Kodak films direct from Eastman Kodak (was: Kodacolor 100. New)

[MattKing]

I've had the benefit of some reasonably well informed information about how Eastman Kodak approaches the issue of cost recovery when they are pricing their products - no specifics, but lots of sense of how the accountants reign supreme.
After the costs associated with one of the world's largest (in the photography world) distribution and marketing systems dove them into bankruptcy, they reconfigured the company to essentially only be a B2B manufacturer, selling almost exclusively in large volume orders to large corporate customers. They left in place only the thinnest possible layer of administration, marketing and distribution resources.
Selling still film to a single customer was the least resource intensive option, and the most efficient way to keep costs manageable while earning the management demanded return on investment.
Having to market and distribute still film worldwide will exponentially increase their costs if their intention is to maintain volumes, and those costs will be fully recovered, with a healthy markup to boot.

 

[benderscameracorner]

In reality, the market for film will show dynamics that are somewhere in-between those of a fixed price monopoly and a quasi-perfect "cost price +" free market dynamic.

Certain brands/manufacturers - usually those with an enviable market positions and a very select dealer network - are able to exert heavy price controls over their distributors and retailers to basically fix street price to MSRP. This prevents 'race to the bottom' discounting, ostensibly to 'protect' brand image but of course maintain everyone's profit margin along the chain.

Kodak kinda fits this description... but also kinda not. Kodak's dominance in film, particularly colour film, is of course massive, especially with Fujifilm basically treading water now and showing little commitment to analogue photography beyond Instax. Fair to say Harmon - as awesome as Phoenix is - won't be a serious Gold competitor, let alone Ektar/Portra challenger - for colour film for another decade at minimum. Lucky will probably get there sooner, but again it's early days for them.

That said, photographic film is fundamentally a mass produced commodity product in a now very niche market. A growing niche market, but one still badly misaligned with Kodak's miles-long high-volume production system. It's in their best interests to grow consumption of film as much as the modern day market can handle... basic logic says that more production, more availability and lower costs will remove one of the main barriers to more people partaking - that being price.

However the prevailing attitude still seems to be to make film precious unobtanium and charge as much as the existing market will bear. Might work in the short term - though Kodak's expenditure to profit ratio is pretty terrible - but long term? Hmmm.

 

[koraks]

one still badly misaligned with Kodak's miles-long high-volume production system

If this means to say that EK's production system is presently geared towards higher volumes than they're selling: this does not appear to be the case. They recently increased finishing capacity by 50% because that was a hard bottleneck. What the situation w.r.t. coating is, we don't know for sure since coating capacity was dramatically reduced a few decades ago and presently it's shared by a number of product groups. I assume there's excess capacity on coating. How much excess there is elsewhere, including upstream supply of ingredients, I don't know. But a chain is only as strong as the weakest link.

basic logic says that more production, more availability and lower costs will remove one of the main barriers to more people partaking - that being price.

Sure, if you look from a couple of thousand miles away through your eyelashes. A little closer by, it turns out to be a bumpy road with non-perfect relationships between volume and sales price.

the prevailing attitude still seems to be to make film precious unobtanium and charge as much as the existing market will bear

This implies that someone in the value chain is reaping excess rents from the manufacture and/or sale of film. Oddly, neither EK's nor Alaris' annual figures (insofar they've been made available) ever supported that notion, nor is it plausible that this is true for downstream distribution. So we may have to accept that the reason for the high prices are simply high costs.