Nikon shuts its camera factory in China being unable to withstand competition with smartphones

Almaty. November 1. Silkroadnews - Nikon shuts its camera factory in China being unable to withstand competition with smartphones, South China Morning Post reported.
“Nikon, one of the world’s largest producers of optics and imaging products, said it has shut a factory in eastern China that assembles cameras, becoming the latest victim of the ubiquitous smartphone that’s displacing more and more stand-alone gadgets from music players to cameras and hand-held navigation devices,” the report reads.
Last year, smartphone sales worldwide grew 3% to a record 1.5 billion units. To compare, the Nikon 1 camera, which comes in two versions, called the J1 and the V1, takes photos with a resolution of 10.1 megapixels, the Huawei Technology P10 smartphone has a camera designed in cooperation with Leica, which shoots with a resolution of 12 megapixels with video recording and hybrid zoom capabilities. Oppo, which is one of the leaders among China’s home-grown brands, features two 20-megapixel cameras on its flagship R11 smartphone. Chinese consumers are giving up their stand-alone cameras, which leads to a drop in profits at Nikon’s Wuxi factory - last year it fell 68% to 1.2 billion yuan ($181 million) from 2012.
According to the company’s spokesperson Luan Xiaofei, the 2,200 employees at Wuxi, who’ve been making the Nikon 1 range of interchangeable lens cameras since 2002, will be dismissed, but will be compensated at standards higher than those required by Chinese law.