"Media reports that Kodak is ceasing operations, going out of business, or filing for bankruptcy are inaccurate and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of a recent technical disclosure the Company made to the SEC in its recently filed second quarter earnings report. These articles are misleading and missing critical context, and we'd like to set the record straight."
I feel like journalism used to be considered a higher calling. Getting things right was very important. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe the internet has just drowned real journalism in a sea of clickbait headlines.
jspann 15 hours ago [-]
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 August 15th
2) They not only mention opening a new business segment, but built a lab AND got FDA approval for that segment (Advanced Materials & Chemicals)
3) The sale of the pension is going to have so much of a surplus they're going to pay down parts of the long debt that they have.
I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated
> 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 tried to become an Inkjet Printer company, which was doomed and eventually pushed it into bankruptcy.
- 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop.
- 2020s: Kodak tried to become a Pharmaceutical company amid Covid-19 pandemic.
As of today, Kodak is focusing on its chemical business (such as manifacturing KODALUX, a fabric coating material) and borrowed $477M (at 12% p.a.) in order to expand that business line.
That loan is due in 2026. Kodak is basically saying "I have no idea how to repay that money. In fact, I only have $155M in cash. Maybe it's time to talk with the creditors?".
bawolff 7 hours ago [-]
> - 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.
coldpie 3 hours ago [-]
I do not miss the zero-interest-rate days and I hope they never return.
brianwawok 3 hours ago [-]
I loved my $4 Lyft across town. Was happy to spend VC money...
close04 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
enaaem 6 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, Fujifilm has pivoted to a like a dozen other industries successfully and it's now a full blown conglomerate.
kalleboo 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jkrom3 4 hours ago [-]
I love instax… it’s seriously so good. The wide version especially. I’m addicted to shooting it.
alistairSH 2 hours ago [-]
As much as I like the end result, I HATE the bulk of the cameras themselves.
I ended up with a Polaroid Go. It's relatively tiny. The output is nowhere near as good (arguably awful), but for my use, it's fine. I have 35mm film and mirrorless digital cameras when I want "good" photos.
vile_wretch 2 hours ago [-]
Kodak isn't far off from $1/shot retail for some of their film stocks.
notfromhere 1 hours ago [-]
The chemical thing kinda worked out. Eastman Chemical is the spinout from that and they're a $9B annual business.
The folks running Kodak kind of forgot that Kodak was really a chemicals company that supported photography, not a photography company. Hence why the pivot into that was ill-fated and doomed.
nixass 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe they should pivot into human robots, self-driving and robo-taxis next.
I heard it pays out well regardless of whether your product being sub-par or non existing at all
FMecha 3 hours ago [-]
Might as well mention generative AI as well.
busterarm 41 minutes ago [-]
> - 2000s: Kodak tried to become an Inkjet Printer company, which was doomed and eventually pushed it into bankruptcy.
Those were actually dye sublimation thermal printers and...they still sell them!
kleinishere 13 hours ago [-]
Correct. And confirmed by Kodak on their Facebook page. The “going concern” disclosure is an accounting requirement. However, the company claims to have line of sight toward addressing it.
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. Great! Except if the fund's assets suddenly drop in value (e.g. when interest rates go up, and their bonds mark to market value drops, or if the stock market crashes) or if the price of those annuities to be bought goes up (e.g. when interest rates go down, and you need to reserve more money now for payments later). Interest rates dropping is perhaps not inconceivable, with a president tweeting every week about firing the chairman of the Fed if rates aren't dropped? A stock market crash, however short term, is also not inconceivable, especially with so much of the index concentrated in a few tech stocks.
A "going concern" statement like this is worth more that the company's press release disagreeing with it.
bluecalm 8 hours ago [-]
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.
nly 7 hours ago [-]
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.
HexPhantom 9 hours ago [-]
Headlines love a fall-from-grace narrative
mark-r 4 hours ago [-]
To be honest, I thought they were already completely gone. The article mentions them filing for bankruptcy in 2012.
They were pretty much doomed from the start. They had built their business by taking a cut from every picture you took, from the rolls of film to the developing to the printing. There was absolutely nothing in the digital camera realm that could duplicate that; their revenue dropped like a rock. If they had sold every single digital camera ever bought, it wouldn't have made up for it.
"Doomed from the start" for a 133 year old company seems a bit hyperbolic. They have lasted 13 decades and counting. How many other company started in the 1890s are still around today?
woofcat 3 hours ago [-]
I'm presuming they were trying to say "Doomed from the start of the digital revolution"
ghaff 2 hours ago [-]
One can come up with plenty of criticisms of Kodak. But they did sell off their chemical business when the selling was reasonably good and they did do a fair number of things that anticipated digital.
But you can't just yank out the carpet from a massive consumables business that basically underpinned a company's revenue and profits almost overnight and reasonably expect them to deal with it.
_fat_santa 2 hours ago [-]
I think where Kodak really missed in recent years is not jumping on the instant camera trend. Fujifilm has their Instax line and there's Polaroid with their "OG" cameras. It would have been easy for Kodak to become a leader in this space just with their brand cache.
Workaccount2 2 hours ago [-]
I cannot imagine the "instant camera" market is too big. The cameras are expensive and the film is too, while the margins are likely terrible.
If you want to make money in the US, stay away from making hardware and cling to making software.
Yeah, they famously missed the boat on Digital Cameras when they held one of the earliest patents but decided to not produce and sell them due to the impact to the film side of the business but like you say even if they hadn't made that error, digital cameras were replaced in 10-15 years by smart phones anyway so it would have only been a temporary reprieve.
ghaff 2 hours ago [-]
Fujifilm also applied some of their expertise in emulsions to medical applications.
But they were a much smaller company and AFAIK are a pretty niche business today. (X-series cameras are nice but I can imagine that sales amount to a huge number.)
guerrilla 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, how cool would it be if Kodak made monitors and TVs. That'd be an amazing brand. Aw man, now I'm sad that didn't happen.
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.
cowsandmilk 14 hours ago [-]
I would hardly describe a brand licensing agreement as a pivot of the company.
A true pivot of Kodak was moving from just doing chemicals for film to doing chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. That actually involved employees changing what they do, changing factory equipment, etc.
ryao 11 hours ago [-]
They did do more than just chemicals for film, but then decided to spin off the business so that they could focus on the film business:
One really must admire their determination to throw all of the life boats overboard to go down with the film ship. Every time they have a chance to save themselves if they move away from a single minded focus on film, they discard the opportunity. They just needed to mimic Nikon and Canon to stay in business, but refused to do even that.
The only way I see Kodak having a happy ending would be if Eastman Chemical purchases their former parent company to put it under sane management.
LudwigNagasena 2 hours ago [-]
It makes sense to spin off a successful subsidiary into a separate company and bankrupt the unsuccessful parent company. ECC net income is four times Nikon's and one third of Canon's, so it fits right in the middle. Seems like a happy end for Kodak stockholders beyond the sentimental value of continuity of brand.
actionfromafar 9 hours ago [-]
That's way too simplified. There's no "just" mimic Nikon and Canon and every other company which tried that died or pivoted away from the try.
vkou 8 hours ago [-]
Survivorship bias. There's no shortage of dead companies who did try to pivot, and, as it turns out, it's harder to become successful in a new field than just saying 'We're trying something new, boys!'
rubidium 14 hours ago [-]
Fujifilm succeeded at it (before Kodak tried). Interesting case study between the two companies.
bravesoul2 12 hours ago [-]
Interesting idea. Rather than the tired "they missed digital photography"... they could have seen it coming and pivoted to something where the experience transfers.
dotancohen 12 hours ago [-]
Kodak _invented_ digital photography.
SturgeonsLaw 11 hours ago [-]
And then shelved it, fearing that it would cannibalise their film sales
actionfromafar 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tejtm 8 hours ago [-]
They thought people wanted to have pictures.
Instead, we just wanted to take pictures.
kriro 4 hours ago [-]
I'd say take and share. Seems like people these days value pictures not as a snapshot for themselves (memory) but rather as a snapshot to show themselves to others (projection). Or at least there was some sort of shift.
exasperaited 8 hours ago [-]
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 lowest resolution photo CD scan (or even approached it, given how bad most people's photos are and how digital cameras made better photography easier for everyone). And given how they were doing the R&D, they should have known what was coming. Not just people not buying film, but people not really paying for prints, which is a double-whammy.
Kodak management wasn't crazy but it was entitled, boorish, inept and lazy. A classic late-stage US company. They were overconfident about their reputation and their essential status (just like Intel). At best, perhaps they were just too self-absorbed to be able to dispassionately react to what was happening.
The problem is that digital required a different approach to profit because the revenue and profit was lumpier.
As a result Kodak's biggest problem is that they could not possibly have pivoted even late on, because their line of digital products was a total pile of exploitative shit over the long term, that offered intermediate, semi-pro and pro users nothing at all of value and was already reviewing rather badly.
People outside the USA simply didn't buy Kodak digital cameras because we didn't hold Kodak in the same regard, and there were so many other choices.
Kodak also overstretched itself repeatedly in international markets, including a hilariously stupid late-era buyout of a competitor's high street lab chain in the UK so there were times when really small towns had two tiny, lacklustre Kodak stores when they barely needed one.
Fujifilm did better (by planning both good digital cameras and a transition to the well-marketed Instax and digital Crystal Archive printing as well as building ancilliary businesses). Heck, even Ilford hung on for longer, to the extent that their business produced better consumer inkjet materials than anyone else. When they were finally restructured in administration they had made the film business lean enough to survive into a management buyout.
Daub 6 hours ago [-]
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.
exasperaited 5 hours ago [-]
> I believe that Kodak’s missed opportunity was in not realizing the social sharing potential of digital photography.
They were screwed long before capitalising on this was a real possibility. The damage was done to Kodak before the vast majority of consumers had fast enough broadband to share more than a couple of photographs a day.
Kodak was an obviously cheesy, out-of-touch, cheap-looking digital brand by 2000, and it showed (at least to anyone outside the USA). The Fuji, Olympus, Nikon and Canon compacts were better-designed, full stop, and Kodak really even had nothing good in the "office camera", "lab camera" or "art department camera" offerings (which Nikon owned with the Coolpix 900 series, and Canon with the G1/G2/G3).
People simply would not have bought into the idea that anything Kodak did was cool or fun. It was the same bad cheesy smiling family branding nonsense.
I was talking about compact cameras there, because realistically that is all almost anyone was buying, even in corporate environments.
I think they sold in the low thousands of that DSLR (since it was a $15K camera). And the state of these partnership cameras was such that it was obvious they were something of a bridge to nowhere. Anyone could see that once Canon and Nikon began making their own things, Kodak would have trouble carrying on with their remodelled cameras.
Nikon had already shipped their first "conventional" in-house DSLR by then, and it was blowing people away.
Kodak should arguably have bought Sigma around then, but they didn't. They continued making these reworked/hybrid Canon/Nikon things until 2004 but when they quit making DSLRs they said the sector had "poor profitability". In 2005! Even Nikon was making a profit in 2005.
Back to the compact cameras:
This is the higher-end compact camera Canon shipped in 2000 (that all the real estate photographers were using):
This is its Nikon competition, which was an incredible camera widely used in professional settings; they turned up in labs attached to microscopes, in rapid newspaper repro, in museums, web development agencies, all over the place:
Sony, Fuji and Olympus had great kit in this segment already. Kodak really just had nothing even close as far as enthusiasts and early adopters were concerned.
I had forgotten that whole period when the Photo CD (an actually really useful technology) didn't work with CD ROM drives.
bravesoul2 11 hours ago [-]
And they missed it!
chris_wot 11 hours ago [-]
Bravo
vintermann 10 hours ago [-]
When the brand is your main asset, licensing it to a scam is pretty bad.
pfdietz 13 hours ago [-]
Didn't Kodak sell off Eastman Chemical long before the first bankruptcy?
cm2187 11 hours ago [-]
My first digital camera was a Kodak camera in 2001. Not saying that crypto was the right decision, but digital cameras definitely were. It seems they were self-conscious, but incapable of executing.
brianwawok 3 hours ago [-]
Is that a surprise? A chemical company doesn't have the in house chops to build a tech hardware?
Same things happens all over. Ford (a car company) completely failing to make a reasonable UI / App / Interface for their infotainment systems (something a tech company would do). Pivoting away from what you are good at is hard for a 3 person startup, but nearly impossible for a giant corporation.
cm2187 22 minutes ago [-]
Well they had a good start, I don't think the early Kodak digital cameras were particularly bad, and they were rather cheap. But it looks like they didn't build on it.
BLKNSLVR 13 hours ago [-]
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...
bawolff 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mont_tag 17 hours ago [-]
Crypto did pretty well during that timeframe. Likely, they didn't pivot hard enough to offset losses to the core business.
BoorishBears 16 hours ago [-]
Cryptocurrency did well, anyone who built things assuming crypto-related tech would do well lost their shirt.
hoppp 16 hours ago [-]
Crypto is pretty much just about buying btc or now eth
But the projects built on it are all questionable and only make money for the builders who slowly rug them
Not sure how they realize all those gains tho, or what happens to the stock price when they try to exit in a substantial manner.
greiskul 11 hours ago [-]
And what projects do they have besides buying BTC like the parent comment mentioned? What tech have they built?
And yeah, BTC went up huge amounts, but certainly they were a large part of the buying pressure to get it there. But like you asked, how do they realize anything? Unless they get US government to start buying and shift their bags to the US tax payer, how do they do anything with their BTC? Besides using it as collateral to borrow even more money to inflate a even higher bubble?
DANmode 16 hours ago [-]
Decent framing of the issue, here.
lenkite 12 hours ago [-]
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.
vasco 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and why not spaceships too.
lenkite 10 hours ago [-]
Spaceships do not form the critical part of a functional smartphone. Cameras do.
pjerem 9 hours ago [-]
Kodak had no specialization into cameras, only into camera films, let alone digital cameras. There are actually few good digital camera manufacturers in the world. Most high end camera in smartphone are from Sony or Samsung who were already specialized in electronics way before the digital camera / smartphone era.
devnullbrain 6 hours ago [-]
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.
triceratops 11 hours ago [-]
They should've started in the late-90s for that. And it wasn't obvious then that cameras and phones would go together so well.
jamal-kumar 11 hours ago [-]
Not only that, they really dropped the ball on photolithography for making chips
The problem was that they were fundamentally a chemical and imaging company, not a consumer electronics company. That would have been a hard shift. When they tried to do consumer electronics, it was crap. Now, if they had merged with an actual consumer electronics company (see: Sony buying Konica) they might have done better.
sgt101 6 hours ago [-]
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
specproc 2 days ago [-]
Interesting to compare the tech companies of last century with those of this era.
Kodak employed a whole town, and many more people besides. We're now waiting on a one-person unicorn.
The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
throw0101a 2 days ago [-]
> Interesting to compare the tech companies of last century with those of this era.
The 'tech companies' (equivalent) of the past tended to deal with physical goods, and so needed physical means of scaling to become as large as they did.
More recent tech companies are often software goods and services, where physical means of scaling may not be as important (though see perhaps with Moore and Dennard). Though those which deal with physical stuff do seem to have higher counts; see below.
> The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
Not sure if this is completely accurate. Kodak topped out at 145,000 employees in 1988:
Many tech companies still deal with physical goods and employ enough people to fill a city - but no longer in the US and Europe, generally. Whether we want them back is up to us.
alephnerd 17 hours ago [-]
Ever been to Folsom, Chandler, Olathe, Huntsville, Quad Cities, Peoria, Irvine, San Diego, North Chicago, East Liberty, Taylor, etc?
We have seen a decrease in companies that work on physical engineering goods, but plenty still remain.
The difference is, engineering physical goods has been increasingly automated and skilled for decades now (robotic manufacturing, additive manufacturing, CAD tooling, etc has been a thing for decades now), so you will need at least an associates but often a bachelors degrees in a STEM field to climb the ladder in Automtotive, Aerospace, Electronics, Pharma, Chemicals, and Defense manufacturing.
Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA.
I don't like the fact that stores like Fry's don't exist anymore, but electronics is a much more niche hobby now than it was 30/40/50 years ago and is much less hobbyist friendly - building something with an 8088 might be fun, but not as much anymore when you can purchase a STM32 for a fraction of what they 8088 was 30 years ago. Coding has becoming a very prevalent hobby now, and access to hobbyist boards like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis has become much more democratized.
glimshe 15 hours ago [-]
I lived in one of these cities. I don't even understand what you're arguing against. The US has highly automated manufacturing because that's what makes sense with the current incentives. Other parts of the world still have factory cities.
The US can align incentives to encourage different types of manufacturing of if it wants. I didn't say anything about whether it's a good idea.
notfromhere 58 minutes ago [-]
US has highly automated manufacturing but only in a few industries where they're still competitive or have trade protections.
Though I feel like generally the narrative being spun for folks is that factory jobs largely got automated, which is true only in the fact that the remaining factory jobs got automated. The vast majority of them went overseas because it was cheaper. Otherwise the country wouldn't be filled with rusting factory towns and you'd still be able to find lots of household goods made in the US.
alephnerd 15 hours ago [-]
> Other parts of the world still have factory cities
I mean, factory cities in other countries are also increasingly being automated as well.
Look at what happened to Wolfsburg in Germany as well as the investments in robotic and additive manufacturing in China leading to around 20 million factory jobs being shed from 2013 to 2023 [0]. If an Indian auto manufacturers like Maruti Suzuki themselves had a 1 robot for 4 employee ratio by 2017 [1] in a country where labor (skilled and unskilled) is cheap, it shows where the tide is turning globally for factory cities.
Globally, manufacturing (especially in electronics, chemicals, pharma, automotive, and aerospace) has become much more automated because the cost barriers for automation have fallen significantly. For example, a robotic arm like that which Kuka or FANUC manufactures costs around $30-40k to install, whereas 30 years ago an industrial robot would have costed around $65-115k in 2003 dollars [2]
The era of single factory cities is coming to a close globally. Industries are overwhelmingly clustering in hubs in order to take full advantage of supply chains and vendor ecosystems.
I'm fine with all of this. Factory hubs are the new factory cities. You still get to employ thousands who don't necessarily have a PhD in computer science.
15 hours ago [-]
smcin 12 hours ago [-]
I still don't understand why San Diego-Tijuana isn't in principle as strong in design+manufacturing as the Hong Kong-Shenzhen axis. (What needs to happen in order to make that so?)
> Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA.
It frightens me the quotes you put around "MBAs" like that, those are the best type of MBAs. In general the cadre of people who go directly or an MBA with zero industrial exposure have very different aims than the ones that do (also their funding sources are very different).
abullinan 15 hours ago [-]
I was a Folsom resident for 15 years. If you’re referring to physical goods, Folsom didn’t produce any. Perhaps you thought Intel site there was a fab? (FYI: Folsom was a small post-goldrush dwindling mining town that turned into a suburban hellhole thanks to Intel: The same strip malls on every block and beige-box sprawl as far as the eye could see. It’s a great example of how rapid scaling culturally starves humans in the long run ... unless you like highschool theater and boomer cover bands.)
alephnerd 15 hours ago [-]
What I mean is Folsom is a city where research into a physical engineering field continues, and primarily for a single employer (Intel), though that remains to be seen with the current rightsizing going on.
> The same strip malls on every block and beige-box sprawl as far as the eye could see
Plenty of industrial cities are similar. And as I mentioned in the previous response, manufacturing is much more automated and skilled today - it's increasingly a white collar job in nature.
giantrobot 15 hours ago [-]
> I don't like the fact that stores like Fry's don't exist anymore, but electronics is a much more niche hobby now than it was 30/40/50 years ago and is much less hobbyist friendly - building something with an 8088 might be fun, but not as much anymore when you can purchase a STM32 for a fraction of what they 8088 was 30 years ago. Coding has becoming a very prevalent hobby now, and access to hobbyist boards like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis has become much more democratized.
I don't think it's so much that electronics is more niche of a hobby but instead of going to Frys or Radio Shack people can click a button and order from Amazon or the Arduino store or anywhere else. There's no hoping a shop has a part you need. You just pick it and are done.
OJFord 8 hours ago [-]
It's also changing political and social landscape though, Cadbury's (though now Kraft-owned) still makes physical chocolate but not from an employee-only model village. Ditto Clark's Village (shoes).
(They both happen to be Quaker I believe, but I mean the point more generally.)
DonsDiscountGas 1 days ago [-]
Apple and Microsoft are the 2nd and 3rd largest companies in the US (by market cap), Kodak never came close to that
scarface_74 12 hours ago [-]
GE however was. It was in the top 10 as late as 2012 when I use to work there.
didibus 11 hours ago [-]
What if you adjust by market cap?
specproc 2 days ago [-]
Heh, I was musing on something I'd read recently that had Kodak as a case study. It was compared with Instagram which had about 10-15 staff when it was bought for USD 1bn. WhatsApp similarly small.
I hear tech can be big employers, maybe I'm overselling my point a bit there. That said, the trend is very much towards smaller operations, and a large headcount is not at all required for large money.
My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.
kstrauser 24 hours ago [-]
That's a challenging comparison, though, as Instagram never had to do fundamental research. They wrote an app. One that has to scale to enormous traffic, to be sure, but that came after they were a 10-15 person company. Meanwhile, Kodak was inventing lens technology and film chemistry and manufacturing processes and distribution channels.
Similarly, Ford has more employees than Gran Turismo, but they're not in the same industry.
Melatonic 16 hours ago [-]
To be fair maybe a better comparison would also be all the people maintaining the physical infrastructure Instagram was using (no idea what Cloud provider they originated on)
throw0101a 2 days ago [-]
> My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.
This has been true for most industries even 'with-in themselves': it's called productivity growth.
The number of employees (or man-hours) needed to create (say) a tonne of steel has dropped a lot, so where previously you had 'steel towns', now a plant may just have a very few (and produce more tonnage than they've ever done).
LorenPechtel 2 days ago [-]
Disagree. It's not a small office worth of staff. You're not counting all the jobs involved in providing the data centers.
siva7 1 days ago [-]
Those aren't employees of instagram or whatsapp
SamBam 14 hours ago [-]
But they're part of its stack. It wouldn't exist without it. And vice versa, AWS wouldn't have as many employees without companies like Instagram.
Kodak required so many because it owned nearly the whole stack.
But that said, we can't just add the number of AWS employees to the number of Instagram employees, because we have to prorate it by the total number of companies that use AWS (or whatever).
randombits0 23 hours ago [-]
You are describing CraigsList. No ads, no salesmen, just a small staff.
ljsprague 17 hours ago [-]
Less people on earth back in the day; and more people in farming back in the day.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
I sympathize but it could also be that the benefits are now distributed across entire supply chains?
HexPhantom 9 hours ago [-]
Companies like Kodak, IBM, and GE weren't just employers - they were ecosystems. Entire towns thrived around them.
squigz 2 days ago [-]
I don't deny wealth disparity is very much a thing, but this doesn't seem the point to make it. How many people does Google employ? Amazon? Apple? Probably as much or more than a small town.
fennecbutt 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah and how many of those people are on 0 hour contracts with a minimum wage that's barely been adjusted for 30 years.
_aavaa_ 1 days ago [-]
How many Kodak workers had to pee in bottles, or needed suicide nets around their company dorms?
solardev 18 hours ago [-]
Hard to say for sure, but I think we can all agree it was a company full of negatives...
joegibbs 15 hours ago [-]
Amazon has 1.5m, it's more on the level of a small country. Google is only at 180k, just small city level.
lr4444lr 14 hours ago [-]
You're counting warehouse and delivery workers though in that number, which IIRC is the significant majority. Google doesn't move physical products. (At least, not anything near that scale.)
specproc 2 days ago [-]
Fair point, see my response to the commenter above.
18 hours ago [-]
tomr75 17 hours ago [-]
flip-side is one person can add a billion dollars of value
SamBam 14 hours ago [-]
Does that billion dollars actually provide a living wage for over 100,000 people for years on end? Because companies like Kodak did.
camdroidw 15 hours ago [-]
Another way to put it: people with lopsided unwholesome lifestyle but genius minds trying to get rich but not realising that money alone isn't what makes life, life.
yieldcrv 24 hours ago [-]
People talk about physical goods and differences in scaling needs, one thing that bothers or excites me is noticing what the market tolerates.
Many companies employed (and still employ) orders of magnitude more people than necessary just to be taken seriously. The executive team and board is stacked and diluting ownership just to get in rooms for more support and investors.
This was arguably never necessary, and in many markets people still believe they need to stack the deck and print employment numbers for any incorporated idea they have. The market reality changes far faster than the culture and I love seeing evolution of markets where individuals test a theoretical reality and do it.
I'm glad that people noticed and tried to keep ownership with parallel voting classes, and smaller personnel. I think there are some negatives and that exchanges can go back to enforcing listing guidelines which factor in ownership structure. But even amongst private companies and family offices, I think its interesting when people approach wealth acquisition in ways that match the liquidity of the markets more than the culture, for example, most billionaires stop trading or trying anything because they are afraid of losing money. While the liqiudity from the central bank and market reforms has gotten so much higher over just the last 10 years, that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to trade up to a $60bn portfolio size in the public markets (Bill Hwang). Its still only a matter of time before someone does it successfully and takes it to far larger amounts. Elon Musk sold nearly $40bn of Tesla shares in his court forced acquisition of Twitter, and that's just one stock ticker. Just a matter of time before someone leverages the liquidity in a more diverse portfolio of momentum stocks and has hundreds of billions without any personnel around them. I'm excited to see this capability.
Being able to convert assets to another asset at this speed and scale is something state actors and even Mansa Musa could never do. And the goal isn't done until everything can be valued within milliseconds and its value transferred to another owner, fractionally, with derivatives for future delivery on top.
Liquidity is the game. Just move to the next idea if liquidity isn't there as companies like Kodak from days of old are not necessary.
achierius 12 hours ago [-]
Order of magnitude, sure perhaps, even if not a given. But orders of magnitude? No, that doesn't match with my experience or historical evidence at all.
yieldcrv 9 hours ago [-]
language exists to convey a shared concept, it was conveyed adequately in singular or plural form
SalmoShalazar 4 hours ago [-]
I’m having a lot of trouble parsing your post. You’re excited that billionaires will be able to swing around more billions than ever… to employ less people? What?
yieldcrv 1 hours ago [-]
I’m excited that overhead costs aren’t much or necessary, and the reasons they were seen as necessary had long overstayed their welcome
People that need income or capital to play this game at all will have to pursue another path of getting that, this post isn’t about their options and private sector employment by billionaires isn’t the only possibility
throw0101a 2 days ago [-]
Destin from SmarterEveryDay did a series of videos on making film at a Kodak plant:
Back in the day when photographic plates were used to capture images from astronomical telescopes, occasionally the excitement of a new discovery was followed by the disappointment of realizing that it was just a blemish in the emulsion, also known as an "Eastman Kodak Object".
HexPhantom 9 hours ago [-]
Kind of poetic, though, that Kodak's legacy reached all the way into space
dotancohen 12 hours ago [-]
Is that EKO, instead of an KBO or NKO?
ddoolin 2 days ago [-]
My grandpa (father's father) grew up in Rochester and that was the first time I visited New York for a family reunion, way back in the early aughts. Kodak was the major employer in town then; he and practically everyone he knew either worked there, had dealings with them in some form, or knew many others who did. When we went, I had the pleasure of touring the place and hearing plenty of stories from my gramps and our family. Good times.
HexPhantom 9 hours ago [-]
A reminder that companies like Kodak weren't just brands
mastry 2 days ago [-]
> Kodak aims to conjure up cash by ceasing payments for its retirement pension plan.
I assume this means payments to retirees. It's a good reminder that (if you can help it) you should not rely 100% on any external source (including the government) for your retirement income.
throw0101a 2 days ago [-]
> I assume this means payments to retirees.
You assume wrong. From November 2024:
> According to the company, the plan’s liabilities to qualifying participants would be satisfied through a combination of lump sum distributions and an annuity purchased from an insurance company to cover existing obligations. Kodak, like many corporate pension plans, is in a funding surplus; it has significantly more assets than liabilities owed to plan beneficiaries and participants.
> Kodak retirees would receive an annuity from an insurance company. Current employees, as well as former employees who haven’t yet reached retirement, would be given an option to either receive a lump sum of their balance, or an annuity once they retire. Plan participants wouldn’t see a change in the value of the benefits that have been promised to them, executives said.
> Kodak expects to put a new retirement plan in place for current employees if it terminates the pension. The company hasn’t yet determined whether it would provide a defined-benefit or defined-contribution plan, such as a 401(k). The company would need to have a new plan designed and in place within about a year, executives said.
The money in the pension fund, at least up to an amount needed to satisfy current liabilities, is the property of employees and Kodak has no right to it. It is the surplus that was taken back by Kodak last year, and future payments are the ones that are ceasing. Per WSJ above another retirement plan system will be setup for current employees.
mastry 2 days ago [-]
Ah - that's good to hear. Thanks for the extra information.
That's pretty sad. I find their color film resolves better than Ilford's B&W stuff (I know it's apples to oranges, but if I'm shooting B&W, I kind of want the detail...). Their film is also generally easier to find than Provia or Velvia, for medium format at least.
fallinditch 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, very sad - I really hope they carry on making camera films.
Kodak film products are (confusingly) handled by Kodak-Alaris, which is a separate company that spun out of Eastman Kodak around 2012-ish and shares the Kodak brand with Eastman Kodak. Despite the similar names they are entirely separate companies, AFAIK.
My team did an integration with Kodak-Alaris a few years back and we toured their main office in Rochester.
Hopefully they'd be unscratched if the big Kodak goes down (I assume they still have some equity?)
Finnucane 2 hours ago [-]
I don't remember the details now, but my recollection is that spinning off the film business was tied to funding the pension, and the way the pension management was also spun off.
lucasyvas 13 hours ago [-]
They should re-market as an anti-AI documentation company that uses analogue capture techniques. Use film!
moomin 2 days ago [-]
It’s sad to see. As I understand it, digital photography forced camera companies to decide if they were principally about film or about photos and imaging. The competition in the image space was brutal, which phones winning the mass market by a huge margin. Those that quietly moved into recondite but valuable areas of technical specialisation did much better, but they’re not camera companies anymore.
kjellsbells 2 days ago [-]
Kodak's failure to capitalize on their invention of the digital camera is so often cited as the cause of their downfall that it has taken on the air of truth. Whether it really was the cause of their demise or not, I'm not so sure. Suppose theyd come out with a line of digital cameras. Would that have saved them? That seems unlikely.
Looking around at similar companies, Nikon and Zeiss became specialist lens makers, for (eg) medical devices, specialist optics like binoculars, and yes, phones. Fuji got into medical imaging, x rays etc. Its almost like they all realized they were in the image business but in different ways.
One peer I find especially interesting is Corning as they were a similar one-trick pony (glass) in upstate New York. But Corning survived, and Kodak didnt. Gorilla glass for phones, fiber optics, etc are a million miles away from pyrex and labware. Why were Corning able to pivot and thrive, and not Kodak?
myrmidon 24 hours ago [-]
One important point I think is that Kodak, at its core, was a huge company specialized in photography related chemistry.
Not easy to turn a company around when the knowledge/qualifications/experience of most of your employees becomes almost worthless.
Thats also what made it easier for others (like Corning) to pivot (presumably).
philipkglass 18 hours ago [-]
Kodak spun off the chemical business as Eastman Chemical Company in 1994, seven years before the main film business went into permanent decline:
Fujifilm recognized that they were a chemistry company and partially pivoted to cosmetics.
NaOH 17 hours ago [-]
There's a good, short 2012 Economist piece on how Fuji recognized its underlying strengths (chemistry company) better than Kodak, and made that part of their strategy since they recognized digital photography would not last.
Kodak managed the film and camera market about as well as they could. The mismanagement was a failure to diversify. The total digital camera market excluding cell phones, would be a fraction of Kodak's film business back in the film era. The film and camera story is a popular one but is fundamentally wrong. The shrinkage of the camera/film market was inevitable. You can look at Fujifilm who does sell cameras and basically owns the remaining film market with instax, however neither of those sustain the business they are effectively a chemical and medical manufacturer who dabbles in photography now.
Kodak on the other hand attempted to diversify to those markets in the 80s and 90s but made some terrible investments that they managed poorly. That forced them to leave those markets and double down on film just in time for the point and shoot boom of the 90s and the early digital market. Kodak was a heavy player in the digital camera market up to the cell phone era: they had the first dSLR and were the dSLR market for most of the 90s, they had the first commercially successful lines of digital point and shoots, they had the first full frame dSLR in the early 00s and jockeyed for positions 1-3 in the point and shoot market until the smart phone era. They continued to make CCD sensors for everyone during this time. Ya they missed the CMOS change over and smarthphone sensor market, but that was well after they were already in the drain.
heeton 2 days ago [-]
We all know that being first does not mean success, and it’s not “gargantuan” mismanagement.
It’s rare to be first AND the leader 20 years later.
CamperBob2 17 hours ago [-]
That was in 1975. It took multiple decades for digital camera technology to become cheap and practical for the mass consumer market, and another decade or two before it was good enough to be taken seriously by professionals.
There was no upside at all in being first with this particular invention. No lessons to learn, other than "Keep working on this and try to grab all the patents, even though they will expire before anyone cares."
vkou 8 hours ago [-]
> give the world the first digital camera... mismanagement on a gargantuan scale
Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones.
Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices, which have no moat or potential for monopoly consolidation.
-Sent from my BlackBerry(tm)
seanhunter 2 minutes ago [-]
Obviously not, but Wright and Kenbak weren't dominant in their markets and Bell was broken up by the courts, so those are pretty poor examples you've chosen there.
intrasight 2 days ago [-]
Kodak could rightfully lay claim to having been the first tech platform company. With the Brownie camera - released in 1900.
My father worked there for 33 years. I did an internship in 1984. My boss took me on a tour of one of the buildings at our site - where all disc cameras were manufactured. When I did my internship, the single site where I worked employed 14,000 people. Our start and end times were staggered in five minute increments to manage traffic.
dtagames 2 days ago [-]
Kodak itself was the first to demonstrate a digital camera in 1975.[0] There is no one else to blame for any decisions.
From the article it sounds like they had strong market share in Digital Cameras in the early 2000’s. What really killed then was phones becoming the dominant form factor
xhkkffbf 2 days ago [-]
It's true. I chose Kodak digital cameras and was happy with them. They were simple, well-priced and pretty nice all around.
It's just that the cell phones took over that job. (And a dozen other ones too.)
Melatonic 16 hours ago [-]
They should have become a digital sensor supplier like Sony - could have been big if they did it early enough
hopelite 5 hours ago [-]
You imply a major if not the only real factor in all of this, the self-destruction America engaged in to “fight communism” by advantaging others at its own detriment. The simple version of this matter is that in the 70-90s it was Japan, from the 80s Mexico/Latin America, from the 90s on it was China, from the 00s India, etc.
In essence, America was ruined by a kind of fast talking con artistry by people with selfish interests. America has fallen to con artists … “listen here. What you really need to do is help others in my interest, and not help your own in your own interests. That’s the smart thing to do. You see?“
DerekL 2 days ago [-]
But switching to making digital cameras wouldn’t have helped much, because selling cameras was never really their business. Their main business was selling film, photo paper, developer, etc.
steveBK123 24 hours ago [-]
And the mass market consumer digital camera market didn't last terribly long either and is effectively dead. It is now a high end hobby with low volume high margin production.
Smartphone cameras and digital distribution of images would have killed them 10-20 years later anyway.
fragmede 22 hours ago [-]
Given that Sony and Samsung make, basically, every smartphone cellphone camera sensor, it doesn't seem inconceivable that a more agile Kodak could have fully pivoted to producing cellphone camera sensors, and fully owned that segment, as well as adding value add services that took advantage of their printing expertise. Sending digital photos to Kodak for them to print and mail them back to you wouldn't have saved all of the company, but if we handwave that it were successful at that, the brand could have kept going for a lot longer. Following that, a prescient, adaptible Kodak could also have created a photo sharing service, like Flickr or Instagram.
The question of why is CEO and executive pay so high always comes up, and between Kodak and RIM/Blackberry, it's easy to argue the good ones are worth what they're paid, as the ones who tank the company clearly are not.
mitthrowaway2 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think if a television and casette-player company like Sony could succeed at pivoting into making CMOS imaging sensors, Kodak could certainly have done the same and beaten them to the punch.
As for executive pay, I think the biggest problem is that it often seems like the executive class gets richly rewarded whether they succeed or fail. Boeing's former CEO was rewarded more for his failures than most people earn for a lifetime of good performance.
hopelite 5 hours ago [-]
Not if they had specialized in researching camera sensors. But that is also one of the most challenging types of pivots to sell to a board, “you know what we should do, specialize in developing the technology that will make our core business obsolete” is a really hard sell.
It seems to be the very same challenge that Google is now dealing with and suffering from. My understanding is that they could have beat OpenAI to market, but they also realized it would savage their core cash cow the search-ad ecosystem they’ve built over decades now; so they put on the brakes and effectively gave way to the competition being able to overtake them. They choked under pressure. Frankly, just for that reason Nadal should have already been removed by now, almost 3 years after the release of ChatGPT. But it’s also a sign of an incompetent and out of touch board that he has not been removed.
It’s immensely challenging to make such a leap. It’s akin to an addiction, how do you convince a Google to give up its search-ad meth? It is nearly impossible short of drastic events. You have to have a clear vision.
Ironically, it seems Microsoft has been making these types of hard decisions, but that also probably is because they’ve been under some intense pressure in various businesses for a while now, i.e., they have not really been king of the hill in anything that they are not de facto monopolists, e.g., PC OS. It is easier to pivot strategies when you’re not vested in maintaining something and their dominance over the whole government-corporate PC network allows them room to operate for am the time being. But there is also a reason why AI has been called an operating system. In the AI-scale medium term, Windows and its involvement in a user facing computer network is also doomed.
regnull 18 hours ago [-]
I always thought that this story is probably more nuanced, and indeed it is:
"While this may have been a motivating factor to some at Kodak, such concerns did not stop Kodak — or even Sasson — from further developing digital cameras and making several technical developments that led to Kodak's first publicly available digital camera in 1991, the Digital Camera System."
mytailorisrich 2 days ago [-]
Yes, this is a classic case of "innovator's dilemma". [1][2]
Visited one of the biggest computer, electronics, and household appliance shop in the country (in Europe) last week. Was surprised that they actually had chemical films on the shelf. Not a big variety, and only limited numbers. Only one brand: Kodak.
Myself I shot slides from 1977 to 2001. Was not a big fan of Kodakchrome colors, preferred Fujichrome. And they were also cheaper, relevant for a student budget. After working with one of the first camera phones I have not bought any roll of film, even if in hindsight 100 KB VGA pictures were somewhat limiting... Now I mostly avoid taking photos because I won't have enough time in my life to keep them organized and watch them...
heldrida 3 hours ago [-]
Kodak film is legendary. There's nothing like watching a movie shot on Kodak Film. Hopefully, they can find a solution.
mikewarot 2 days ago [-]
There are lots of hidden dependencies in the world, who knows what depends on the reliable production of polymer/emulsion products.
It could be that we stop being able to make chips, or printers, or something else because of this as a second or third order effect.
jjk166 22 hours ago [-]
Presumably they wouldn't torch the equipment and shoot the engineers when shutting down. If some business unit within Kodak is producing something the world needs, then there will be money to restart that particular production back up again, either as a spun off entity or as new production by a different firm.
Losing a technological capability requires it to go decades without being practiced - long enough that those with the key knowledge die off. This can and has happened under the right circumstances, but probably wouldn't from a company going out of business.
HexPhantom 9 hours ago [-]
Hard to watch a company that once defined photography now circling the drain... especially one that literally invented the digital camera, then buried it to protect film sales
siavosh 24 hours ago [-]
I remember when they tried to make a crypto currency a few years ago I knew it was well past a shadow of its former self.
mv4 13 hours ago [-]
Anyone remember KodakCoin? [1] The price tripled overnight. Good times.
The MBAs that outsourced camera production to APEC are long retired.
decimalenough 17 hours ago [-]
What they actually fumbled was the transition to digital. Keeping analog film/camera assembly in the US would only have led to Kodak running out of money even sooner.
starik36 17 hours ago [-]
I don't know that they really fumbled anything. They had a pretty good set of digital cameras in the early 2000s. I owned one.
It's just the technology that was the underpinning of the entire company has outlived its usefulness. You don't see many companies making horseshoes today - but there were thousands 150 years ago. They didn't fumble anything - just no longer needed.
packetlost 17 hours ago [-]
I agree with this, but as someone who occasionally shoots film I'm still very sad about it. There's still reasonable demand for film, I can walk into my local Target and pick up Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia 200 for $10 a roll. It's just really hard to scale down a business without imploding, but I firmly believe Kodak could have had a future as a boutique film supplier if they wanted to. It just wouldn't be super profitable.
2 hours ago [-]
majormajor 16 hours ago [-]
Fuji has a pretty nice camera business today after not being a particularly notable player in film SLRs - or even digital SLRs before mirrorless ILCs (contrast with Olympus here, who whiffed starting with the transition to autofocus).
That'd still be a big change of course, but it's better than not being a player.
Or they could've been Sony, who's now both a major player in cameras and supplying sensors to tons of other cameras.
jeffbee 17 hours ago [-]
What they actually fumbled was trying to become a pharmaceuticals company. They owned 100% of the digital market for 20+ years.
zoeysmithe 17 hours ago [-]
The inventors of capitalism are long dead. Lets not pretend its "mba's" or "corpos" that are the problem here. This is how capitalism works. If people dont like it then they should consider alternatives.
SamuelAdams 17 hours ago [-]
> Kodak aims to conjure up cash by ceasing payments for its retirement pension plan
I have always wondered, what happens to a pension plan when the company files for bankruptcy? What happens if the lump sum payment is not enough for retirees? Are they financially screwed until they die?
jethkl 4 hours ago [-]
> Are they financially screwed
I’ll share an anecdote I witnessed in my extended family–it was horrible. When US Air went bankrupt, employees with decades of service, expecting high five-figure to low six-figure annual income, learned they would get roughly $0.20 on the dollar. For many who were entering retirement, the impact was life-changing, and the stress and disruption it caused could well be argued as life-shortening.
PBGC did take over, but that did not solve the problem.
I believe the root cause was mismanagement of the pension, with the bankruptcy merely exposing this. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, at every opportunity during the bankruptcy process, changes were made that eroded the program’s health.
This is why the systems like what Australia has, with mandatory superannuation (401k accounts but better) is great. It makes the company pay the retirement plan amount for each worker, each pay. Then if the worker quits, they take their benefit with them. It's a 4 Trillion dollar industry in our country.
We need an American Samsung-like company. Kodak could have been it.
Then again, Sears could have made Amazon a pets-dot-com flash in the pan.
beardyw 2 days ago [-]
Even my DSLR is gathering dust.
iancmceachern 1 days ago [-]
They literally invented the digital camera
hu3 24 hours ago [-]
Well Nokia had a touch screen smartphone 4 years before iPhone.
First movers advantage only gets you so far.
kfor 24 hours ago [-]
As well as many of the key innovations for OLEDs (patents they later sold to LG)
yieldcrv 24 hours ago [-]
and fumbled
smm11 1 hours ago [-]
They could have ruled the world V298768.
cannes1 5 hours ago [-]
I’m curious if this is tied to U.S. intelligence having to cut back on spending. They’ve been tight with Kodak over the years.
TomMasz 2 days ago [-]
It was Rochester's largest employer for so long. Now it's become a bit of local trivia, much like Xerox. Both of them struggled to deal with changing markets.
tombert 17 hours ago [-]
Wait, Kodak is still around?
I'm not trying to be a dick or shitpost, but I genuinely thought they collapsed after I heard nothing about KodakCoin after the initial announcement.
YZF 15 hours ago [-]
They went bankrupt in 2012 but came out of their banruptcy. This is the second time they're collapsing. Not really related to their coin I don't think.
tombert 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I just assumed that the coin was a last-ditch effort to cash in on a trend, and I guess I assumed that when that thing failed, so did the company.
I haven't touched a film camera in more than twenty years, so for most of my life I have only been aware of Kodak peripherally, so it's not like I was paying a lot of attention to them.
ThaDood 16 hours ago [-]
I use a lot of Kodak 35MM! They are still kicking around. They are kind of hard to find in my neck of the woods, so I mostly stick with Fuji anymore.
2 hours ago [-]
drakenot 14 hours ago [-]
> Presteign did not care for the artists, musicians, and fops Olivia kept about her, but he was pleased to see a scattering of society notables this morning.
> There was a Sears-Roebuck, a Gillet, young Sidney Kodak who would one day be Kodak of Kodak, a Houbigant, Buick of Buick, and R. H. Macy XVI, head of the powerful Saks-Gimbel clan.
- The Stars My Destination
bsenftner 15 hours ago [-]
Biggest brand failure in my memory. "Kodak Moments" could have been used forever.
physicsguy 2 days ago [-]
It's not really the same company it was... just a name now.
kodak spun off Eastman Chemical decades ago (my dad owned some of their stock and held it to their bankruptcy).
But looking at it, kodak shareholders were given 1 share of Eastman chemical for every 4 shares of Kodak they had. Eastman chemical has split once since then. Eastman chemical is now $60. Kodak ended 1993 (the new company was created jan 1 1994 I believe) at $56 a share.
So that would imply that eastman chemical, that was viewed as 1/5th the value of the combined company in 1994 is now the value of the parent that was left over then (and no longer really exists).
fennecbutt 5 hours ago [-]
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.
williamscales 24 hours ago [-]
Dang, this would suck. I really like Kodak film, like Portra 400 and Ektar 100.
Writing’s been on the wall for quite a while though. I’m not surprised.
13 hours ago [-]
exasperaited 8 hours ago [-]
Pharmaceuticals manufacturing is an obvious way to sustain a business that has a "halo" product that is a product of chemistry. If you think you still need to sell film to even be Kodak, then having boringly profitable chemical work keeps a lot of your processes, certifications and facilities ticking over, I guess. Fujifilm do much the same thing with cosmetics.
genman 2 days ago [-]
The most important aspect is to save/conserve the equipment and knowledge so it would be possible for somebody else to take over. Something like this happened with Polaroid - a group of enthusiasts got Polaroid equipment and managed to partially restore the development of Polaroid integral instant film (the one where everything is packed into single package). Unfortunately the much more beautiful and photo like "peel apart" instant film was already scraped by both Polaroid and Fuji. I would even consider this a cultural vandalism, similar to destroying important cultural artifacts.
impish9208 2 days ago [-]
Pitbull (Mr. Worldwide) will be sad to hear this. Picture that with a Kodak.
FireBeyond 2 days ago [-]
And for us a little older, Paul Simon. After all, Kodachrome gives us those nice bright colors, and the greens of summers.
kevin_thibedeau 12 hours ago [-]
None of which would be possible without scientists and engineers who bothered to learn their crap from high school.
"Media reports that Kodak is ceasing operations, going out of business, or filing for bankruptcy are inaccurate and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of a recent technical disclosure the Company made to the SEC in its recently filed second quarter earnings report. These articles are misleading and missing critical context, and we'd like to set the record straight."
https://www.kodak.com/en/company/blog-post/statement-regardi...
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 August 15th
2) They not only mention opening a new business segment, but built a lab AND got FDA approval for that segment (Advanced Materials & Chemicals)
3) The sale of the pension is going to have so much of a surplus they're going to pay down parts of the long debt that they have.
I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated
[1]: https://investor.kodak.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
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 tried to become an Inkjet Printer company, which was doomed and eventually pushed it into bankruptcy.
- 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop.
- 2020s: Kodak tried to become a Pharmaceutical company amid Covid-19 pandemic.
As of today, Kodak is focusing on its chemical business (such as manifacturing KODALUX, a fabric coating material) and borrowed $477M (at 12% p.a.) in order to expand that business line.
That loan is due in 2026. Kodak is basically saying "I have no idea how to repay that money. In fact, I only have $155M in cash. Maybe it's time to talk with the creditors?".
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.
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.
I ended up with a Polaroid Go. It's relatively tiny. The output is nowhere near as good (arguably awful), but for my use, it's fine. I have 35mm film and mirrorless digital cameras when I want "good" photos.
The folks running Kodak kind of forgot that Kodak was really a chemicals company that supported photography, not a photography company. Hence why the pivot into that was ill-fated and doomed.
Those were actually dye sublimation thermal printers and...they still sell them!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19UdGkBYwr/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Also discussed on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogCommunity/s/XTwZHnUHnc
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. Great! Except if the fund's assets suddenly drop in value (e.g. when interest rates go up, and their bonds mark to market value drops, or if the stock market crashes) or if the price of those annuities to be bought goes up (e.g. when interest rates go down, and you need to reserve more money now for payments later). Interest rates dropping is perhaps not inconceivable, with a president tweeting every week about firing the chairman of the Fed if rates aren't dropped? A stock market crash, however short term, is also not inconceivable, especially with so much of the index concentrated in a few tech stocks.
A "going concern" statement like this is worth more that the company's press release disagreeing with it.
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.
They were pretty much doomed from the start. They had built their business by taking a cut from every picture you took, from the rolls of film to the developing to the printing. There was absolutely nothing in the digital camera realm that could duplicate that; their revenue dropped like a rock. If they had sold every single digital camera ever bought, it wouldn't have made up for it.
The contrast between Kodak and Fujifilm is fascinating. Fujifilm survived by pivoting to manufacturing critical components for LCD panels, which were exploding in popularity at the time. https://web.archive.org/web/20250704224940/https://petapixel...
But you can't just yank out the carpet from a massive consumables business that basically underpinned a company's revenue and profits almost overnight and reasonably expect them to deal with it.
If you want to make money in the US, stay away from making hardware and cling to making software.
More than 50% of it's imaging business in 2022
But they were a much smaller company and AFAIK are a pretty niche business today. (X-series cameras are nice but I can imagine that sales amount to a huge number.)
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.
A true pivot of Kodak was moving from just doing chemicals for film to doing chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. That actually involved employees changing what they do, changing factory equipment, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company
One really must admire their determination to throw all of the life boats overboard to go down with the film ship. Every time they have a chance to save themselves if they move away from a single minded focus on film, they discard the opportunity. They just needed to mimic Nikon and Canon to stay in business, but refused to do even that.
The only way I see Kodak having a happy ending would be if Eastman Chemical purchases their former parent company to put it under sane management.
Kodak mgmt wasn't crazy or anything like that.
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 lowest resolution photo CD scan (or even approached it, given how bad most people's photos are and how digital cameras made better photography easier for everyone). And given how they were doing the R&D, they should have known what was coming. Not just people not buying film, but people not really paying for prints, which is a double-whammy.
Kodak management wasn't crazy but it was entitled, boorish, inept and lazy. A classic late-stage US company. They were overconfident about their reputation and their essential status (just like Intel). At best, perhaps they were just too self-absorbed to be able to dispassionately react to what was happening.
The problem is that digital required a different approach to profit because the revenue and profit was lumpier.
As a result Kodak's biggest problem is that they could not possibly have pivoted even late on, because their line of digital products was a total pile of exploitative shit over the long term, that offered intermediate, semi-pro and pro users nothing at all of value and was already reviewing rather badly.
People outside the USA simply didn't buy Kodak digital cameras because we didn't hold Kodak in the same regard, and there were so many other choices.
Kodak also overstretched itself repeatedly in international markets, including a hilariously stupid late-era buyout of a competitor's high street lab chain in the UK so there were times when really small towns had two tiny, lacklustre Kodak stores when they barely needed one.
Fujifilm did better (by planning both good digital cameras and a transition to the well-marketed Instax and digital Crystal Archive printing as well as building ancilliary businesses). Heck, even Ilford hung on for longer, to the extent that their business produced better consumer inkjet materials than anyone else. When they were finally restructured in administration they had made the film business lean enough to survive into a management buyout.
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.
They were screwed long before capitalising on this was a real possibility. The damage was done to Kodak before the vast majority of consumers had fast enough broadband to share more than a couple of photographs a day.
Kodak was an obviously cheesy, out-of-touch, cheap-looking digital brand by 2000, and it showed (at least to anyone outside the USA). The Fuji, Olympus, Nikon and Canon compacts were better-designed, full stop, and Kodak really even had nothing good in the "office camera", "lab camera" or "art department camera" offerings (which Nikon owned with the Coolpix 900 series, and Canon with the G1/G2/G3).
People simply would not have bought into the idea that anything Kodak did was cool or fun. It was the same bad cheesy smiling family branding nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_D2000
I think they sold in the low thousands of that DSLR (since it was a $15K camera). And the state of these partnership cameras was such that it was obvious they were something of a bridge to nowhere. Anyone could see that once Canon and Nikon began making their own things, Kodak would have trouble carrying on with their remodelled cameras.
Nikon had already shipped their first "conventional" in-house DSLR by then, and it was blowing people away.
Kodak should arguably have bought Sigma around then, but they didn't. They continued making these reworked/hybrid Canon/Nikon things until 2004 but when they quit making DSLRs they said the sector had "poor profitability". In 2005! Even Nikon was making a profit in 2005.
Back to the compact cameras:
This is the higher-end compact camera Canon shipped in 2000 (that all the real estate photographers were using):
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong1
This is its Nikon competition, which was an incredible camera widely used in professional settings; they turned up in labs attached to microscopes, in rapid newspaper repro, in museums, web development agencies, all over the place:
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikoncp990
Sony, Fuji and Olympus had great kit in this segment already. Kodak really just had nothing even close as far as enthusiasts and early adopters were concerned.
Same things happens all over. Ford (a car company) completely failing to make a reasonable UI / App / Interface for their infotainment systems (something a tech company would do). Pivoting away from what you are good at is hard for a 3 person startup, but nearly impossible for a giant corporation.
Having said that, more of the cryptocurrency industry is scams than not - but then that also wouldn't necessarily exclude them from profitability...
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.
But the projects built on it are all questionable and only make money for the builders who slowly rug them
Not sure how they realize all those gains tho, or what happens to the stock price when they try to exit in a substantial manner.
And yeah, BTC went up huge amounts, but certainly they were a large part of the buying pressure to get it there. But like you asked, how do they realize anything? Unless they get US government to start buying and shift their bags to the US tax payer, how do they do anything with their BTC? Besides using it as collateral to borrow even more money to inflate a even higher bubble?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPR
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
Kodak employed a whole town, and many more people besides. We're now waiting on a one-person unicorn.
The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
The 'tech companies' (equivalent) of the past tended to deal with physical goods, and so needed physical means of scaling to become as large as they did.
More recent tech companies are often software goods and services, where physical means of scaling may not be as important (though see perhaps with Moore and Dennard). Though those which deal with physical stuff do seem to have higher counts; see below.
> The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.
Not sure if this is completely accurate. Kodak topped out at 145,000 employees in 1988:
* https://rbj.net/2017/09/13/kodaks-decades-of-decline/
Apple has 164,000; Microsoft has 228,000; Amazon has 1,610,000.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
We have seen a decrease in companies that work on physical engineering goods, but plenty still remain.
The difference is, engineering physical goods has been increasingly automated and skilled for decades now (robotic manufacturing, additive manufacturing, CAD tooling, etc has been a thing for decades now), so you will need at least an associates but often a bachelors degrees in a STEM field to climb the ladder in Automtotive, Aerospace, Electronics, Pharma, Chemicals, and Defense manufacturing.
Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA.
I don't like the fact that stores like Fry's don't exist anymore, but electronics is a much more niche hobby now than it was 30/40/50 years ago and is much less hobbyist friendly - building something with an 8088 might be fun, but not as much anymore when you can purchase a STM32 for a fraction of what they 8088 was 30 years ago. Coding has becoming a very prevalent hobby now, and access to hobbyist boards like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis has become much more democratized.
The US can align incentives to encourage different types of manufacturing of if it wants. I didn't say anything about whether it's a good idea.
Though I feel like generally the narrative being spun for folks is that factory jobs largely got automated, which is true only in the fact that the remaining factory jobs got automated. The vast majority of them went overseas because it was cheaper. Otherwise the country wouldn't be filled with rusting factory towns and you'd still be able to find lots of household goods made in the US.
I mean, factory cities in other countries are also increasingly being automated as well.
Look at what happened to Wolfsburg in Germany as well as the investments in robotic and additive manufacturing in China leading to around 20 million factory jobs being shed from 2013 to 2023 [0]. If an Indian auto manufacturers like Maruti Suzuki themselves had a 1 robot for 4 employee ratio by 2017 [1] in a country where labor (skilled and unskilled) is cheap, it shows where the tide is turning globally for factory cities.
Globally, manufacturing (especially in electronics, chemicals, pharma, automotive, and aerospace) has become much more automated because the cost barriers for automation have fallen significantly. For example, a robotic arm like that which Kuka or FANUC manufactures costs around $30-40k to install, whereas 30 years ago an industrial robot would have costed around $65-115k in 2003 dollars [2]
The era of single factory cities is coming to a close globally. Industries are overwhelmingly clustering in hubs in order to take full advantage of supply chains and vendor ecosystems.
[0] - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/10/f...
[1] - https://www.livemint.com/Companies/0qexlea1C0MelXiAXcveOJ/Ro...
[2] - https://unece.org/sites/default/files/datastore/fileadmin/DA...
> Even the "MBAs" they hire in LDPs are required to have technical undergrad degrees before joining an MBA.
It frightens me the quotes you put around "MBAs" like that, those are the best type of MBAs. In general the cadre of people who go directly or an MBA with zero industrial exposure have very different aims than the ones that do (also their funding sources are very different).
> The same strip malls on every block and beige-box sprawl as far as the eye could see
Plenty of industrial cities are similar. And as I mentioned in the previous response, manufacturing is much more automated and skilled today - it's increasingly a white collar job in nature.
I don't think it's so much that electronics is more niche of a hobby but instead of going to Frys or Radio Shack people can click a button and order from Amazon or the Arduino store or anywhere else. There's no hoping a shop has a part you need. You just pick it and are done.
(They both happen to be Quaker I believe, but I mean the point more generally.)
I hear tech can be big employers, maybe I'm overselling my point a bit there. That said, the trend is very much towards smaller operations, and a large headcount is not at all required for large money.
My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.
Similarly, Ford has more employees than Gran Turismo, but they're not in the same industry.
This has been true for most industries even 'with-in themselves': it's called productivity growth.
The number of employees (or man-hours) needed to create (say) a tonne of steel has dropped a lot, so where previously you had 'steel towns', now a plant may just have a very few (and produce more tonnage than they've ever done).
Kodak required so many because it owned nearly the whole stack.
But that said, we can't just add the number of AWS employees to the number of Instagram employees, because we have to prorate it by the total number of companies that use AWS (or whatever).
Many companies employed (and still employ) orders of magnitude more people than necessary just to be taken seriously. The executive team and board is stacked and diluting ownership just to get in rooms for more support and investors.
This was arguably never necessary, and in many markets people still believe they need to stack the deck and print employment numbers for any incorporated idea they have. The market reality changes far faster than the culture and I love seeing evolution of markets where individuals test a theoretical reality and do it.
I'm glad that people noticed and tried to keep ownership with parallel voting classes, and smaller personnel. I think there are some negatives and that exchanges can go back to enforcing listing guidelines which factor in ownership structure. But even amongst private companies and family offices, I think its interesting when people approach wealth acquisition in ways that match the liquidity of the markets more than the culture, for example, most billionaires stop trading or trying anything because they are afraid of losing money. While the liqiudity from the central bank and market reforms has gotten so much higher over just the last 10 years, that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to trade up to a $60bn portfolio size in the public markets (Bill Hwang). Its still only a matter of time before someone does it successfully and takes it to far larger amounts. Elon Musk sold nearly $40bn of Tesla shares in his court forced acquisition of Twitter, and that's just one stock ticker. Just a matter of time before someone leverages the liquidity in a more diverse portfolio of momentum stocks and has hundreds of billions without any personnel around them. I'm excited to see this capability.
Being able to convert assets to another asset at this speed and scale is something state actors and even Mansa Musa could never do. And the goal isn't done until everything can be valued within milliseconds and its value transferred to another owner, fractionally, with derivatives for future delivery on top.
Liquidity is the game. Just move to the next idea if liquidity isn't there as companies like Kodak from days of old are not necessary.
People that need income or capital to play this game at all will have to pursue another path of getting that, this post isn’t about their options and private sector employment by billionaires isn’t the only possibility
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XXcmtNSUxoa...
I assume this means payments to retirees. It's a good reminder that (if you can help it) you should not rely 100% on any external source (including the government) for your retirement income.
You assume wrong. From November 2024:
> According to the company, the plan’s liabilities to qualifying participants would be satisfied through a combination of lump sum distributions and an annuity purchased from an insurance company to cover existing obligations. Kodak, like many corporate pension plans, is in a funding surplus; it has significantly more assets than liabilities owed to plan beneficiaries and participants.
* https://www.ai-cio.com/news/kodak-considers-terminating-over...
> Kodak retirees would receive an annuity from an insurance company. Current employees, as well as former employees who haven’t yet reached retirement, would be given an option to either receive a lump sum of their balance, or an annuity once they retire. Plan participants wouldn’t see a change in the value of the benefits that have been promised to them, executives said.
> Kodak expects to put a new retirement plan in place for current employees if it terminates the pension. The company hasn’t yet determined whether it would provide a defined-benefit or defined-contribution plan, such as a 401(k). The company would need to have a new plan designed and in place within about a year, executives said.
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-prepares-to-terminate-u-s...
The money in the pension fund, at least up to an amount needed to satisfy current liabilities, is the property of employees and Kodak has no right to it. It is the surplus that was taken back by Kodak last year, and future payments are the ones that are ceasing. Per WSJ above another retirement plan system will be setup for current employees.
This is what we would lose:
https://thedarkroom.com/film-brand/kodak
My team did an integration with Kodak-Alaris a few years back and we toured their main office in Rochester.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Alaris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak#Still_film
Huh
Hopefully they'd be unscratched if the big Kodak goes down (I assume they still have some equity?)
Looking around at similar companies, Nikon and Zeiss became specialist lens makers, for (eg) medical devices, specialist optics like binoculars, and yes, phones. Fuji got into medical imaging, x rays etc. Its almost like they all realized they were in the image business but in different ways.
One peer I find especially interesting is Corning as they were a similar one-trick pony (glass) in upstate New York. But Corning survived, and Kodak didnt. Gorilla glass for phones, fiber optics, etc are a million miles away from pyrex and labware. Why were Corning able to pivot and thrive, and not Kodak?
Not easy to turn a company around when the knowledge/qualifications/experience of most of your employees becomes almost worthless.
Thats also what made it easier for others (like Corning) to pivot (presumably).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company
Eastman Chemical Company is still doing fine.
https://archive.is/20250424104926/https://www.economist.com/...
[1] https://www.kodak.com/en/company/page/photography-history/
Kodak on the other hand attempted to diversify to those markets in the 80s and 90s but made some terrible investments that they managed poorly. That forced them to leave those markets and double down on film just in time for the point and shoot boom of the 90s and the early digital market. Kodak was a heavy player in the digital camera market up to the cell phone era: they had the first dSLR and were the dSLR market for most of the 90s, they had the first commercially successful lines of digital point and shoots, they had the first full frame dSLR in the early 00s and jockeyed for positions 1-3 in the point and shoot market until the smart phone era. They continued to make CCD sensors for everyone during this time. Ya they missed the CMOS change over and smarthphone sensor market, but that was well after they were already in the drain.
It’s rare to be first AND the leader 20 years later.
There was no upside at all in being first with this particular invention. No lessons to learn, other than "Keep working on this and try to grab all the patents, even though they will expire before anyone cares."
Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones.
Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices, which have no moat or potential for monopoly consolidation.
-Sent from my BlackBerry(tm)
My father worked there for 33 years. I did an internship in 1984. My boss took me on a tour of one of the buildings at our site - where all disc cameras were manufactured. When I did my internship, the single site where I worked employed 14,000 people. Our start and end times were staggered in five minute increments to manage traffic.
[0] https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/kodak-engineer-ha...
It's just that the cell phones took over that job. (And a dozen other ones too.)
In essence, America was ruined by a kind of fast talking con artistry by people with selfish interests. America has fallen to con artists … “listen here. What you really need to do is help others in my interest, and not help your own in your own interests. That’s the smart thing to do. You see?“
Smartphone cameras and digital distribution of images would have killed them 10-20 years later anyway.
The question of why is CEO and executive pay so high always comes up, and between Kodak and RIM/Blackberry, it's easy to argue the good ones are worth what they're paid, as the ones who tank the company clearly are not.
As for executive pay, I think the biggest problem is that it often seems like the executive class gets richly rewarded whether they succeed or fail. Boeing's former CEO was rewarded more for his failures than most people earn for a lifetime of good performance.
It seems to be the very same challenge that Google is now dealing with and suffering from. My understanding is that they could have beat OpenAI to market, but they also realized it would savage their core cash cow the search-ad ecosystem they’ve built over decades now; so they put on the brakes and effectively gave way to the competition being able to overtake them. They choked under pressure. Frankly, just for that reason Nadal should have already been removed by now, almost 3 years after the release of ChatGPT. But it’s also a sign of an incompetent and out of touch board that he has not been removed.
It’s immensely challenging to make such a leap. It’s akin to an addiction, how do you convince a Google to give up its search-ad meth? It is nearly impossible short of drastic events. You have to have a clear vision.
Ironically, it seems Microsoft has been making these types of hard decisions, but that also probably is because they’ve been under some intense pressure in various businesses for a while now, i.e., they have not really been king of the hill in anything that they are not de facto monopolists, e.g., PC OS. It is easier to pivot strategies when you’re not vested in maintaining something and their dominance over the whole government-corporate PC network allows them room to operate for am the time being. But there is also a reason why AI has been called an operating system. In the AI-scale medium term, Windows and its involvement in a user facing computer network is also doomed.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kodak-digital-camera-inven...
In particular:
"While this may have been a motivating factor to some at Kodak, such concerns did not stop Kodak — or even Sasson — from further developing digital cameras and making several technical developments that led to Kodak's first publicly available digital camera in 1991, the Digital Camera System."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
[2] https://innovationmanagement.se/2017/05/24/the-innovators-di...
Myself I shot slides from 1977 to 2001. Was not a big fan of Kodakchrome colors, preferred Fujichrome. And they were also cheaper, relevant for a student budget. After working with one of the first camera phones I have not bought any roll of film, even if in hindsight 100 KB VGA pictures were somewhat limiting... Now I mostly avoid taking photos because I won't have enough time in my life to keep them organized and watch them...
It could be that we stop being able to make chips, or printers, or something else because of this as a second or third order effect.
Losing a technological capability requires it to go decades without being practiced - long enough that those with the key knowledge die off. This can and has happened under the right circumstances, but probably wouldn't from a company going out of business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin
It's just the technology that was the underpinning of the entire company has outlived its usefulness. You don't see many companies making horseshoes today - but there were thousands 150 years ago. They didn't fumble anything - just no longer needed.
That'd still be a big change of course, but it's better than not being a player.
Or they could've been Sony, who's now both a major player in cameras and supplying sensors to tons of other cameras.
I have always wondered, what happens to a pension plan when the company files for bankruptcy? What happens if the lump sum payment is not enough for retirees? Are they financially screwed until they die?
I’ll share an anecdote I witnessed in my extended family–it was horrible. When US Air went bankrupt, employees with decades of service, expecting high five-figure to low six-figure annual income, learned they would get roughly $0.20 on the dollar. For many who were entering retirement, the impact was life-changing, and the stress and disruption it caused could well be argued as life-shortening.
PBGC did take over, but that did not solve the problem.
I believe the root cause was mismanagement of the pension, with the bankruptcy merely exposing this. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, at every opportunity during the bankruptcy process, changes were made that eroded the program’s health.
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/us-airways-pilots...
https://www.pbgc.gov/
Then again, Sears could have made Amazon a pets-dot-com flash in the pan.
First movers advantage only gets you so far.
I'm not trying to be a dick or shitpost, but I genuinely thought they collapsed after I heard nothing about KodakCoin after the initial announcement.
I haven't touched a film camera in more than twenty years, so for most of my life I have only been aware of Kodak peripherally, so it's not like I was paying a lot of attention to them.
> There was a Sears-Roebuck, a Gillet, young Sidney Kodak who would one day be Kodak of Kodak, a Houbigant, Buick of Buick, and R. H. Macy XVI, head of the powerful Saks-Gimbel clan.
- The Stars My Destination
* Eastman Kodak
* Kodak Alaris
* at least four separate Kodak licensees or more all also making photographic products among other plastic sludge: https://www.engadget.com/general/a-tale-of-four-kodaks-17304...
But looking at it, kodak shareholders were given 1 share of Eastman chemical for every 4 shares of Kodak they had. Eastman chemical has split once since then. Eastman chemical is now $60. Kodak ended 1993 (the new company was created jan 1 1994 I believe) at $56 a share.
So that would imply that eastman chemical, that was viewed as 1/5th the value of the combined company in 1994 is now the value of the parent that was left over then (and no longer really exists).
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.
Writing’s been on the wall for quite a while though. I’m not surprised.