Kodak – What Happened to a Great Company

Yes, Kodak is still a company, having emerged from a 2013 bankruptcy that was preceded by a decade of
selling off intellectual property; failed investments in cameras, printers, and medical devices; and sharp
reductions in their workforce. Of the more than 200 buildings that once stood on the 1,300-acre campus in
Rochester, NY, more than 80 have been demolished and 59 others have been sold off to other companies.
Eastman Kodak was founded officially in 1881 as the Eastman Dry Plate Company. In 1888 the name “Kodak”
was born and the KODAK camera appeared on the market, with the slogan, “You press the button—we do
the rest.” The company grew rapidly on the back of research and patents that set the standards for decades.
By 1990 it had sales of $19 billion and employed more than 145,000 employees worldwide. Kodak actually
created digital photography and put the technology into professional cameras in the early 1990s. While they
were the founders of what would eventually mean the demise of the company, they did little with it, only
dabbling in cameras for consumers. It wasn’t that the company didn’t see the decline in film coming; it was
just so profitable to keep producing film that everyone assumed the company had time to change. The end
began to become very clear. Starting in 2001 film sales began plummeting by 20%–30% a year. The company
poured a fortune into a very unsuccessful attempt to enter the digital printing market. Like so many companies
that are unable to adapt to new market conditions, the company suffered through many rounds of layoffs,
restructurings, and asset sales as management teams floundered. In 2013 the company sold off a majority
of its remaining valuable patents to a group of companies including Apple, Samsung, and Facebook for just
over $500 million. Today the company is owned by a group of Private Equity investors and the CEO lives in
San Francisco and is trying to manage the remaining intellectual property and employees to find some areas
of growth. The company excels at high-speed printing and digital imaging. Some Hollywood directors still use
film (Quentin Tarantino & J.J. Abrams) which Kodak continues to produce, but the future of the company is
murky at best. Kodak, once a brand name that rivaled the greatest in the world may go the way of other
legacy companies that failed to change with the environment.
Source: Quentin Hardy, “At Kodak, Clinging to a Future Beyond Film,” The New York Times, March 20, 2015.