Its legacy spans 13 decades and boasts many US firsts, but Eastman Kodak, best known for cameras and photography, maybe running out of options and time.
Concerns about the company’s future boiled over on Friday, after it hired a law firm well-known for bankruptcy cases, sending its shares down 54 percent to US$0.78 per share.
Although Kodak said it has “no intention” of filing for bankruptcy, the fact that its shares closed under US$1 and market capitalization shrank to less than US$300 million suggests that even the most die-hard investors may have lost faith.
Photo: Reuters
The picture began to fade in September 2003. Film sales were dying and Kodak slashed its dividend by 70 percent, hoping to gain flexibility as it beefed up spending on commercial and inkjet printers, medical imaging devices and other digital systems. It stopped investing in traditional consumer film.
The next year, billionaire financier Carl Icahn ended a brief, but profitable stint as a Kodak shareholder, saying that the company’s business model would not work, especially since it needed to shift gears while its primary revenue source, film, was in decline.
“[What Kodak is doing] certainly might not be enough,” he said. “I think it is possibly too late.”
In January 2004, the company said it would trim costs by shrinking manufacturing and cutting about 15,000 jobs, or 20 percent of its work force, over three years. Its work force has since been pared to about 18,800 — 9,600 in the US — at the end of last year, down from 86,000 in 1998.
Kodak has been an iconic name in US business. The company’s history stretches back to inventor George Eastman’s Eastman Dry Plate Company in 1881. By 1885, he had introduced the first transparent photographic film. The “Kodak” camera hit the market in 1888, with the slogan, “You press the button — we do the rest.”
It rolled out Kodachrome, the first commercially successful amateur color film, in 1935, but George Eastman was unable to see its debut. The ailing Eastman, a pioneering inventor and prolific philanthropist, committed suicide in 1932.
Nearly a century later — 1981 — its sales topped US$10 billion. It even got in early to the digital camera movement, with its Professional Digital Camera System in 1991 that enabled photojournalists to take an electronic picture with a camera equipped with Kodak’s 1.3 megapixel sensor.
Daniel Carp took over as CEO in 2000, right around the time that digital cameras started to become an affordable alternative to film cameras. Taking pictures without the use of film and the option to forgo printing proved a crippling blow to the company, which sold film, photo paper and the systems that develop film into prints.
Veteran Hewlett Packard executive Antonio Perez joined the company in 2003 and became CEO two years later. Perez was instrumental in Kodak’s shift to digital devices and services, hoping to outpace plummeting demand for film.
However, some say that was already too late, since consumers had become enamored with the ease of digital cameras, which allowed then to snap hundreds of photos without film or the need to make prints.
Today, most snapshots are taken with phones and viewed on Facebook, and it is tough to remember when Kodak’s brand was stronger than that of the social media site. Most iPhone-toting teens have never purchased a roll of film and have no interest in carting around a stand-alone camera.
In recent years, the company has relied on the licensing of patents related to photography and printing, as well as sales of commercial and consumer printing systems.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors
RSS