Kodak files for bankruptcy

[alp227]

Kodak has filed for bankruptcy in a bid to survive a liquidity crisis after years of falling sales related to the decline of its namesake film business as digital cameras have taken over the market.

Eastman Kodak Co, the photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a $950m, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going.

"The board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," chairman and chief executive Antonio M Perez said on Thursday.

Kodak and its US subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 business reorganisation in the US bankruptcy court for the southern district of New York, the company said.

full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/19/kodak-files-for-bankruptcy

[truthisfreedom]

1. Sad.

[tawadi]

16. My first thought too

They were the best. But everyone's on top once I guess.

[bitchkitty]

20. It really is sad.

I remember my brownie camera. This feels like the end of an era!

[frylock]

23. my grampa worked at kodak for 25+ years..

really saddens me to hear of this too.

[Old and In the Way]

2. A case study of how technology can completely change the market.

The Kodaks and Polaroids pretty much had the market to themselves 30 years ago..but digital technology changed everything. Sadly for them, they didn't recognise and embrace the changes. It's hard to kill your business plan that's paid off handsomely for decades...they didn't react quickly enough and the rest is history.

[Citizen Worker]

4. The truly ironic twist in the story is that Eastman Kodak invented digital photography. It was

eight years ago around Xmas when I listened to an interview on NPR. The subject was digital photography and what I can remember was a comment by a Kodak scientist who revealed that in a test of the new digital format a photo had been taken of a water skier or surfer, I don't recall which, and the image was enlarged to 8' x 6' "with no detectable distortion." I new then that my roll film cameras would one day be obsolete.

[Sherman A1]

7. Indeed

and as the inventors of it, they certainly found themselves not following up on their invention.

[boppers]

8. There was too much cash in selling film.

They had invented something that would obsolete themselves.

If a car maker figured out teleportation, chances are, they'd keep trying to sell cars, rather than abandon the jobs, business models, and assembly lines they had built up over the years.

[Sherman A1]

12. Yes, there certainly was

and now there is not.

[Old and In the Way]

14. I'm sure they were at the cutting edge of the tech development.

Their engineering and some of the marketing guys were probably big proponents of the technology. Unfortunately, when the time came to place bets in a big way, the decision makers were biased against the risk. Not surprising, the film/SLR market was still booming - we bought a Chinon SLR in the early 90's and we bought hundreds of rolls of Kodak film to feed our photography habit. Why would the corporate exec's rock the boat and help kill their golden goose (film)?

In the late 90's (IIRC), we bought a Sony MVC-WD90 Mavica camera. State of the art - 1.3 MP with 3-1/2 floppy disk storage. It even did 15 second movies! The pics weren't as good as the Chinon SLR...but no film and immediate results when plugged into the computer for downloading. The Chinon really never got used much after that. I suspect that there were millions of consumers like us who did pretty much the same thing. Instead of being early adopters and abandoning their traditional business model, Kodak bet small and never gained share in the consumer market.

[aquart]

3. My first camera was a Kodak Brownie.

This breaks my heart.

[Citizen Worker]

5. As was mine at nine years old.

[boppers]

9. Same, at age 8.

Back in 1980 (it was an antique by then, but I had a camera! Of my own!). I never got a single good picture from it, but that really wasn't the point.

[mac56]

17. Mine too, at age eight.

[Earth_First]

6. ...and the shell of Rochester's former self continues to deteriorate

:sigh:

[JustAnotherGen]

10. I'm with you

So sad to see entire streets go dark. That empty facility off of 490. Definitely not the place I grew up in anymore. I left 6 years ago, have a niece attending college in the area and Ive encourage her to leave to. I couldn't imagine being in my 20s and trying to start out there now.

[Liberalynn]

22. A lot of my extended family

had jobs there. One took early retirement, a few more got laid off, and one still works there.

This is a sad time for the Flower City.

[TahitiNut]

11. ...

Retirees can kiss their pensions (and health care) good-bye. Current and former employees, whose innovation, dedication, and labor are the SOLE reasons a company succeeds become the cannon fodder when the green-eye-shade butchers harvest the "labor equity" remaining in a company they've fattened themselves on for many years.

Kodak is one of the last "blue chip" companies left whose history serves as an exemplar of the 'engineering' founders who, through a sense of gratitude and kinship, "trickled down" their success by the creation of a host of public assets, from the Eastman School to the best municipal golf course in the nation. We're seeing the end of an era of philanthropy on the part of folks who loved PRODUCING above wallowing in boundless greed.

Kodak is but one more example of the coming predations Thorstein Veblen described 100 years ago.

[hunter]

18. Yep. This is another looting.

When the financial elite are through with us, we the 99%, won't be left with anything. We'll all be serfs, working the fields of our corporate overlords.

Nice to see you around, TahitiNut.

[newfie11]

13. Kodak lost lots of money when medical film changed to digital

It was not cheap and they also made x-ray processors. So double whammy.

[mac56]

15. Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away!

[Ghost Dog]

19. Fujifilm, Ilford Photo

http://www.fujifilm.com/products/films/index.html



http://www.ilfordphoto.com/products/producttype.asp?n=3&t=Black+%26+White+Films

[Javaman]

21. I still have a roll of 64 sitting in my refrigerator.

I used 64 for as long as I can remember. I can't part with it.