Posted on 08/13/2025 7:21:18 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
After 133 years, a bankruptcy, and multiple reinventions, Kodak’s latest snapshot is grim: The company says there’s “substantial doubt” it can stay in business.
In a quarterly filing released Monday alongside its second-quarter earnings report, Kodak’s management raised serious concerns about its ability to continue operating over the next year. The warning stems from roughly $500 million in debt maturing within 12 months and the lack of committed financing to cover those obligations. Without new funding or successful refinancing, the company could default, they said.
The note’s stark language sent Kodak’s shares tumbling, sliding 21% to $5.43 as of Wednesday morning.
Operational EBITDA slipped to $9 million from $12 million, as significantly lower sales volumes and surging manufacturing costs overwhelmed relatively modest price increases.
Cash reserves also slimmed down. Kodak ended the quarter with $155 million on hand, just $70 million of it in the U.S. That’s $46 million less than it had in December, drained by rising costs, and weaker operating results.
Chief financial officer David Bullwinkle said in the note the company is counting on a somewhat random source of liquidity: terminating its U.S. Kodak Retirement Income Plan and using excess assets to pay down debt. Kodak said it expects clarity by mid-August on how it will settle obligations to plan participants...
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
If any of these investors are recent, well, a fool and his money........
Not too many copies being made, on large copiers and not too many people still using photo film.
What other areas are they known for?
Sad, but, sign of their times, I guess.
“Chief Financial Officer, David Bullwinkle said....”
Going into corporate finance, with a last name like that?
He must have been supremely confident.
Actually, I thought Kodak had gone out of existence around the same time Blockbuster and Radio Shack did.
Kodak’s main business at one time was silver based photography film. Digital cameras made that obsolete.
I had a printer made my Kodak.it was much bigger than canon printers.
I think Kodak’s decline began a long time ago.
In the 1960’s Nikon, Minolta, Cannon, and Honeywell all made good quality Single Lens Reflex cameras. Kodak never entered that market to speak of and so when digital photography came along, Cannon and Nikon just switched their camera bodies to DSLR (D for digital).
Bought a lot of Kodak ISO 100 for my Nikon EM back in the day.
A lot.
The corporate business world is an ecosystem.
Adapt, or go extinct.
Hmmm, the article mentions the old “loot the pension plan” corporate strategy.
I still have a Kodak digital Camera that I like. They stopped making them a long time ago. People mostly use cell phone cameras now. The digital era doomed Kodak. Just like it doomed companies like Smith Corona.
When I worked in graphic arts in the 1970s we went through several boxes of 20”X24” Kodak black & white graphic art film every week.
Kodak's rival Fujifilm embraced the digital era and developed a cult following with its digital cameras. The X100VI fixed-lens point-and-shoot camera is so wildly popular that it is selling for much more than its initial price of around $1500 and if you order one, it will take months to arrive because of the backlog.
I'm mostly a Lumix shooter, but I have an old Fujifilm X30 point-and-shoot and an X100T, a forerunner of the X100VI, and they both shoot good pictures.
Next you’re going to tell me that Hewlett Packard is abandoning it’s stellar reputation as an advanced equipment manufacturer to sell printer ink cartridges.
Kodak, Like Sears, is dead because they refused to adapt to new technology and new customer habits and needs.
Peripherally related:
Imagine what the price of silver would be today if photographic film was still necessary for photography.
(Especially with the billions of ‘selfies’ taken by narcissists every day.)
They should have sold it off 10 years ago.
Eastman Kodak has been HORRIBLY mismanaged for over 30 years ...
they completely missed the digital camera era, and then they next missed the color copier and color printer eras ...
true story:
when our team visited the Kodak research labs in Rochester in the 90’s, the engineers had a magnificent color copier in their lab many years before anyone else ... Xerox had just attached their big industrial B&W copiers to IBM computers, and the age of digital printing had thereby begun, and it was obvious to anyone paying attention that within a year or two that smaller copiers would soon be turned into small digital printers directly attached to LANs ...
at the time, the big Kodak B&W printers were far superior to the Xerox ones in terms of reliability ... our Xerox printers were down at least half the time with a service guy kneeling in front with his head stuck in the innards ... the Kodak ones never broke down ...
we begged the Rochester Kodak engineers to develop the electronics to adapt their magnificent research color copiers into digital printers, but they told us that they were forbidden to take that step by Kodak management because management believed the market for color copiers was minuscule, being purchased only to produce color slide presentations for CEOs of Fortune 500 companies ... and of course digital printing was something management probably had never even heard of ... the Kodak engineers knew that all of that was utter BS, and like everyone else, except Kodak management, could see where the future was going with digital printing ...
Kodak COULD easily have beaten everyone else to market with both reliable color copiers and reliable color printers, but management was stuck back in the days of Instamatic cameras ...
right then and there, i told my team that Kodak was guaranteed to go bankrupt ...
Paul Simon will be deeply disappointed.
“Kodak, Like Sears, is dead because they refused to adapt to new technology and new customer habits and needs.”
The thing about Sears, with the structure of the catalogue business they had, the warehouses, and delivery infrastructure, a lot of the physical elements of what became Amazon were already there.
I was intensively involved in photography as a HS student in 1975, and followed photo technology closely. Later, as a college student, I worked in a photo specialty store and then for a precursor to the big box consumer electronics wave, selling and managing sales of photo equipment. Later, after completing law school, I focused on insolvency, and when it came time for Kodak’s 2011 Chapter 11 case, I followed it closely. As the company shed enormous numbers of employees, mostly in upstate NY, stories began to emerge about how the company had let digital opportunities slip through its hands. Most amazing was the fact that Kodak patented a digital sensor, which was the starting point for modern digital cameras, in 1975. They debated, at the board level, whether to exploit this invention, and the consensus was to bury it so it wouldn’t cannibalize their film-based products(!)
You could see that it was an ossified organization that couldn’t handle the challenge of Fuji Film in the 1980’s, and when digital emerged, they reacted with confidence that its adoption rate would be slow. I attended a party in Atlanta in 1997, carrying my first-generation Olympus digital camera (fixed lens, 784k resolution, no memory cards, used a serial cable tether to offload images...) A Kodak sales manager was at the party, and we got into a discussion about the digital future. He told me that Kodak’s internal forecast showed they expected the number of digital images taken to not exceed the number of film images taken for about 9 years. In fact, it happened in less than 2 years. They just didn’t get it.
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