Kodak 3Q: Traditional business down 18% YoY

[Henning Serger]

....Hopefully the demand for Lambda/Lightjet prints from pro labs will be enough to keep RA-4 around for us, because I reckon it is on its way out in schools as Kreonites get older and older and chemicals get more and more expensive.

Don't worry about RA-4 and color paper. It will be there for a very long time. This business is quite stable (the most stable part of the whole analogue business) and so far profiting from the fact, that lots of digital pictures are printed on traditional color paper in the big labs (e.g. via online services).

Some data directly from the industry:
- Production: 1,8 billion m² p.a. = 300.000 tons of paper
- quite stable production numbers over the last years
- so far the production was much higher than many in the industry expected some years ago
- color paper will stay for a much longer time than expected because of its high quality at extremely low costs, and because it is suitable for mass printing of digital files

Source: Dr. Gerd Papier, Senior Vice President Research & Development, Felix Schoeller GmbH & Co KG, Osnabrück, Germany. Published in "Wochenblatt für Papierfabrikation 19/2007".
The company Felix Schoeller is one of the biggest manufacturers of paper bases for photographic papers. Mitsubishi in Japan is the other big player.

AFAIK DNP in Japan has now the greatest market share in color paper, Fuji at second and Kodak at third position.

Best regards,
Henning