Kodak is cutting more jobs. President and CFO stepping down.

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lxdude

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IDK, but clearly his head fits easily in his ass!
 

removed account4

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i guess the maya were right after all, at least for Kodak ..

very sad last couple of weeks ...
----

im glad our friends in england and europe are still doing well ..
 

Roger Cole

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Imagine being on Kodak's Board of Directors. Perez is Chairman as well as CEO. How much straight talk can there be?

I cannot understand why the man who "led" them into bankruptcy and their shares into near-worthlessness is still there, expecting a bonus for "guiding" them through the bankruptcy! Although the bankruptcy has been very hard on Perez. He had to give up both corporate jets. It's a bitch to have to fly first class commercial on vacations to his hometown in Spain, you know.

To reference a currently popular political topic, Perez can declare "I didn't build this".

No, but he sure helped destroy it. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it was burned in one afternoon. :sad:
 

lxdude

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Not quite. It fits tightly. If it fit easily it'd be loose enough to fall out again. It seems quite firmly stuck there.

Right you are. When it comes to self-regard, he has a big head!
 

lxdude

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SilverGlow

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All this hate talk against Perez.

Lets take a walk down reality lane boys: What is killing Kodak film, and film in general is the lack of customers willing to buy and use film.

Hello?!?
 

Ian Grant

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All this hate talk against Perez.

Lets take a walk down reality lane boys: What is killing Kodak film, and film in general is the lack of customers willing to buy and use film.

Hello?!?

No what's killing Kodak is poor management spear-headed by Prerez. This started with big cuts in R&D closure of innovative units all geared towards new technologies and then too much reliance on the film/coating division.

It's the financial journals and pundits who've named and blamed Perez and some of the other Kodak directors, often non executive. These guys have been taking huge bonuses while overseeing losses. Bonuses are normally paid for making good profits and usually linked how much additional profit so this really says it all, they are just out for themselves not the shareholders, employees or customers of what was once a proud International company.

Ian
 

SilverGlow

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Ian, there is another valid reason to pay bonuses, and that is to give incentive for executives to stick around and help bring the ship down to a soft landing. I have often been paid bonuses to to stick around and be part of the "sunsetting" crew, or the restructuring crew. I'm sure Perez could've done better, made better decisions, but at the end of the day, the lack of customers is going to be the final deathblow to Kodak or any company. Just look at all the other film companies that are either cutting back, or discontinuing film products, so you see, it's not just a Kodak/Perez problem. Look at Hollywood, and the MP industry, slowly trending away from film. Distribution doing it even faster, so how can Perez or any human being for that matter work against this momentum...like stopping a moving train!
 

DREW WILEY

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Stop comparing one film company to another. There weren't that many to begin with. Once solid
mfg corporations in this country are failing right and left for similar reasons. Some of them had plenty
of business all along, but either mismanaged their profits or paid they're brass so much that nothing
was left over to sustain the operations. But if true, the roles of CEO and Chairman being combined
person should be a red flag from the word "go". There should be some common sense law against that kind of thing. Only a fool would invest in a company structured in that kind of manner.
 
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Ian, there is another valid reason to pay bonuses, and that is to give incentive for executives to stick around and help bring the ship down to a soft landing. I have often been paid bonuses to to stick around and be part of the "sunsetting" crew, or the restructuring crew. I'm sure Perez could've done better, made better decisions, but at the end of the day, the lack of customers is going to be the final deathblow to Kodak or any company. Just look at all the other film companies that are either cutting back, or discontinuing film products, so you see, it's not just a Kodak/Perez problem. Look at Hollywood, and the MP industry, slowly trending away from film. Distribution doing it even faster, so how can Perez or any human being for that matter work against this momentum...like stopping a moving train!

He didn't seem to have a problem plowing money from their only profit making entity (film) into a technology that they weren't able to properly launch - for a decade. If you can't see a trend forming in ten years, then it's time to step down and let a real visionary in. It's not like their problem is new. It was well known ten years ago that film would some day decline to a tiny sliver of what it once was. Instead of just riding out the curve of demise, it would have been appropriate to diversify.

It doesn't make me an expert, but I work in a company in an industry that renews itself about every ten years. There are new innovations all over the place, and once in a while you see a ground breaking introduction of something that changes the game enough to make many old products obsolete. Some companies rest on their laurels and continue doing what they've always been doing, make good cash for a while, but eventually disappear, while others continue to spend money on R&D, do market research, reinvent themselves, and stay on or lead the cutting edge of the industry. Those are the ones that kick a$$ and take names, if they know how to also make a profit (which Kodak did with film). If you stand still in today's market you will be run over by a steamroller of new inventions, but those that move and keep up stay ahead of the curve. Visionaries are needed to accomplish these things.
My company was on the brink of destruction ten years ago, laying people off left and right as soon as times got hard, cash strapped, and with an aging product portfolio. Enter a new CEO with a really strong desire to do well, to be best, to compete, and to sustainably do so. Cash is king, we are now truly global, made profit even during the 2008-2010 recession, and did not lay off a single person in that time. We take market share, and we come out with something like 600 new products per year. Some of those products succeed, and others do not, but we keep at it and do it again. The result = we kick a$$ and take names, and the common denominator is our CEO and his infectious enthusiasm along with a transformation of how we go to market. We were a sinking ship but turned it around into a very mighty company, and it's been an outstanding ride to be along.
 
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All this hate talk against Perez.

Lets take a walk down reality lane boys: What is killing Kodak film, and film in general is the lack of customers willing to buy and use film.

Hello?!?

That was simply the precipitating event that Perez was hired to manage Kodak's response to, not an obstacle blocking his efforts to do so. And he is accountable for his own success or failure to do that for which he was hired. As are we all.

Ken
 

Prof_Pixel

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EK stock price and the Dow Index showing Kodak CEO's

A while ago I made a graph of the Dow and EK stock values from Jan 1990 to Jan 2010 showing the various CEO's.

Note that the Dow index and the EK stock prices are normalized to their values on 1 Jan 1990.

You can see how things started falling apart under Fisher.
 

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pbromaghin

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That was simply the precipitating event that Perez was hired to manage Kodak's response to, not an obstacle blocking his efforts to do so. And he is accountable for his own success or failure to do that for which he was hired. As are we all.

Ken

Great Point, maybe the best of this thread.
 

Ian Grant

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A while ago I made a graph of the Dow and EK stock values from Jan 1990 to Jan 2010 showing the various CEO's.

Note that the Dow index and the EK stock prices are normalized to their values on 1 Jan 1990.

You can see how things started falling apart under Fisher.

Now that also coincides with Fuji making huge inroads into the US market boosted by their sponsoring the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, no longer was Kodak dominant.in their home market but rapidly losing market share. They'd lost dominance in Europe in the 1980's.

Ian
 

wblynch

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I wish Kodak would have entered the Photovoltaic Solar Cell business instead of junky ink jet printers.

I still have 6 boxes of Kodak Christmas Lights in my garage.

Christmas Lights!
 

Photo Engineer

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Fred;

Fisher chose Carp and Carp chose Perez. Like begets like.

Also it is interesting to remember how unimaginative Fisher was when it came to cell phones in spite of him being from Motorola. Maybe he wanted to avoid impinging on Motorola's turf?

Interestingly enough, both Fuji and Konica closed their US plants and no longer manufactured products here. In fact, the entire Fuji plant was up for auction having been build but really never used. They seemed to have some sense of what was coming. Our EK management apparently did not.

PE
 

lxdude

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I wish Kodak would have entered the Photovoltaic Solar Cell business instead of junky ink jet printers.

I still have 6 boxes of Kodak Christmas Lights in my garage.

Christmas Lights!

OK now, THAT one made my jaw drop. Fewkin' idiots!
 

lxdude

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That was simply the precipitating event that Perez was hired to manage Kodak's response to, not an obstacle blocking his efforts to do so. And he is accountable for his own success or failure to do that for which he was hired. As are we all.

Ken

Yes, Perez was hired to improve the health of the company, not to wind it down. He is an utter failure. Yet he is still there. That's just SO encouraging.
 

Prof_Pixel

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I wish Kodak would have entered the Photovoltaic Solar Cell business instead of junky ink jet printers.!

Sometime around 1980 when I was working in the Research Labs setting up a battery lab, the group I worked with also contained people working on coatable solar cells; I've forgotten what happened to them. Maybe PE remembers.
 
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