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Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

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Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#161
post #97

Maybe I'm reading the headlines wrong, but it doesn't seem like a lot of people read the actual press release and earnings report from the August 11th, 2025[1]: 1) The "Going Concern Assessment" that they put out was a regulatory requirement because they didn't have full control of the sale of parts of the pension. They say in the release that they're going to have the sale finalized on December 15th, with details on…

> I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated The basic background here is that Kodak has been pivotting at least for last 40 years. - 1980s: Kodak tried to become a Chemical magnate. This strategy was abandoned in 1990s. - 1990s: Kodak tried to become a Digital Imaging company. While it saw a brief success, Kodak lost the competition. - 2000s: Kodak trie…

> - 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop.

Its hard not to laugh at that. At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense. I guess 2010 came along and the executives just decided to yolo.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#162
post #66

Not many people remember, but it wasn't that long ago that Kodak was "pivoting to crypto": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin At that point, it was pretty clear that they're on borrowed time. I'm surprised they had enough runway / credit to make it to 2025.

Given that bitcoin just hit another all time high, I'm not sure how apt your analysis is. Having said that, more of the cryptocurrency industry is scams than not - but then that also wouldn't necessarily exclude them from profitability...

KodakCoin is still a stupid idea no matter how well bitcoin might be doing.

The price of bitcoin being high does not mean your weird altcoin is a good investment. That would be like saying that because USD exchange rate is up it means every usa business is a good investment.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#163
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regulatory requirement is there for a reason. Whenever you see a statement like that it means that the accountant they hired is covering their ass so they don't get sued if the company DOES go bankrupt. Even though the company is paying them, the accountant is saying "whelp, doesn't look like a sure thing to me!" Their pension fund has assets outstripping its liabilities and they can essentially wind up the fund.…

Or the pension fund has positions marked at given value which aren't updated to current reality (commercial real estate, private equity shares etc.) so they try to off-load it to some poor sucker before it blows up.

No, typically what happened is during the low interest rate era of 2007-2020 companies pumped money in to their pensions schemes to try to meet their future employee liabilities (most of which are still way out in the future)

Now that rates have risen across the yield curve the cost of locking in coverage for those liabilities (typically with long duration government bonds) has reduced, leading to a surplus in the pot.

Selling the scheme to the insurance industry while it's in surplus lets them claw some money back and get it off their books forever

They seem late to the party though as rates are coming down. 2023-4 would have been when the iron was hot.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#164
post #97

Maybe I'm reading the headlines wrong, but it doesn't seem like a lot of people read the actual press release and earnings report from the August 11th, 2025[1]: 1) The "Going Concern Assessment" that they put out was a regulatory requirement because they didn't have full control of the sale of parts of the pension. They say in the release that they're going to have the sale finalized on December 15th, with details on…

> I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated The basic background here is that Kodak has been pivotting at least for last 40 years. - 1980s: Kodak tried to become a Chemical magnate. This strategy was abandoned in 1990s. - 1990s: Kodak tried to become a Digital Imaging company. While it saw a brief success, Kodak lost the competition. - 2000s: Kodak trie…

Interestingly, Fujifilm has pivoted to a like a dozen other industries successfully and it's now a full blown conglomerate.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#165
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and why not spaceships too.

Spaceships do not form the critical part of a functional smartphone. Cameras do.

Red tried the same without success. I'm not convinced the differentiators for photography consumers are the same as the differentiators of cameras for smartphone consumers.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then was a leader in digital sensors. But film sales collapsed basically overnight, not in a slower slope as projected. Kodak mgmt wasn't crazy or anything like that.

Film sales didn't collapse "overnight" in any way -- it should have been easily predictable and their sales of crappy, creaky plastic digital compacts and printers should have told them. If that rubbish was selling, film was doomed. More to the point, the sales of Kodak Photo CD many years earlier should have tipped them off to what would happen once a small, cheap-enough digital camera met the broad quality of the l…

I believe that Kodak’s missed opportunity was in not realizing the social sharing potential of digital photography. They had all the ingredients: the first digital camera, the almost first online sharing of photos… but didn’t grok it. Instead they clung to existing outdated models. A camera nowadays is a different animal to what it was when there were such things as height street photographers.

Compare that to the increadidble lateral thinking they employed when they re-packaged their movie film stock into short rolls, made a cheap-ass camera to accommodate it (the box brownie) and established a printing service to process the results. Pure genius.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#167
post #66

Not many people remember, but it wasn't that long ago that Kodak was "pivoting to crypto": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin At that point, it was pretty clear that they're on borrowed time. I'm surprised they had enough runway / credit to make it to 2025.

Why didn't Kodak pivot to making smartphones ? As soon as the iPhone reveal happened, any sane executive would have realized that this is what they would need to do.

There's quite a lot of interesting literature on this. Unfortunately the best work looks at Polaroid [1] rather than Kodak so I'm on slightly shaky ground, on the other hand I think that if Clay Christensen can point at Kodak as a exemplar of the same processes [2] it's all ok.

Anyway the issue seems to be that Polaroid (also Kodak) had what's called a razor blade business model. In Polaroids case they actually sold the cameras for the film, but they sold them cheap cheap cheap so as to encourage the use of the high margin product that they really wanted to shift - the film. Kodak went one better (sorta) by becoming a category killer in film so everyone who wanted to use a non-polaroid camera probably ended up buying Kodak film (razor blades).

There isn't really an equivalent consumable in digital, the action is in the camera (which ended up being connected to the smart phone). Now, Polaroid had consumer goods experience and consumer product R&D capability from making instamatics, and they had a management culture of investing big to create the next big thing - but even they just couldn't get past the "I'm telling you there is no business case for this" conversation in the C-suite. And here comes Clay with the Innovators Dilemma. The Polariod and Kodak executives both struggled to see past the investment cases which said things like "invest $100m to get $40m a year from efficiency savings in film manufacture, 100% for sure for ever here is proof that can't be discussed" to see "invest $20m to get $5m next year, growing 200% a year for the next 10 years maybe, I promise, honest that's what the future looks like fellas". Worse than that - investment in the digital industry would clearly kill the film industry, and the future for a digital Kodak looked radically different to the future for a film based Kodak and therefore there was a big constituency that didn't want to see their lovely chemical factories and lab based R&D shuttered in favour of a basement filled with computer geeks, also a bunch of people saw that their million $$ sales commissions for selling to corner store processors would go out of the window.

The turkeys... they do not vote for Christmas.

So the innovation cases that could have saved both companies didn't get the bucks and the rest is history. Sucks to be the shareholder left holding that stock when the veil of corporate propaganda masking the collapse finally fell. I remember a presentation from a Kodak team in about 2009 that would have convinced you that the future was indeed filled with Kodak moments spilling through everyone's life forever. Unless you actually knew what a digital camera was and how good they were then.

In the last few years a new thread of work [3] that unifies these kind of insights into a theory of innovation processes has emerged. I am a big fan but it hasn't got the kind of profile I think it should, probably because of Quantum AI Crypto flaps. It's quite instructive to use it to understand the Quantum AI Crypto stuff as well, but no one likes to hear about that because it's more fun to look at the pretty pictures I guess.

[1] Tripsas, M., & Gavetti, G. 2000. Capabilities, cognition, and inertia: Evidence from digital imaging. Strategic Management Journal, 21: 1147–1161.

[2] Christensen, C., Raynor, M.E. and McDonald, R., 2013. Disruptive innovation (pp. 20151-20111). Brighton, MA, USA: Harvard Business Review.

[3] Grondal, S., Krabbe, A.D. Chang-Zunio, M. THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY. Academy of Management Annals 2023, Vol. 17, No. 1, 141–180. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2021.0086

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#168
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated The basic background here is that Kodak has been pivotting at least for last 40 years. - 1980s: Kodak tried to become a Chemical magnate. This strategy was abandoned in 1990s. - 1990s: Kodak tried to become a Digital Imaging company. While it saw a brief success, Kodak lost the competition. - 2000s: Kodak trie…

Interestingly, Fujifilm has pivoted to a like a dozen other industries successfully and it's now a full blown conglomerate.

And yet right now they’re back to chemical photography film being over 50% of their revenue due to the breakout success of the instax instant cameras. Being able to charge a dollar per photo remains an unbeatable business to be in.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#169
No it didn't, lmao. Modern hellscape nightmare of false news, parroting misinformation and general apathy to actually checking facts.

Kodak has even had to release a statement in response to this nonsense.

Anyway, buy Kodak film, maybe they'll bring some of the older ones back after they've cleared debts.

Re: Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated The basic background here is that Kodak has been pivotting at least for last 40 years. - 1980s: Kodak tried to become a Chemical magnate. This strategy was abandoned in 1990s. - 1990s: Kodak tried to become a Digital Imaging company. While it saw a brief success, Kodak lost the competition. - 2000s: Kodak trie…

> - 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop. Its hard not to laugh at that. At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense. I guess 2010 came along and the executives just decided to yolo.

> At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense.

But was this even a real pivot? They "rented" out their name to a company with an already failed crypto coin project, who thought they'll make it if they use a bigger brand. A pivot implies some effort to change the business model, not just literally throwing your name out there and hoping money follows.

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