Nikon has sat inside the top three of the camera world for about as long as most buyers can remember. In 2025 it slipped to fourth, and the brand that pushed it there is the one you cannot seem to keep on a shelf.
According to Nikkei industry data reported by Digital Camera World, Fujifilm shipped 1.16 million cameras worldwide in 2025, more than double its 2024 figure. That gave it an 11.8 percent share and third place behind Canon and Sony. Nikon fell to 880,000 units and 8.9 percent, down from 960,000 the year before, as TechBriefly notes in its breakdown of the same report.
The gap at the top is still enormous. Canon shipped 4.5 million cameras for a 45.7 percent share, a lead PetaPixel points out actually grew last year. Sony held second on 24.6 percent, though its slice slipped. Together the top three now account for 82.1 percent of every camera shipped, a market concentrating fast around the names that read the moment correctly.
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The retro boom did this
Fujifilm's rise is not really about specifications. It is about how the cameras look and feel. The X100 series and its built-in film-simulation colours turned into a social-media phenomenon, and the company doubled shipments in a year when the whole industry was still fighting parts shortages. Buyers wanted cameras that felt like objects rather than appliances, and Fujifilm's rangefinder-style bodies and dial-driven controls were built for exactly that mood.
Nikon, by contrast, leaned on its mirrorless Z line and professional bodies. Those are strong cameras that simply never went viral the way a mint-green compact did. The result is a ranking that rewards public demand, not heritage, and Nikon has plenty of the second while Fujifilm cornered the first.
What this means in Malaysia
Malaysian buyers are living this trend, not watching it from a distance. Fujifilm's own Malaysian pricing puts the X100VI at RM8,888 and the X-T50 body at RM7,998, and both regularly show as sold out at authorised dealers here. The wait for a retro compact in Malaysia looks a lot like the queue everywhere else, and the busy secondary listings on local marketplaces say the same thing.
It also fits a pattern we have tracked before. Chinese brands like DJI and Insta360 already dominate Malaysia's camera aisle at the action-cam end, and DJI's newest creator cameras reach local shelves even when American buyers are locked out. The through-line is simple: Malaysia's camera market rewards whatever people actually want to shoot with, and a good share of that want right now is a retro-styled Fujifilm.
The takeaway for buyers
If you are choosing a camera in the next few months, treat the ranking as a signal, not a verdict. Canon and Sony still offer the deepest lens systems and the most stock on hand. Fujifilm gives you the look everyone is chasing, provided you can find one in stock. Nikon's slide in the table says very little about how good a Z-series body is to actually shoot with, and a lot about which cameras caught the public mood. Buy for the pictures you want to make, not the leaderboard.
Images courtesy of Francisca Silva and Eric Prouzet on Unsplash.
