“Eastman Kodak Co. said Wednesday its fourth-quarter net income tumbled 95 percent as results were undermined by weaker camera revenue, sharply lower royalties from digital-imaging inventions and a large gain a year earlier,” Ben Dobbin reports for The Associated Press.
“The photography and printing company missed Wall Street expectations, earning $22 million, or 8 cents a share, in the October-December period. That compares with a profit of $443 million, or $1.40 a share, a year earlier when results were swelled by $421 million in licensing and royalty revenue,” Dobbin reports. “Sales sank 25 percent to $1.93 billion. Excluding items, Kodak says it lost $99 million, or 37 cents per share. Analysts polled by FactSet expected Kodak to earn 5 cents per share on higher sales of $2.09 billion.”
Dobbin reports, “Kodak is relying on leaner costs to see it through its transition into a digital imaging powerhouse. It has chopped almost 50,000 jobs since 2002 and its work force of 20,300 is its smallest since the 1930s. After a $3.4 billion turnaround from 2004 to 2007, its momentum was stalled by the recession.”
Read more in the full article here.
OMG. Talk about being behind the Buggy Whip Curve!
You squandered the most powerful position in the photography business by dumbing it down just to keep your antique film rolling.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Now we know why they were so dependent on their lawsuit.
How do you screw up such a great legacy like Kodak?
No one will miss them when they are gone.
It will still be a few years before Kodak’s IP is up for grabs.
I can’t believe they made less than Tim Cook.
Well, well, well…isn’t that special?
How’s that patent trolling going for you?
“digital imaging powerhouse” ????? I would go so far as to calling it a powerhouse. Maybe a digital imaging player, but not a powerhouse.
In 1986 I was sitting in a meeting room at MEC (Kodak’s Marketing Education Center) in Rochester. There were a number of other members of the industry there talking with a few Kodak VPs about where the industry was heading, about Kodak’s long term plans, etc.
Most of the talk was pretty banal, and when they asked what we thought Kodak should be doing I piped up and said that photography would go the way of home movies, where video had simply wiped Super 8mm film off the market.
A Kodak Senior VP laughed and said that the two markets weren’t at all similar; both film and video were just different forms of projection, but still film would endure because (and I’ll never forget this) “people will always want to hold the memories in their hands.”
My response was that Kodak would be out of the film business within 10 years and that all the suits would be looking for jobs if they didn’t get in on digital early and make it their own. They laughed nervously and ended the meeting.
I was a little off on the timing, but it eventually happened. Every once in a while I wonder where those guys ended up.
Apple has made a mark in the photography world with it’s proprietary autofocus methods implemented in the iPhone, iPod Touch and soon to be, iPad cameras. Apple is very serious about photography and has plenty of development underway which has and will effect/change that ball game too.
Kodak has technology that would benefit Apple and is probably not a bad candidate for an Apple purchase.
They did not miss my expectations.
Every once in a while I wonder where those guys ended up.
Microsoft.
What’s Kodak?
since we are talking cameras again today i will re-iterate something i have said before: i wish apple would make a camera. the cameras on the market today – just the camera bodies – have more buttons and dials than a tv remote control.
@ Industry Veteran
Good call.
“people will always want to hold the memories in their hands.”
And it’s precisely fuzzy, gooey bullshi|t like this that brought this once strong, incisive sort of company to its knees. Kodak lost the Vision Thing a long time ago, and, much like some other foundering companies we know, just tried to old on to their doomed business model.
C1:
But Apple could reinvent Kodak…
Many companies, like Kodak, simply aren’t adept at reinventing themselves as consumer needs and interests change. That is what makes Apple so unique. Apple is constantly creating new products and even forging new paradigms in terms of how we use technology.
The iPad is the greatest example. I can still remember all the naysayers when the iPad was announced last year. Now I watch with amusement as many of them scramble to follow apple. Motorola. Microsoft. And the list continues.
True, that’s where an acquisition could work to reinvent a company though.
From Yahoo Finance:
“The 130-year-old picture-taking pioneer, battling for almost a decade to recast itself as a digital photography and printing powerhouse, missed Wall Street expectations and posted its third yearly loss in a row.
The dim showing raised renewed concern about whether Kodak has become too reliant on income from intellectual property as it scrambles to build up inkjet printer businesses that have yet to turn a profit.
“I think it’s a pretty tough road ahead of them,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore. “At some point, they come to the end of the rope of IP litigation, and these businesses that are generating huge losses operationally have to stand on their own.”
If the IP is any good Apple should buy it with pocket change.
From what I saw during my 10 years working in photo retail, Kodak hasn’t had any electronic goods worth a damn for a long, long time. And since film sales are (mostly) dead ………