Snapshot Of A Humbled Giant

Snapshot Of A Humbled Giant When, one sunny weekend in July 2007, Eastman Kodak demolished Buildings 9 and 23 – disused facilities in "Kodak Park" near the US group's headquarters in Rochester, upstate New York – the local newspaper, the Democrat heir senior executives believed they had a duty to "maximise how much you might earn out of the traditional business". Antonio Pérez, Kodak's chief executive, likes to point out the irony of that scene to those who start lamenting the group's missed opportunities, or even accuse him of accelerating its decline. In January, overburdened with the legacy costs of its industrial past, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Asked recently how he explained Kodak's decline, he said: "It was denial. The reaction of US strategy expert Gary Hamel, who in 1992 praised Kodak for creating "stored energy" for the future, is typical. The bigger question is why Kodak was unable, or unwilling, to jump on to the digital train – or at least dodge out of its path. A history of innovation George Eastman, Kodak's founder and one of the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors in industrial history, understood the value of intellectual property. But the image the company presented in its regular filings to the financial regulator and shareholders from the early 1990s changed only gradually. The firm only embarked on a radical rewriting of what it did in its 2000 annual report, when it put itself at the centre of "infoimaging"– a $225bn industry that included digital hardware, software and online services. Defenders say the official coyness up to this point reflected two realities of the market in the 1990s. Second, it did not want to bet too publicly against its traditional consumer film business, until it could point to stronger profits from its longer-term investment in digital. Kodak innovated successfully on the back of Eastman's original scientific breakthroughs for more than 100 years. ". The competition, from rivals such as Japan's Fujifilm, the German-Belgian group Agfa-Gevaert and Britain's Ilford Photo, was eating into its dominant position. Crucially, the gross margins on the traditional photography process – from roll-film sales to photographic paper – remained, in the words of one former executive, "luxurious", estimated at 75 per cent or more, and apparently reliable. But as Kodak's official regulatory filings continued to emphasise through the 1990s, the group's services and products "competed with similar services and products of others". That was understandable. Kodak had a technological lead, backed by those patents. But in the 1890s, having come up with the affordable combination of roll-film and camera that democratised photography, he realised – as business historian Richard Tedlow has written – that to maintain leadership, he needed to "turn his firm into a moving target". Eastman wrote that he wanted his business to be able to create "a rapid succession of changes and improvements 1997 to 2005 and is now a management professor at Harvard Business School. But while these efforts yielded several of the patents Mr Pérez believes could yet be Kodak's salvation, they sucked in investment for little return. It was only as late as 1999 that Kodak's roll-film sales peaked. They saw what was coming Snapshot Of A Humbled Giant Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 03/04/2012