Unbelievable. I knew that Kodak was in a downward spiral for a long time. But, ,unlike Polaroid, it had been working hard to avoid irrelevance, getting rid of its vast land holdings, shipping production to cheaper locales, working on its digital imaging business, and being the legacy producer of classic photographic profucts. But its stock lost more than hsalf its value in october. It’s now the lowest it’s ever been, and even selling off their sheaf of intellectual property muight not save Kodak in an era when everything seems to have a (poor quality, compared to Kodak’s better lines) camer built into it.
When I lived in Rochester, the stores planned their sales around the times Kodak gave their bonuses. When Kodak wanted to turn a city park into a parking lot, they could. Big chunks of the city were owned by the Big Yellow Box.
Now they’re off the Standard and Poor’s 500, their rating is CCC, and they’ve been told their stock price is too low for a seat, and they’re contemplating bankruptcy. How the mighty have fallen. And surprisingly rapidly, too.
For me, locally, one sign of this is the fact that Eastman Gelatine in Peabody, MA (which I pass almost every time I go to Salem) has been sold to Rousellot, a Dutch food company. Any day now a new sign will go up there:
Kodak has gone down the same road as Polaroid, 10+ years ago. Instead of recognizing the death of film photography, they went on a half-assed campaign to get big in ink jet printers-another technology that is headed for the trash heap. They have about a 3% market share in that business, and it is unprofitable as well.
AS I read it, Kodak has been trying to sell its advanced imaging patents, but with limited success. I guess I don’t understand why they were nable to make the leap into didgital imaging, as they had invested billions in it.
I wold not be buying a house in Rochester-that place will become a ghost town.
Funny how CEOs don’t bother to learn the lessons given by the Harvard Business School’s case studies-they might have realized that this is a classic case of a dinosaur technology, in the last stage of extinction.
So sad for the employees-bt the CEO will walk off with millions.
People being the way they are, I know there must be people out there who stubbornly cling to film, paper, and chemicals like I used when I was a photo hobbyist as a teen in the 1970’s. Does Kodak still supply them with those things? If not, who?
Yes – that’s why I said they were the “legacy producer of photographic products”. But you can’t sustain a company the size it was on that market alone, no matter how rabid (my wife and daughter are members of the oldest photographic society in the country. I know a lot of these people – and a lot of them have gone digital in recent years).
Look at Kodak’s syock price. It was still about $5 a share only a few years ago. (it was close to $100 a share two decades ago, when the handwriting was, I think, already on the wall) Now it’s less than 50 cents a share.
I have a friend who is a professional photographer. Eight years ago, he sold ALL of his film equipment (enlarger, darkroom supplies, film cameras)-HE saw the writing on the wall.
Today, most of this stuff is worthless.
My question: as film photography goes obsolete, why is the price of silver rising? Photography was the No. 1 user of silver for years.
I was just reading Dracula by last night and it mentions Jonathon Harker using his Kodak to take pictures of the English house for Dracula. They have been around for a while.
George Eastman began manufacturing photographic plates in 1880. The name “Kodak” was born in 1888. The Eastman Company was founded the next year, and became Easdtman Kodak in 1892. Stories about the company give its age as 131 years.
By way of comparison, Xerox once owned the photocopier business, but as the patents expired, it acquired lots of competitors. And with changes in technology (cheap laser printers, scanners, etc), it might have suffered the same long-term fate as Kodak. But Xerox reinvented itself and developed new products. Another company that might have been a dinosaur is Pitney Bowes, what with the reduction in mail. But they’ve also managed to survive.
I interviewed for a job with Kodak (in market research) when I was leaving graduate school. Didn’t land it (not that I’m sure I would have been willing to move to Rochester, anyway), but they were a very prestigious company back then.
The point is, they failed to play to their strengths by developing imaging products for the digital world, like digital cameras (which they invented!) CCDs (which they helped develop), large-format digital (for which they hold a gazillion patents), 3D imaging (likewise), and so on. They had this huge patent portfolio from R&D in Rochester which they failed to exploit. Instead, they went off on this hare-brained idea to sell consumer level inkjets, a market completely dominated by companies like HP, Compaq, and Canon. There is and was absolutely no room for growth in that market, and not a single person on Earth has ever purchased a Kodak inkjet.