July 28, 2022
02:00
Close to bankruptcy by forgetting to digitize itself, the iconic brand of photography is now found in millions of smartphones.
“Shooting a Leica is like a long tender kiss, like shooting an automatic pistol, like an hour on the analyst’s couch.” The words of the sacred monster of photography Henri Cartier-Bresson perfectly sum up the feeling felt by photography amateurs and professionals when they use a Leica camera.
Iconic brand of the sector par excellence, its devices are now as popular with professionals as amateurs.. Some Leica cameras have even become fashion accessories that are worn like a trophy, like a luxury watch.
Some Leica cameras have even become fashion accessories that are worn like a trophy, like a luxury watch.
From its beginnings in 1849 in the German town of Wetzlar, the brand has positioned itself in the high end, but not yet cameras. At the time, Leica was an optical institute that did not yet bear its name and produced microscopes.
It is with the arrival of Ernst Leitz, recruited as a technician that the story will take another turn. He will buy the company in 1869, develop a complete range of products related to optical instruments and give it his name which is a contraction of Leitz and Camera. After the First World War, his son took up the torch and with the help of his engineer Oskar Barnack, they imagined reducing the size of the negative used at the time and obtaining prints by enlargement. It is this idea that will make the initial success of the company in the world of photography.
Thanks to the portability of its first models marketed in 1925, Leica will revolutionize the sector, because its competitors do not yet manage to produce light and compact cameras. The iconic Leica III model, released in 1933, would be one of the company’s greatest commercial successes. and will long remain a standard regularly copied, but rarely equaled. For a century, the brand will be successful with its various models with professionals who praise the precision, reliability and maneuverability of the devices. It will become the working tool of photojournalists and will be associated with some of the most famous photographs of the 20th century..
The missed turn
The digital shift of the 2000s will be almost fatal for the company. Overwhelmed by the arrival on the market of digital devices deemed more practical to use, Leica refuses to embrace the current digital revolution. The boss at the time, Ralph Coenen, even declared that digital technology “does not fit with us or with our customers”. At the height of his blindness in 2004, the company finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy with a turnover at half mast which rose in three years from 158 million euros to 93.5 million euros.
In the early 2000s, then-boss Ralph Coenen said that digital technology “didn’t fit with us or our customers”.
Hermès, then owner of the company, threw in the towel and handed over the torch to a certain Andreas Kaufmann, heir to a great Austrian family. In 2005, he officially entered the capital of the German brand by taking over half of the company’s shares. Resolutely turned towards the future, the new owner wants to make Leica a modern brand and is throwing headlong into digital. He won’t do it alone sinceit will associate Leica with Panasonic, Fujitsu and Kodak to catch up at high speed the accumulated delay. The result is a first model, the M8, in 2006 which received a timid welcome and numerous criticisms, in particular on the rendering of images which left something to be desired. The return is somewhat missed, but it announces better times.
The time to take off once more will be for 2009 with the release of the M9, the S2 and a modern version of the very first Leica, the X1. With its 18 megapixels, the M9 will mark the end of Leica’s dark period by being a real success in terms of sales.
Leica is back at the best time. Digital photography has given birth to thousands of amateur photographers in search of quality devices to immortalize the small and great moments of their lives. With its history and its illustrious ambassadors like Robert Capa, icon of photojournalism, the German brand is once once more seducing and raising the stakes with models that reach several tens of thousands of euros.
From box to smartphone
The digital shift well underway, the German company has decided to move up a gear to avoid being left behind once more. Being a high-end brand has always given it a special status in its field.a real marketing asset, but which has the weakness of not being able to be within reach of everyone.
In 2014, Leica secured its digital future by partnering with Chinese smartphone maker Huawei.
To remedy this and ensure its digital future, Leica hit a double whammy in 2014 when it teamed up with Chinese smartphone maker Huawei, then at the height of its popularity. To manage to integrate its technology with that of a smartphone, the German manufacturer had to make concessions. Known for its glass lenses, Leica had to adapt to a sector where plastic is king. For the release of the Huawei P9 in 2016, the first model of the Chinese brand to be equipped with a Leica lens and to display the famous logo on its shell, Leica offered lenses with lower quality glass, cheaper, but is refused to use plastic.
And if Leica is used to producing everything in its German factory, it had to resolve to outsource the manufacture of the lenses. Huawei, for example, has sold six million P20 models, each with two or three Leica lenses. A pace impossible to follow.
This partnership has made Leica more accessible. It has also somewhat tarnished its premium brand image. Huawei’s setbacks since the US sanctions have not helped and led Leica to end the partnership in 2021. Since it is with Xiaomi, another Chinese manufacturer, that Leica has linked up. The first models resulting from this partnership have just been unveiled and are clearly top of the range, we can’t get over it. They will only be available in China for now before being released worldwide. Leica is counting on this partnership to ensure a future and significant sales volumes, alongside its in-house models reserved for an elite, which will allow it to avoid reliving its dark period of the early 2000s.
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