How does Linhof manage to stay in business?

[Bob Salomon]

There will always be a market for high quality gear. Sinar also sold much more than their camera line. What has put them into the lesser position that they have today was/is bad management coupled with a healthy does of Swiss arrogance.

I think that some of their problems were created by that fellow who sneezed his teeth out at a meeting we had once as well.

[Rick Rosen]

I think that some of their problems were created by that fellow who sneezed his teeth out at a meeting we had once as well.

LOL, ya think?

[Sevo]

Sinar also sold much more than their camera line. What has put them into the lesser position that they have today was/is bad management coupled with a healthy does of Swiss arrogance.

Linhof actually had a much broader range of products than Sinar - down to camera and light stands, microscope attachments and repro gear. They even acted as the German distributor for a range of other pro equipment makers (most notably Zenza Bronica). So that can't explain it. I suspect that the management and ownership issues actually came late in the downfall of Sinar. Sinar was a founder-inventor driven company until the mid eighties, when the patriarch slowly pulled out and the next generation (along with the regular rabble of consultants and investors) tried to run a MBA driven growth operation. So they faced the usual second generation crisis on top of the general camera industry crisis. Linhof still is privately owned, and never was fleeced by consultants and VC stealing their assets. So they remained capable of sustaining no-growth periods and downscaling...

[Bill_1856]

Linhof actually had a much broader range of products than Sinar - down to camera and light stands, microscope attachments and repro gear. They even acted as the German distributor for a range of other pro equipment makers (most notably Zenza Bronica). So that can't explain it.. Linhof still is privately owned, and never was fleeced by consultants and VC stealing their assets. So they remained capable of sustaining no-growth periods and downscaling...

I certainly hope that Linhof manages to keep going. Wonder how many employees they have?

[toyotadesigner]

Here is the bandwidth of Linhof manufacturing:

http://www.linhof.de/just_in_time_e.html

http://www.linhof.de/opt_system_e.html

[Rick Rosen]

Linhof actually had a much broader range of products than Sinar - down to camera and light stands, microscope attachments and repro gear. They even acted as the German distributor for a range of other pro equipment makers (most notably Zenza Bronica). So that can't explain it. I suspect that the management and ownership issues actually came late in the downfall of Sinar. Sinar was a founder-inventor driven company until the mid eighties, when the patriarch slowly pulled out and the next generation (along with the regular rabble of consultants and investors) tried to run a MBA driven growth operation. So they faced the usual second generation crisis on top of the general camera industry crisis. Linhof still is privately owned, and never was fleeced by consultants and VC stealing their assets. So they remained capable of sustaining no-growth periods and downscaling...

I never meant to suggest that Sinar sold more diverse products than Linhof.

I worked for the succession of US distributors of Sinar in the '70's and early '80's. I never met Karl Hans Koch, the patriarch founder photographer, but I did deal with his son Hans Karl. From what I know, Hans Karl was a mechanical engineer living in No. CA when his father convinced him to move home and run the company. He was not trained as a photographer. He designed the Sinar P as an engineer not as a photographer. The concept of working out your swing/tilt angles on the back of the camera and then transferring them to the front standard made sense, to him, because the photographer worked at the back of the camera. Then came the digital shutter and film plane metering, which worked well until they added the metering module that automatically computed the reciprocity values for any film. The designers took the published data from the film manufacturers and used that data in their computer. What they never realized, being engineers, was that film manufacturing is not a 100% exact science and emulsion batches often required adjusted EI values, not the published ISO values and the reciprocity values changed. What value to the photographer was a $20,000 Sinar with all the electronics if the computer output was not accurate 100% of the time? A friend of mine at Polaroid got an angry call from Hans Karl one day lambasting Poaroid for manufacturing variations in their films.

Funny story: When the Sinar P was introduced Hans Karl traveled around the US demonstrating his new wonder camera to notable photographers. He visited Ansel and showed him all the bells and whistles of his new P camera. Ansel was unimpressed (with the design and his arrogance) and said that any photographer that understood large format did not need all those fancy calculators and features of the P. A challenge was made. Ansel set up a table top shot and they were both to produce a sharp Polaroid. Ready-set-go! While Hans Karl was busy transferring the swing/tilt angles to the front standard and using his depth-of-field calculator knob Ansel was holding a properly exposed and perfectly sharp Polaroid. Hans Karl left Carmel with his tail between his legs.

A few years later I was hired and giving seminars for Sinar and teaching large format at Ansel's workshops (using my Sinar F) and other programs including my own. Every time I saw Hans Karl he would shake his head and say "I can't understand why that old photographer cannot see the advantages of Sinar." I would just shrug my shoulders and smile inside. Ansel allowed me in his workshops because he liked me and my teaching approach in spite of my employment in Sinar. Also, I never took Sinar literature to any workshops I taught at. No students ever knew I worked for Sinar. In Ansel's book "The Camera" there is a nice write up and pictures of a Sinar P expert kit. That was my equipment and Ansel did that out of respect for my participation in his workshops and my frustrations with Sinar's arrogance. Incidentally, when I left Sinar the camera I took was an original, new condition, Sinar "Norma" expert kit. Still, in my opinion, the best camera they ever made.

At one time Hans Karl asked my opinion on why so many landscape photographers seemed to love wooden flat bed field cameras and why Sinar did not sell many of their F model in that market. The F is an excellent field camera design so he was bewildered and asked me to help Sinar design a new camera that would have a broader appeal to the rocks and trees photographers. I accepted the challenge and covered a Sinar P with wood grain shelf contact paper and sent him a picture. Even serious Hans Karl got a big laugh out of my effort!

Those were fun days!

Rick

[Ari]

That's a great story, Rick; they were indeed fun days.

[Rick Rosen]

That's a great story, Rick; they were indeed fun days.

Yes they were. Now if I could only get the new breed of photographers to understand the value of learning large format film photography ...............

[chassis]

Regarding the OP's question. As has been suggested in an earlier post, if Linhof has 30 full time employees, they need in the ball park of USD 5 million in annual revenue to be modestly profitable. There is a range on this number from the several millions to as much as 10 million USD in revenue per year. A lot depends on how the company is financially structured, what facilities and assets they have, and how much debt, if any, exists.

Is USD 5m in revenue a realistic number for new camera equipment? For an average transaction price of around USD 10K, it means around 500 cameras sold per year, about 2 every working day. Is the Linhof factory pumping out two new cameras per day?

As another previous post showed, Linhof offers contract manufacturing and consulting services. Let's say these services generated a few million USD per year. This means the new camera revenue would need to be only a few million per year, to arrive at the target USD 5 million total revenue. This means the factory would need to produce 1 new camera per day. It starts to become believable.

Additionally, there may be seasonal employees, consultants, or non-employee family members "working" in the business. If this were the case, it would reduce the required annual revenue for breakeven. And there could be an angel investor(s) putting money into the company to keep the lights on, because he/she/they wants to do so.

So it seems like the company could soldier on. It seems clear from the company website that not 100% of their revenue is coming from new camera or new parts sales.

[John Layton]

I spent a week at Linhof in 2003. They were interested in my L-1 camera and invited me over so they could get a closer look. At that time Linhof seemed to be a reasonably active place - the factory floor humming along, the ad/pr dept. upstairs fully engaged...and the upstairs final assembly room lined with rows of Technica and Technikardan components. Long story short about my L-1 - Linhof loved the camera, and we signed an agreement...but ultimately Linhof decided that my camera shared so little DNA with Linhof's offerings, that they could not move forward. The prospect of either adding to and/or changing such DNA for such a company can be both prohibitively expensive and confusing to the market.

The above scenario was repeated in 2011, this time with Sinar, who wanted to look at my L-45A. They loved it, we signed an agreement, but my camera's DNA was too different. By this time, Sinar had begun to consolidate everything under one roof in Zurich - a wise move in response to the changing currents of this industry. And not to criticize Sinar's current leadership but more to generalize, there is often something lost in the absence of an original owner's vision...a loss compounded when this person's product is based on personal experience and passion. Of course there is a counterargument...that this passion can over time become "monochromatic," indicating an administrative "upgrade" to seek a broader response to a changing business climate.

Just my 2 cents...and I continue to wish the good folks at Linhof and Sinar all the best, in the face of very challenging times!