Hard-up Kodak selling consumer film biz

Re: Ilford film

Those who pay any attention at all to my posts will know I live in France, near Lille. A couple of years ago I was surprised to discover that the FNAC[*] nearest where I live still stocks some 35mm film, including rolls of Ilford B/W film...

[*] For those who don't know, FNAC (sometimes written "fnac") is a substantial retail chain in France, selling books, CDs and DVDs, tickets for concerts and other events, computers, mobile phones, and other assorted electronics, etc. The "etc." part evidently includes Ilford film...

Re: They're finished

I doubt they would want to make profit from printer hardware, but they will from printer ink.

I assume the chemicals business would include it.

Re: They're finished

They are/were the major supplier in industrial colour printing (books, magazines, catalogues, packaging).

Based on a 100years of expertise in colour they were doing quite well in the area until they got a nasty dose of management.

Re: They're finished

"Kodak's last hope was as a small niche player in the b/w film market (like Ilford"

Kodak was always a large, mass-market company, and a niche market like black-and-white film- even if profitable- won't be able to save them in their current form. It's like comparing a small paper shop turning a decent profit (*for its size*) versus a large but obsolete supermarket trying to keep itself open on the profits made by the small newspaper section at the front of the store. Those profits wouldn't even come close to covering the whole superstore's running costs.

Kodak will not survive in its current form. They are a large company built primarily around a large consumer film market that no longer exists. For that reason, there would be no point restructuring them to continue their old business (like happened with General Motors).

Ironically, I'm guessing that Kodak had to reach the point of legal bankruptcy to be able to make the changes necessary to the existing organisation surviving in *any* form- the amount of investment, associated employees and legal liabilities related to their existing (mass market film-based) operations would otherwise probably have made this impossible.

And once this restructuring has been done, the question is whether there would be any point in trying to keep the "old" Kodak (or anything like it) together when the core reason for having all those (formerly) secondary parts in one company disappeared with the mass market for film.

I suspect the various parts will be split up and sold off. The name will certainly remain, possibly licensed to whoever buys out and continues the (professional and niche amateur) remains of Kodak's film business, and also quite probably whored out to random distributors who want to exploit the name recognition to shift generic electronic tat (a la "Polaroid" LCD televisions, and similar cases with countless other defunct company brands).

Re: So they think that the market

The first thing they sold was their CCD division. They used to make the best CCDs and in colour performance they still are pretty near the top. But it's too easy to make customs CMOS imagers these days even for high end cameras.

Re: So they think that the market

I agree that it seems unlikely, in the time that everyone's moving to Red and other digital imagers and shooting stereo at 60fps. I do think that ditching the consumer film industry is a mistake, in that they have a small but loyal base and, like Ilford, someone continuing to make Kodak film stock will always have a market, especially in the formats not supplanted by digital. But since Kodak have been mis-judging the film market since APS and Disc Film, I'm not sure that they have a concept of sticking to what works (even if, admittedly, the market has shrunk a lot).

In as much as anyone's printing anything at all these days (the vast majority of images stay in digital form), a lot of people are either using commercial print services or local shops - because they're plenty good enough and more convenient. Of those who print a lot at home, as far as I know the big names in photo ink jets are Epson, HP and Canon, with companies like Lexmark and Kyocera sniffing around. I'm vaguely aware that Kodak make printers, but I've never been under the impression that the had a significant market segment. If nobody's buying your printers, you can't make money on the ink; if you make budget printers rather than the market leader, it's more likely that your customers will buy cheap off-brand ink.

Kodak have never been a leader in (consumer) digital imaging - they're just not an electronics company, and they're not going to compete with Canon, Panasonic and Sony. They don't have the optical and ergonomic background of Nikon or Pentax that allowed those companies to get a foot-hold in the digital market - Kodak haven't been a halo brand name for cameras in a very long time.

They're a film company. They've been a film company for a very long time. That the market for film has drastically shrunk is unfortunate for them, but trying to reinvent themselves into other sectors where they've not been successful isn't going to make them great. From a customer's perspective, I'd like them to continue doing the things that only Kodak do (making some proprietary emulsions), cut their costs, and try to find some new area in which to invest. Throwing out their only unique products while attempting to become a profitable box shifter for consumer goods doesn't seem like a viable long-term strategy.

My only hope is that someone like Fujifilm decide to pick up the film plant and keep making the emulsions, but given that they, too, are discontinuing some films, I don't have much hope. Maybe the Impossible Project will pick it up.