Tk 25,000 a camera in 2003, 10,000 sold a year; now a 16-lakh-a-year market

A 2021 report in The Business Standard gives two pictures of the CCTV business. One marketer of video surveillance products started his business in 2003. At that time each camera cost about Tk 25,000, and mainly elite buyers bought around ten thousand cameras a year. By his reckoning, about two lakh cameras were sold in the country in 2015, and in 2020 that passed 16 lakh; at least 70% of cameras are bought by individual buyers. He is now managing director of the local partner company of a large Chinese brand and is investing $5 million in an assembly plant in Gazipur. He said that the total taxes and duties on imported cameras are 37%, and on recorders 89%. The other picture is of an IT hardware shop in Multiplan Center on Elephant Road, Dhaka. After the lockdown lifted, in May–June the shop sold almost twice as many CCTV products, and its annual sales were about 60% higher than the previous year. One of its rural customers installed cameras with cloud backup in his shop at a village market in Brahmanbaria, so that the footage would remain even if the equipment were stolen. The cloud service fee is about Tk 1,500 per camera per year, although at the time fewer than 3% of customers took it. According to the report, the price of a good-quality basic camera had by then already fallen below a thousand taka.