WSJ: a potential sale of Leica has ended for now
WSJ published a new article “These $10,000 Cameras Are a Rare European Manufacturing Success” discussing the latest developments at Leica Camera AG – here is a recap of the main points:
Bertrand Benoit’s Wall Street Journal piece (Sept. 27, 2026) frames Leica as a rare European factory success that stayed alive by staying small, expensive, and mostly made in Europe.
- Andreas Kaufmann, a former schoolteacher, used proceeds from his family’s Austrian paper, pulp, and packaging empire (about $1.7 billion) to invest in Leica in 2004, when the company was nearly bankrupt and its then-chief called digital photography “an intermezzo.”
- New management plus a sensor small enough for the rangefinder body produced the M8 in 2006, the first digital Leica rangefinder. That turned the company around. About four in five models sold today are digital; film cameras are still made, deliberately pared down.
- More than 100 years after the first consumer Leica (1925; the name is Leitz + camera; roots go to a 1849 microscope maker), Leica still builds lenses and assembles most cameras in Europe — Wetzlar, Germany, and a more automated plant in Portugal opened 53 years ago. Portuguese labor costs are a bit over a third of Germany’s; that site does preproduction of large parts and binoculars.
- Wetzlar turns out only about 45 flagship M bodies a day. A digital M11 lists above $10,000; an analog M6 about $7,000. The factory is half clean room, half workshop: technicians hand-polish, cement, and paint lenses; machines press glass into lenses.
- Revenue is roughly $650 million — a minnow next to Canon — with record sales in four of the past five years. Retro design has pulled in younger buyers amid an analog resurgence. The playbook is not presented as transferable to mass-market European manufacturers.
- Kaufmann’s formula: strategy, tactics, people, and money. On Europe more broadly, he says makers should obsess over materials and design, and that he can barely imagine buying a European car because “they all look so ugly.”
- Under Kaufmann, Leica took distribution back from dealers and opened about 120 stores, often with galleries. Own channels now account for about 50% of sales. It also runs an auction house (Pope Francis’s M-A sold for about $7.5 million last year) and sells refurbished bodies.
- New lines lean on Chinese partners: the Cine 1 projector with Hisense, the roughly €2,000 Leitzphone with Xiaomi (launched in March), and an April deal with Gpixel for Leica’s first proprietary future sensor. Some fans see that as diluting the German identity.
- Blackstone’s 45% stake was earlier reported as possibly for sale to a Chinese investor; those talks have ended, according to a person familiar with the matter. In April, 44-year-old former consultant Andreas Voll became CEO, with ideas for more video products and a lower-priced camera for younger buyers.
- Risks the piece flags: tariffs (Leica passed Trump’s U.S. tariffs on without losing share), AI image generation, and a U.S.–China squeeze. It already dropped Huawei, its first phone partner, after 2021 sanctions. Kaufmann says Leica is diversifying suppliers and markets, and that it is “much too small” to be crushed between the two superpowers — the same company that survived 1920s hyperinflation.
- Bottom line: Leica survived technological disruption by transforming itself into a luxury, high-margin manufacturer. The company’s revival is presented as a rare bright spot for European industry, though its niche strategy may not be a model that works broadly across manufacturing.
