Exiting cameras and photo film; selling the camera business to Sony (2006)

Abandoning both founding trades at a single stroke

This was the rarest kind of corporate decision — a company closing the business it had been named for. In January 2006 Konica Minolta announced it would leave both cameras and photo film at once: the camera line Minolta had built since 1928 and the photographic business at the root of Konica since 1873, shut down together. Digital cameras had erased the demand for film, and rather than manage a long decline the group chose a clean, total exit. The single-lens-reflex assets — the Alpha (α) system among them — went to Sony, which would carry the mount into its own cameras, while the rest was wound down: the camera business by March 2006, the photo business by September 2007.

The exit was expensive and, in its way, the purest expression of how this company works. Konica Minolta took a $906.4M (¥105bn) special loss for write-downs, closures and some 2,243 job cuts, and fell to a net loss of $467M (¥54bn) for the year to March 2006. It walked away from its own heritage without sentiment because it had already decided the future lay next door — in office equipment, and increasingly in medical imaging, inkjet and materials, which it was building up in the same years. That willingness to drop a founding trade the moment it stops paying is what has kept the company alive across three reinventions; it is also why so much rides on whether the businesses it pivots into can become durable pillars — a question the next decade would answer harshly.