I've contacted a number of higher ups and mid levlers in the past several months through e-mail as well as Linkedin in reguards to the availability of Velvia, frustrations of us users not knowing and all that - and not one response.
Like I said in the other thread - you approach random people through LinkedIn with questions that interest you but don't really relate to their job/requirements, what do you expect? Of course you're not getting a response. It doesn't say much about "how Fuji feels about film" either. It just shows that it's not a very effective way to approach executives.
Btw, Fuji does care about film, but the truth is that it's just a very small part of their business. One part they do find interesting, also in terms of volumes and financial gains, is Instax. Pretty much everything that requires coating in Japan has to make way for Instax. Which makes perfectly good business sense. Other products coated on the same line therefore are coated intermittently, or are removed from the portfolio altogether. Recently they dropped production of Fujitrans, for instance. Not that you hear many people complain about that, even though that truly was a unique product that really has no substitute in current production, other than their color slide and color negative films. It's just not associated much with the analog crowd, so nobody hollers about it if it's gone (which is now the case).
Insofar as I talk to people at Fuji, they do care about the analog world btw, and they acknowledge our existence. They're the people in the paper business and although they spend extremely little time on analog, what time they do spend on it is always disproportionally much to the infinitesimally tiny revenues it creates for them. I'm not complaining; they pick up the phone, answer emails and they try to do their best (within reason) to answer my/our questions. But yeah, you need to know
who to approach and
how to approach them and to avoid wasting too much of their time.
I can't speak for the people in the film business as they're all in Japan. This is another reason why it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to approach people in US or European offices with questions about film. If you don't speak Japanese AND you don't have the contacts directly to the people involved in that business segment, you're not going to hear about that part of the business at all, ever. Zip, zilch, nada.
Speaking generally though, Fuji has never responded to end user enquiries. That isn't the Fuji way.
This is for the most part correct and they also acknowledge it - heck, we touched upon this only last week and they more or less literally said so. They're a B2B company, not used to or particularly interested in communicating directly with end users. It's not that they don't
want to. For the most part, they just have other things to do and they're not organized to answer end user questions at a large scale - especially not about film, because like I said above, that's a Japanese endeavor and you're not going to get any answers, let alone straight ones, if you approach them as an American/Canadian/European etc. If you would know who to approach in the first place.
Btw, not that Kodak is so much better. I tried to contact them in the past about color paper and received no answer whatsoever. No acknowledgement, no polite "we'll forward your request" or "please have a look at our online documentation" - nothing whatsoever.
their instant film, which makes them billions of dollars
No, tens of millions or maybe a hundred million annually if they're very lucky. Which is big money, still. But not billions, by a long shot. Instax revenues aren't even close, let alone the money they actually
make on it in terms of EBITDA etc.
