DJI Reportedly Acquires Majority Share in Hasselblad ⇥ luminous-landscape.com

Kevin Raber of Luminous Landscape:

Hasselblad still needed to stay afloat. The investors wanted their money and they were not willing to contribute any more to this cause. What now?

Simple, the minority shareholder becomes the majority shareholder. DJI now owns the majority share of Hasselblad. You heard me right. This information has come from numerous, reliable sources. Hasselblad, the iconic Swedish camera company, is now owned by the Chinese drone maker DJI. Sooner or later, this will all become public. Maybe now that I am spilling the beans, it will be sooner rather than later. It seems that everyone inside Hasselblad knows about this, as well as some distributors and resellers. You can’t keep something this big a secret for very long, eventually, it is going to get out.

This is pretty wild. Historically, Hasselblad made some of the best film cameras in — and out of — the world. When everything turned digital, they were left behind, but have since created the wildly successful X1D. After I spent far too long gawping at some sample photos posted by Ming Thein last year, it’s no wonder it has been such a runaway hit.

DJI, meanwhile, builds some of the best semi-professional drones in the world. The attached cameras produce remarkably high-quality video, but I’m worried that Hasselblad’s name will be used to sell products they had little to do with. They’re no stranger to that — they’ve released a lot of rebadged Sony cameras — but their reputation is back on the right track with the X1D. I worry that it will be squandered.

For what it’s worth, both DJI and Hasselblad said that they could only tell me that they “have no further news about DJI’s partnership”, but TechCrunch is confirming Raber’s report.