Good Question...
Dear Wayne,
You ask a very good question, firstly, yes our business is growing and thats great, and although KODAK pulling out of mono paper and the sad demise of AGFA Photo has given us a great boost, its not the full story, we are working hard to have a range of products that appeal to all photographers from students just starting out to the biggest names in photography.
We think a vital part of ensuring a vibrant traditional monochrome market both now and in the future is to maintain the utmost quality and develop new products that increase the creative options available to photographers and printers. Since taking over the business we have spent a huge amount of time and effort bringing back products that were lost during receivership ( mostly chemistry ) and we have been very active in the market place listening to what our customers want and yes we now run a business that has the flexibility and skills to look at things in a different way, the ULF film was a good case in point as was postcard papers, we just have to ensure that demand is there and that we do the correct business things.
SFX for instance, we will coat it again in 35mm only, providing our trials continue OK, we know the historical volumes, our distributors will be pleased to order it, retailers will buy it and we can therefore coat that at little risk, we just will not hold stock going forward, we will coat annually, what we also know that 120 would need a new base, the minimum base volume would not be viable ( it would be several years coated volume ) even if we doubled the historical SFX 120 sales.
As to new products we need to ensure that all our monochrome R&D is focussed toward developing products that will sell and be a success, we therefore now try and communicate with our customers to ensure that when we decide to commit R&D, launch a project, we are as comfortable as we can be that we making products people want to buy.
Ah I hear you say....more products, more SKU's, well no...we are trying hard to reduce our SKU's, in the future you will not have a choice of 10, 25, 50, 100 or 250 sheet boxes or 250ml, 500ml, 1lt, 5lt bottles, so we will reduce SKU's in that way but keep all our product families in tact.
Also we believe we have a responsibility to take analog monochrome on from where it is now, we are the biggest name in mono, if we do not develop new products and maintain ( or improve ) the wide variety of products available we will fail to attract new users and loose existing ones.
I hope that broadly answers your question.
Simon.