Canon's current list is relatively exhausting. I'm not a conspiracy theory kind of person – but rain covers and eyecups are back ordered? Of course, it could be that more and more users from the EF mount are moving over to the RF mount, causing them to replace their entire kits including accessories, and that this migration was unexpected. Or someone at Canon HQ is simply bad at estimating. I'll let you decide which one makes more sense in the forums
Geez, do you ever read the news? Globalization is over, the green transition generates commodity shortages, international shipping is in disarray, and
this is the best you can come up with? The iPhone had supply chain issues all of last summer as seemingly every component became an issue. We know climate disruption in the form of stronger typhoons hitting Taiwan is increasing costs of semiconductor manufacturing, so that likely affects Canon too.
If Canon has a problem competing for materials it could be due to a lack of sufficient scale to control producer pricing on some critical commodities, particularly those in computer chips. Yes, they make cameras, printers, chip manufacturing technology, and more. And the whole reason they bought their way into the security camera space was to improve scale and technology reuse. But by comparison: Sony has about 2/3 the number of employees, but three times the market cap as they manufacture so much in the entertainment sphere--and all those TVs, players, game consoles, and so forth use many of the same raw materials, they're physically larger on average, and they all have computer chips. Sony sells more units of each, hence they probably have better pricing power when purchasing raw materials for semiconductors, the single most expensive component in all of these products. (Cue the music: Canon is Doomed in F Minor)
Canon may also have internal pressures to keep commodity costs down, passing up possible commodity purchases in hopes of finding a better price--and if so, that is on them. That would better explain problems in plastics, for example. But doing this would keep the prices to you, the consumer, lower, so it's a tradeoff. The camera industry is very competitive, but Canon does what it can to maintain profit margins so something has to give somewhere. Delivery delays seem like a reasonable play for them. So did automating their photography manufacturing lines, which we know they have done. I'm honestly shocked at the R1 pricing as I expected this camera to top $7k based on earlier models, the stacked sensor and additional accelerator chip, and inflation adjustments. (Cue the music: Canon is Saved in D Major)
I could continue overanalyzing the situation in an information vacuum, but the point is that if you're trying to understand anything about a business it helps to consider both the current environment and possible corporate strategic responses. There's no way of knowing what the decisions were from outside the black box, but worthwhile speculation uses facts and reasonableness instead of petty emotive digs at Canon's leadership.
