The current Nikon situation in Japan

The current Nikon situation in Japan – sent by a reader who has correctly predicted several past events:

I would like to share some information regarding promotions in Japan now. Nikon launched a new cashback campaign that started on Friday (14 Feb) and will end on 7 May. As usual, during the cashback period, no new products are usually announced, so I guess that after the 28-135 PZ, we might not see any new products for a while. (Development announcements might happen, though.)

Nikon is expected/rumored to have a slow 2025 year (in terms of new product announcements)

They are aggressively pushing the sales of Z5 and Zf—the Z5 has been perpetually on every single cashback campaign recently, and the Zf, which was previously given a JPY20,000 rebate, will be getting a JPY30,000 rebate (and JPY35,000 for the kit) for this new promotion—which might be an indicator that a Z5II with Zf’s internals might be in the works.

Also on a slightly different note, there are rumors and speculations that Nikon would be amending how local models are sold in Japan to prevent overseas scalpers from abusing the weak yen, buying tax-free and reselling back in their home countries. All previous Nikon models (mirrorless or DSLRs) had English and Japanese selectable for local sets, and for international sets a longer list of selectable languages is available. But with the Z50II English is removed and it is only available in Japanese for local sets here, but international models are not affected, and speculations are that it was done to counter international scalpers.

Some of the ground sales staff I had spoken to think that it might be a trend to stay, thus giving Nikon the advantage to set a Japan-only price which could attract more potential local buyers here rather than to have it match the overseas pricings and succumb to the yen’s fluctuations – the Z6III is actually a good example as it was launched when the yen was at its weakest, and thus its high MSRP coupled with the increased cost of living here affected its sales quite negatively. The sales staff I had spoken to was predicting that if Nikon could launch “local-only models” they could price it more aggressively here and not worry about overseas scalpers coming in to abuse the lowered price.

What to expect next from Nikon: an updated list of upcoming/rumored Nikon cameras and Nikkor lenses

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