We continue to accelerate the growth of our Advanced Materials & Chemicals ("AM&C") business.
During the second quarter, Kodak continued its focus on improving the efficiency of our operations and investing in growth initiatives in our AM&C group," said David Bullwinkle, Kodak’s CFO. "Revenue for the quarter was roughly flat year over year, which was in line with expectations, and we continued to see revenue growth in our AM&C business.
I agree with what you said about Kodak's digital transition. Unimaginative wasn't the problem.
They'd probably have done just fine if the film division had been spun off to private independent ownership years ago. Being married to Wall Street can be an endlessly nagging ball and chain. Or maybe Fuji could absorb them for sake of their own interest. There are plenty of Gazoolionaires out there who could buy Kodak outright with pocket change. After all, they don't make just photographic film, but base materials necessary to various aspects of the Tech Industry itself.
It sounds like this pension plan clawback has been in progress for a little while, and Kodak is making this disclosure due primarily to regulatory reasons regarding the deadline for paying back this debt and the fact that they don’t control the pension plan thing entirely and thus can’t count it on their books until it’s done.
Chuck - in my own field of commerce, I watched one 75 or yr old mfg corp after another fall like flies in a single decade due to takeovers, or going public, or some radical shift in strategy, esp outsourcing. You know the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it" - then some bright eyed and bushy tailed CEO or MBA comes along who has an untested idea, and so it goes. Nothing is risk free. Some mistakes are predictable, like bringing in top mgt with no background in the specific field itself. Kodak is a textbook case of that. They were also just too big, an octopus with so many arms that they lost track of some along the way. Then another classic error - taking a massive surplus of cash and using it to buy back their own stock options, instead of saving it for a rainy day, or facility upgrading. All kinds of things could be cited, and have been. Water under the bridge at this point. The next question is, will the bridge itself hold? At this point in time, many forces are at work to allegedly encourage domestic mfg, but which in a real world context, are actually making it a lot more difficult. Time will tell.
IRAs are very different from traditional pensions, in the sense that the risk, but also the potential rewards, have been shifted to the employee, rather than the employer.
professional managers who couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.
Thank you! I have noted this expression down and I WILL use this line at some point in my life!
"scale of users for these films appear to me to be far smaller than for monochrome." Is this true? Yes, colour slides are a very niche area, but I thought colour negatives were big ... that was part of the motivation for the Harman activity. Any one got any numbers?
I think that the headlines are intended to cause retirees to drop dead of a heart attack
Diabolical!!!
When Kingswood Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based American private equity firm, bought the British Kodak Alaris two years ago, I said then that it made sense for them to buy Eastman Kodak to assure the survival of the film they need for distribution sales. Maybe something is going on behind the scenes along these lines..
Harmon, Foma and Adox combined reprensent a microscopic fraction of Eastman Chemical, just one of four Kodak descendants. I am not following your logic. Fomapan's yearly revenue is around $10M, that's about as much as a single Chick-fil-A location makes. Meanwhile we're talking about preserving a trillion dollar empire. Why are you using a restaurant-scale business as an example? This tells me you aren't serious.Note that far smaller companies like the aforementioned Harmon, Foma, Adox etc. seem to plod along just fine. They are smaller and thus more agile to change. Kodak could have done that, but a hundred years of institutional inerta and complacent leadership thinking prevented that.
I am not suggesting that Kodak management of that era was "incompetent". I am saying they were unimaginative and inflexible.
If Kodak were to go down, along with its near monopoly of realistic color neg film production and now the future of chrome film too, that would be the end of any incentive for Fuji to produce RA4 printing paper, or for anyone to make processing chemicals (which still happens to have high demand). You can't just start that kind of thing back up by selling off patents or by relocating complicated experienced production.
Meanwhile, Ilford's black and white presence is being artificially crippled by dramatically rising prices to US consumers - what do you want, a death spiral to the whole industry? And don't imagine digital printing supplies won't follow suit in an inflationary spiral if they're the only remaining option. What are even hand-coaters going to do if all kinds of subsidiary ingredients disappear due to lack of broader demand? Back to cave painting - but it had higher esthetic standards than most of today's photographic output.
Time to take a deep breath, before a bunch or unsubstantiated rumors gain traction.
In 2023 Kodak Alaris had revenues of approximately 500 Million Dollars.
For the same year, Eastman Kodak had revenues that were about twice as much, of which considerably more than 3/4 had nothing to do with film.
Why would Kingswood be interested in something that has relatively so little to do with its other investment?
In 2023 Kodak Alaris had revenues of approximately 500 Million Dollars.
For the same year, Eastman Kodak had revenues that were about twice as much, of which considerably more than 3/4 had nothing to do with film.
Why would Kingswood be interested in something that has relatively so little to do with its other investment?
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