On September 9, 2026, Sigma turned 65. There was no commemorative lens, no limited-edition paint job, no countdown clock on a landing page. Instead the company published a letter from CEO Kazuto Yamaki and released an animated film built entirely out of camera and lens parts, which is roughly the most Sigma way imaginable to mark a milestone.
The letter opens with an admission most manufacturers would bury in a footnote. “Our company was one of the last to enter an industry once so crowded with camera and lens manufacturers that it was said a brand existed for almost every letter of the alphabet,” Yamaki writes. Sigma was founded on September 9, 1961 by Michihiro Yamaki, the current CEO’s father. Most of those alphabet brands are gone. Sigma is not.
Yamaki’s explanation for that survival is not a technology story. It is an ownership story. Sigma remains privately held, unlike Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Sony and Panasonic, so it answers to itself, its employees and its customers rather than to shareholders. “Sigma exists today because it has been nurtured and supported by so many of you,” the letter says.
What lifts the message above the usual anniversary boilerplate is the part where Yamaki thanks customers for the stern feedback the company received when its products or services fell short. Very few chief executives put that in writing on their own website. It reads less like a marketing document and more like a note from a family business that has been paying attention.
The rest of the letter sets out what Sigma says it is aiming at:
- Products that are “not only of high quality and performance, but also innovative, original, and beautiful”.
- The founder’s guiding philosophy, “For Happy Moments”, rooted in the belief that photography accompanies people through their moments of happiness.
- A contribution, in Yamaki’s words, to “the development of photographic and visual culture, social peace, and human happiness”.
The accompanying video is the loud half of the celebration. It renders cameras and lenses in X-ray-style cutaways washed in saturated, shifting color, turning barrel groups and shutter assemblies into something closer to a music promo than a product reel. It was directed by Daihei Shibata with music by Cornelius, creative direction by Ichiro Iwasaki and production by WOW inc. Sigma attaches a warning about flashing lights for viewers with photosensitive conditions, and it is not a decorative caution.
None of this ships in a box or mounts to a camera. That is rather the point. A 65-year-old optics company that still designs, manufactures and assembles under its own control chose to spend its birthday talking about the people buying the glass instead of the glass itself. Whether the lenses keep earning that goodwill is, as the letter more or less concedes, the customers’ call.
