This is what happens when you ignore a disruptive technology that makes your’s obsolete. They could have tried to lead the digital camera market but instead chose to stick with their bread and butter products. The first digital cameras were so clunky and low res that they probably thought they would never be able to compete with film. They found out too late that they could.
While I do own digital cameras, I still prefer film for my photography. There is nothing more fun than developing and printing your own film.
I realize that it doesn’t fit with most peoples use of cameras but for artists, good ol’ photography cannot be duplicated the same way digitally.
“This is what happens when you ignore a disruptive technology that makes your’s obsolete. They could have tried to lead the digital camera market but instead chose to stick with their bread and butter products. The first digital cameras were so clunky and low res that they probably thought they would never be able to compete with film. They found out too late that they could.”
Some Kodak execs togther with some hedge funds needed to do a leveraged buyout and take Kodak private some years ago, at the earliest stage of digital photography and before the full measure of the revenue shift from film to digital was apparent.
Stock investors, individual or institutional may have long-term views of their own portfolios but are not the best judges of the best long-term interests of a company whose stock they hold; they want quarter by quarter steady earnings per share, regardless of how much of that might be paid out as dividends versus reflected in market share price. The calculation of long-term return on a stock, using “today’s” net earnings per share, will seem increasingly less advantageous, when quarter by quarter that “today’s” net earnings per share is not positive. Not knowing if all the places where the company’s spending is going will some day pay off in better returns, many public investors are inclined to sell.
Long after Kodak itself acknowledged the coming of digital photography. film and photo printing not only remained the most substantial part of Kodak revenues, the profit margins remained greater om film and photo printing, way better, than anyone was getting on digital cameras.
The Kodak execs had dificulty admitting to the stockholders that capital investements needed to quit being spent on film and things related to film and film’s great revenue margins needed to get eaten up in large capital investments in the digital revolution. They refused for too long to deny to the stock holders the highest net earnings per share they could get, even though doing so limited the restructuring and diversions of revenue needed for a better future.
Costs go up not down over time, normally, and by the time Kodak realized it had erred in it’s vision track for far too long, its great film revenue, still it’s biggest revenue source, was already declining, reducing the margins needed for big changes in capital spending. It had temporarily, for too long, appeased the stock markets, at the expense of doing what needed to be done for the future.
A privately held Kodak, taken private by Kodak execs and hedge fund partners years ago with the right vision, could have taken the risks and spent more revenue on the future, not needing to satisfy a public marketplace’s obsession with continuously great quarterly net earnings per share.
Yes, Kodak would have quickly and in the short term immediately shrunk in size, with many layoffs and closings of some of it’s business units, and the new private owners would have been lambasted as capitalist cut-throats for all the lost jobs. But, had that been the course, then instead of declaring bankruptcy today, the privately held Kodak may have instead been announcing a new IPO for itself.
Maybe something of such a course is still open to Kodak, as a result of the course of its bankruptcy.