It's very sad that Fotokemika's situation is at the point of diminishing return. When I think of the employees who rely on their operation for a living it becomes even harder to accept. I'm not sure how silver rich their films and papers are in comparison to Foma, Ilford, Kodak, etc, but it is a thing of economy of scale. If you spend more money making the product than you can reasonably charge for it, there isn't much that can be done.
Silver (and other raw materials) has become incredibly expensive, and you can view it as a similar situation to the transportation industry; take airlines, for example. It used to be that jet fuel was rather inexpensive, so the airlines could fly people to all corners of the world with fuel guzzling airplanes at reasonable prices. But then fuel prices went up, and all of a sudden their profits were gone, to the point that they have to stop handing out meals on most flights, charge for suitcases etc - basically put all those costs back with the customers. Now, with more fuel efficient engines and technology it's entirely possible to be profitable again, as difficult as it may seem, but it can be done.
Back to film - silver is like jet fuel - incredibly expensive. So what can Fotokemika do? They don't have enough R&D to redesign their films to contain less silver, so they could increase their prices. But then their market share would shrink, probably significantly. I'm sure there are those who would be willing to pay more, but what percentage of the population that uses the products today (world wide) would be willing to do that? Who's to say they would remain loyal?
I don't think for a second that it was an easy decision to make, but really, where do they go from here?
Here in the US the films are already on par with Kodak and Ilford price wise. But their papers are much lower priced. Even Foma papers are as expensive as Ilford now, so there would be a fair bit of margin expansion possible in their paper range at least. I'm not so sure about the film range, but at least it's unique enough that they aren't directly comparable to anything else. I'm sure they've weighed these options, but it would be very interesting to hear the reasoning from within the walls at Fotokemika.