http://bcnranking.jp/news/1112/111228_21729.html
(in Japanese, Google Translation to English Here)
There are two tables and one chart which illustrate the key information. The first table shows the top selling 20 interchangeable lens bodies, regardless of whether it is a DSLR or a ILDC. It can be noted that Pentax K-r is ranked at 12, of which the share to the number of total units sold in the last year at Japan is at 3.0%.
I myself do contribute to that 3% sales as my K-r gold/brown edition was ordered in early January last year from Japan.
A quick add-up on the top 20 models reveals that the total number of market share is in 83.8% only. If the same figures of the years 2009 and 2010 are compared, it can be observed that in this year the other models outside the top 20 do have got more shares than what the other less popular models did as in the past. So, what does this imply? It simply hints that the competition has become more vigorious and the choice of models by the consumers have been diversified.
Next, let's look at the second table, which shows the 10 top selling models of ILDC and the market share of them when only ILDCs' sales are counted (DSLRs are not counted this time). It can be seen that the top 10 models already occupy 81.2% of the ILDC market and thus the crowd of the remaining ILDC models only share the remaining slice of the pie in 18.8% only.
At this point, we Pentaxians would ask, for what we are interested in, where is the Pentax Q and how Pentax has performed with the Q system? As we can learn from the above, Pentax and the Q does not appear in the chart. So, let's go on to look at the third graph then, which shows five brands in the legend, from top to down is: Olympus, Panasonic, Sony, Nikon and Pentax. The legend actually lists the brands by the ranking of them in terms of the sales. Besides, the vertical axis of the chart shows the market share in % and the horizontal run shows the months of the year:-
Now, we have the conclusion about the sales trend of the ILDCs in 2011: Olympus has still been the market leader, followed by Panasonic and Sony. It is particularly mentioned that the sudden drop of Sony's sales from October was owing to the flooding in Thailand when the Sony Thailand factory was forced closed and thus affecting sales owing to the shortage of supply of new goods.
As for Pentax, the Q has sought less than five percent of the market in recent months and the sales of Nikon 1 is rising, close to about ten percent in December.