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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the actual strategies are that Kodak can use to turn around their business? I think currently their revenue streams are:

* Commercial printing and imaging. They are one of the main suppliers for equipment and consumables for large-scale offset printing used in books, magazines, and stuff.

* Advanced materials and chemicals. They even have an FDA-registered pharmaceutical manufacturing facility.

* Film and industrial film production.

* Brand licensing and partnerships.

I think that while film has a bit of a comeback due to its nostalgia factor, it's always going to be relegated to a handful of niche applications. Meanwhile, I don't see Kodak getting back into consumer photography, much as I love photography, since it's a low margin and increasingly niche business. Also, they sold off their medical imaging division in 2007.

I miss those Kodak CCDs.

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Fujifilm was able to make a massive comeback with a big pivot towards chemical. They're the best at making anything film-related, including a lot of stuff the pharma industry needs. The camera division is extremely profitable due to the Instax golden goose: great marketing, stellar margins both on the cameras and the consumables.

Somewhat surprisingly, they’ve also successfully diversified into high-end skincare, applying their chemical expertise to moisturizer forumulations and whatnot.

Film chemistry involves a lot of emulsions does it not?

Yes, exactly. Apparently the chemistry for film emulsion is very similar to what’s needed for skin applications. I think a lot of companies would not be so forward-thinking, so I give them a lot of credit here.

Fujifilm's digital cameras are also doing great these days in a somewhat surprising comeback.

Perhaps not so surprising: Fuji was producing excellent film cameras and lenses in the 1980s and 1990s, whereas Kodak was not.

Kodak already spun off its chemical company.

They seem to be doing pretty well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Chemical_Company

>I wonder what the actual strategies are that Kodak can use to turn around their business?

The retro scene has never been larger and shows no signs of stopping. Bring back all the popular film and charge a premium for it so I can stop scouring eBay. Print a billion dollars by next week. Start printing vinyl records too, another billion. Pivot into the modern retro-futurism company. People are tired of "tech".

I'd love to see a company specialize in taking older technology, and only improving on it by incorporating modern materials science to make more reliable and higher build quality versions

Right? It seems like such a no brainer. Someone is going to bring back old boxy cars and make a fortune. Imagine they re-issued the E30 and didn't muck it up too hard? Or any number of popular old cheap models.

So you're thinking something like https://www.analogue.co/?

Just remembered them coming out with a crypto coin back in 2018 and the first link was to an Investopedia story from yesterday:

https://www.investopedia.com/a-flash-in-the-pan-the-strange-...

Unfortunately for Kodak, its foray into digital assets coincided with the onset of crypto winter—the cyclical slump in crypto markets that tends to follow periods of speculative frenzy. The price of bitcoin slid from a record high of more than $20,000 in late 2017 to less than $4,000 in December 2018.

In October 2018, KODAKOne launched a beta version of its licensing portal, which reportedly generated $1 million in licensing claims in its first two months.But the portal never exited beta mode, nor was KODAKCoin ever integrated with the platform.

The real pisser is that Kodak was ahead of the curve on digital photography before they decided on five year thinking instead of fifteen year thinking.

They paid for a modified version of Mosaic that could handle high resolution images. I want to say 4 megapixel before anyone else even had digital cameras. They were going to have you send in your images and then order a CDROM via a website with the ones you wanted to keep. Because storage was terrible at the time. I don’t remember if prints were an option, but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.

I'm not convinced it was really their strategy on digital that killed them. I mean it's clear their film camera business was a "razor blades" model in support of their film business - then they tried to approach digital the same way, trying to figure out what razor blades they could sell us.

But it was largely working - Kodak were the market leaders[*] in digital cameras right up until the smartphone came out. The market for non-SLR/mirrorless cameras is down >98% from there. They could have owned 100% of that segment and they'd still be a nostalgia marque today.

Digital all but killed the film segment, and then smartphones all but killed their digital segment. They were winning in dead markets.

* In the US, according to some contemporary BusinessWeek article that wikipedia's sourced. But I'm willing to accept that it's within a margin of error of successful in that segment.

I imagine that their revenue isn't as much a concern as their debt. A lot of companies in this position have decent revenue for a smaller company, and would be fine if they could cut costs (but they can't, because they have massive debts to service). I haven't looked at their balance sheet, though, so who knows.

AFAIK kodak have a virtual monopoly on colour film production today.

Unfortunately, this is akin to having a monopoly on the horse saddle market.

Demand for film has been rising over the past 5-10 years. Being the last major player in the color film market isn't a bad position to be in.

A cursory search suggests the global horse saddle market is worth $4.5 billion. Kodak's annual revenue being $1 billion, having a monopoly on the horse saddle market would be huge for them.

But even with it being a small market, if they're valued correctly and they've got a monopoly on the market that sounds like a great and sustainable position to be in.

Fuji supposedly still produce colour film, but production seems intermittent. Harman, the company behind Ilford, is getting into colour film and recently released their second gen. Orwo still makes colour film. Lucky in China is supposedly going to start?

But yes - Kodak and Fuji's colour films are considerably better than the others.

Most film shooters I meet these days are young people that were not alive when film was commonly used by the public, so I don’t think it’s nostalgia. I suspect film is becoming more popular again as embracing a fully analog process allows you to disconnect from computers.

I just hope that any brand licensing doesn't lead to garbage products that only detract from the brand.

Kodac still has enough of a brand recognition that it could still be a leading option for digital video/photo equipment. They are pretty much the only option standing for film, which is somewhat scary in a few ways. It makes me apprehensive when technology becomes completely unavailable. What gets lost to humanity when this happens.

Any one of those revenue streams could be functional as its own business operating with its own goals and direction, why are they having a hard time?

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