I don’t envy a single person who had to sit on the earnings call that Kodak held for its investors on Monday, August 11, when they had to hear that the company may go under because there’s “substantial doubt” that it can cover its debt payments.
If this sounds like déjà vu, it’s because Kodak already declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in 2012. This kind of investor meeting probably isn’t the kind of nostalgia that Kodak was hoping for.
Kodak Has Hit hard times… again
“In its earnings report Monday, the company warned that it doesn’t have ‘committed financing or available liquidity’ to pay its roughly $500 million in upcoming debt obligations,” CNN reported on August 12.
In a quirk of history, it was Kodak that marketed the first digital camera way back in 1975. Even though it flat-out dominated film and film camera sales in the US at the time, what Kodak had actually done was help to birth the monster that would end up slaying it.
I wouldn’t say that Kodak was always necessarily doomed by digital photography’s onslaught against Kodak’s film business. If anything, Kodak had 25 years looking into the crystal ball, since it wasn’t until around 2000 that digital cameras really became a mass-market phenomenon that displaced film cameras from the hands of consumers and pros alike.
Kodak could’ve adapted to digital photography the way that its 20th-century competitor Fujifilm did. Fujifilm had relied upon sales of not just film cameras but film itself, just like Kodak.
Yet it became an envied trendsetter by carving out a niche among digital cameras, even as it keeps making (an admittedly dwindling choice of) film. Its X100VI is so sought-after, it’s still hard to find a year after its release.
And that’s to say nothing of Leica, Canon, Nikon, and Panasonic. Kodak could’ve even reinvented itself like Polaroid, which has undergone a revival of sorts lately.
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