Forte has ceased production along with Agfa and Kodak.
All three had the same problem; massive production facilities
in a shrinking market. The three may still have been in business
if they had learned to "produce and sell" a lot less
and do it at a profit. Dan
Or they might just have gone out of business much sooner if they hadn't had as much help as possible selling their production. As PE has been at pains to explain, running a coating plant less and less, and slower and slower is not the simplest thing.
I can imagine that managing workable economies of scale and then finding a market for the output is a growing challenge. The fact is, somewhere down the road, some sort of equillibrium will be reached that will reflect a more stable and much smaller user base and a production output that serves that base. The sad truth is that the lower level of production will likely be served by a significantly smaller number of coating plants. Whether that ultimately means that *any* other than Ilford's will survive remains to be seen. Even a lone facility like the former Kodak plant in Hungary that became Forte simply doesn't have the resources to build and support an internationally familiar brand itentity like Kodak, Ilford, Fuji or Agfa, especially during a period of a contracting marketplace. You can see that even those brands have been taking it on the chin. Without a major branding presence, even at their minimum sustainable production levels, a second tier company must have resellers to OEM to. My personal opinion is that when you find a second tier product that you like..and have identified a multiplicity of packaging identities for, you do the manufacturer the most good by purchasing the product most clearly positioned to serve your geographic niche. This helps the manufacturer maintain the broadest and most sustainable reach across the marketplace.
