Comment by ndiddy
2 days ago
The problem was that Kodak essentially was a film chemical production company pretending to be an imaging company. The switch to digital meant they could no longer get the fat recurring profits from selling film that they were used to. Kodak's value peaked at $31 billion in 1996 ($58 billion in 2025 dollars) while the total value of the digital camera industry today is around $8 billion (https://www.researchandmarkets.com/report/digital-camera). Even if Kodak had pulled off a masterful pivot to digital and captured the entire market, it would have been disastrous for the company and led to it shedding most of its employees.
I think camera is a major smartphone selling point and certainly cannibalized the digital camera business. Kodak could have upgraded from camera to phone like Apple upgraded from mp3 player.
I doubt that Kodak could have built a complete phone. But they certainly could have been a tier-1 supplier of camera components and software to Apple and other phone manufacturers. It seems like Kodak didn't even really try.
Digital was disaster so the plan after 1996 was delay and deny. The question is: did it do enough extra business in those transitional years to make up for going bankrupt in 2012? And was it better ultimately for shareholders?
Yea, but, like, phones are digital cameras…
If Kodak were to have survived, it should have kept Eastman Chemical and morphed into that as imagining declined.