because the first half beat the plan by so much. The second half, which includes the holiday season and is usually the strongest period for camera sales, now looks clearly worse than Nikon expected three months ago.

Nikon names the Imaging Products Business as the main reason for the lower revenue. The notice also lists which divisions get a higher profit outlook: Precision Equipment, Healthcare, and Industry. Imaging is not on that list, and I don’t think that is an accident. What the notice does not give us is the size of the imaging cut, because it contains no segment figures. Those should come with the full second-quarter results, which Nikon usually publishes in early November.

A lower bar was already set in August

It helps to remember where the imaging plan stood. In August, Nikon expected ¥290.0 billion (about $1.87 billion / €1.61 billion) in imaging revenue and ¥13.0 billion (around $84 million / €72 million) in operating profit, down from ¥17.2 billion a year earlier. It planned to sell 850,000 interchangeable lens cameras and 1.25 million lenses, and it cut its estimate for the whole interchangeable lens camera market by 300,000 units to 6.7 million. The reasons were China and memory costs, which we explained in our memory shortage overview.

Of that plan, ¥160 billion in revenue and ¥8.5 billion in operating profit were assigned to the second half. That is exactly the part Nikon is now revising down. My guess is that the camera unit target will drop again when the full results come out, but that is only a guess until Nikon publishes the figures.

For context, the group closed the last fiscal year with an operating loss of ¥112.4 billion (about $725 million / €624 million). Most of that came from the Digital Manufacturing Business, Nikon’s metal 3D printing division, which lost ¥106.2 billion on its own. Compared with that, any profit this year is a recovery for the group as a whole.

What about Nikon’s cinema push?

This is the question I care about most as a filmmaker, and the forecast can’t answer it. Nikon does not report RED or its cinema cameras separately, so the ZR, KOMODO, and V-RAPTOR all disappear into the imaging total. What we do know is the ambition: in its medium-term management plan from May, Nikon targets ¥360 billion in imaging revenue and ¥34 billion in imaging operating profit by the fiscal year ending March 2028, with a coming Z CINEMA series as part of that growth. A weaker plan for this holiday season moves those targets further away.

In my opinion, the best way for Nikon to change the camera numbers is new products and better support for the ones people already own. ZR owners are still waiting for that big firmware update (Nikon, if you are reading this: that would be a very cheap way to make a lot of filmmakers happy). And when Nikon, Canon, Sony, and Fujifilm executives spoke to Nikkei about the future of cameras, video was a central topic. We will follow up when the full first-half results and the revised imaging figures are out.

Nikon’s group profit is going up, but its camera business goes into the holiday season with a lower plan. Do you think the China slowdown and memory costs will change Nikon’s next launches or its prices? And are you waiting for Z CINEMA products before you buy into the system? Let me know what you think in the comments below!