![]() ![]() RDE: My second question of course is supply-chain issues. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any public-domain photos showing the massive traffic-jam of containers, so I took this one by Alex Needham from Wikipedia. COVID has led to massive backups, with containers stacked high everywhere. This shot is of the port in better times when goods were flowing freely. (Note though, that Fujifilm’s fiscal year ends on March 31, so the 2019 fiscal year included the early effects of the pandemic.)įujifilm's main camera factory is in China, in the Shanghai area, so they were hit hard by the Shanghai COVID lockdowns, both in terms of production and in the ability to get products shipped out through the Shanghai port. That said, 2020 was of course a down year for everyone, thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic, but looking back at their previous financial results, total revenue for 2021 was slightly above that of 2019, and profit was significantly higher. Consumer imaging covers traditional chemical-based imaging products such as photographic paper and minilab supplies and Instax cameras, while professional imaging includes both their digital cameras and the Fujinon line of broadcast lenses. Making direct comparisons of Fujifilm’s imaging revenue and profits across the years is a little difficult, because in 2021 they separated consumer and professional imaging. Igarashi-san didn’t have the specific numbers at hand during the interview, but I looked up their financial reports online later. RDE: So the sales in 2020 were down from 2019 due to the Corona pandemic, how much did it drop? In the last year, we saw double-digit growth over the year before, and we’re seeing the same thing this year as well.Įven allowing for a prior dip, double-digit growth is impressive in the current market. Yuji Igarishi: It’s happening for the industry as a whole, but for us the same thing has been happening as well. There's a lot here (almost 8,000 words of text), but I've grouped everything under subheads, so you can easily skim and quickly find the parts you're interested in. Importantly, they also explained that reports of problems with "punch-in" focus in video shooting are incorrect, inasmuch as they have no relevance to any products that actually shipped to end users. I had a wide-ranging nearly 90-minute discussion with five Fujifilm managers and engineers, with topics ranging from market conditions and supply-line issues to details of the stacked-CMOS sensor in their new X-H2S camera, their new processor chip, autofocus development, how you make a zero-blackout live-view viewfinder system, plans for the GFX product line and at least a little info about new lenses. One of the first meetings I had was with Fujifilm, at their Omiya headquarters north of Tokyo. ![]() It was great to be back and reconnect with so many people I know in the photo business over there. For example, it is reasonable to assume it is infeasible to compute \(2^, b, r, \pi )\).After a nearly 2½ year absence due to COVID lockdowns, I finally got to return to Japan in late July of 2022. This suggests the key security property for a delay function: it should be infeasible for an adversary to distinguish the function’s output from random in less than a specified amount of wall-clock time, even given a potentially large number of parallel processors.Ī trivial delay function can be built by iterating a cryptographic hash function. With a delay function of say, one hour, by the time the adversary simulates the outcome of any potential manipulation strategy, the market will be closed and prices finalized, making it too late to launch an attack. ![]() One solution is to add a delay function after extraction, making it slow to compute the beacon outcome from an input of raw stock prices. The attacker could read the prices of the assets it cannot control, quickly simulate \(2^k\) potential lottery outcomes based on different combinations of the k outcomes it can control, and then manipulate the market to ensure its preferred lottery outcome occurs. whether the stock finished up or down for the day) and suppose the adversary is capable of changing this bit for k different assets using last-second trades. Suppose the extractor takes only a single bit per asset (e.g. For example, a high-frequency trader might slightly alter the closing price of a stock by executing (or not executing) a few transactions immediately before the market closes. Stock prices are believed to be difficult to predict for a passive observer, but an active adversary could manipulate prices to bias the lottery. A classic approach is to apply an extractor function to a public entropy source, such as stock prices . Consider the problem of running a verifiable lottery using a randomness beacon, a concept first described by Rabin as an ideal service that regularly publishes random values which no party can predict or manipulate. ![]()
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