Kodak's Q1 2009 results

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dfoo

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At the risk of starting another long winded and fruitless discussion has anyone noticed Kodaks latest results?

The photography pioneer said it lost $353 million, or $1.32 a share, in the January-March quarter, compared with a loss of $115 million, or 40 cents a share, a year earlier.

Sales plunged 29 percent to $1.48 billion from $2.09 billion a year ago, hit by a sharp slowdown not only for chemical-based film and paper but a new world of electronic-imaging products from cameras and picture frames to retailer kiosks and high-speed commercial presses.
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The The film, photofinishing and entertainment unit division had an operating profit, but sales fell again.

The film, photofinishing and entertainment unit had an operating profit of $8 million, down from $26 million, as sales dropped 31 percent to $503 million. Sizable cost reductions and lower retiree benefits were more than offset by a slide in consumer film sales and unfavorable currency exchange rates.
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I think they need to get rid of Perez. He has done nothing to help this company, IMO.
 
Look at the call transcript I found

Print film is up a bit. Origination film is down because some of this uncertainty around ... studios have around the contract negotiation issues and not wanting to start a lot of features, a lot of television and so on, having stop start cost.
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So it looks like consumer film was actually up, whereas for movies & tv film sales dropped. If so, that is good news in general for the film industry (and for us).
 
With the entire world economy tanking, it's going to be difficult to separate out cause and effect for Kodak's fortunes.
 
I don't know what I would do to turn this company around. Seems pretty hopeless to me. Film will never be the business it used to be, and Kodak will never be what it used to be in film.

/T
 
You can't keep losing that kind of money quarter after quarter and stay in business long. It doesn't matter if film is profitable or not. It doesn't matter if it's the economy or not. If you are losing 353 million a quarter, the shareholders are going to bail.
 
dfoo said:
So it looks like consumer film was actually up, whereas for movies & tv film sales dropped. If so, that is good news in general for the film industry (and for us).
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Regarding film it worries me more that sales for movie and TV film dropped. That is by far the larger amount of film sales compared the amount of consumer film (e.g. 120 and 135) they sale.
 
No one will be what they were in film. Film is now a niche, even with the picture industry. But you know, it's a fun niche.

Shareholders for just about EVERYTHING have been sucking pond water for a while.

B2 (;-<
 
Tuolumne said:
I don't know what I would do to turn this company around. Seems pretty hopeless to me. Film will never be the business it used to be, and Kodak will never be what it used to be in film.

/T
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I agree. It's got a good film business that is dwindling and a mediocre digital camera business that has much more competition than the film business ever did. .

The quarter is even worse from a cash perspective.
 
Why does their fate need to be tied to film, even though it is their heritage? They have explored various digital media technologies, but they seem to have trouble coming up with killer products. They have huge r&d resources, are the problems in management and vision?
 
i know its OT maybe-i am in krakow for a few days now. thousands of tourists with cameras. i saw only one g2 contax and one slr film minolta and of course my wife and me are using m4, zorki1 and canonet. i was very sad when i saw so little number of film cameras. :(
 
If I was in charge of Kodak's marketing department, I would spend /some/ money trying to convert digital hobbiests to film. Get some cool guy from Tee Vee, have his bonehead friend surprised he shoots film - I dunno. There seems to be negligible effort from /any/ of the current manufactures to stimulate demand or grow the overall market for film.
 
Kind of hard to promote film when the potential customers can't go to Walmart and buy a camera that shoots film (except a few one-time-use junk).
 
nzeeman said:
i know its OT maybe-i am in krakow for a few days now. thousands of tourists with cameras. i saw only one g2 contax and one slr film minolta and of course my wife and me are using m4, zorki1 and canonet. i was very sad when i saw so little number of film cameras. :(
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It's only going to get worse. Soon there will be single-use digital disposable cameras.

/T
 
I don't understand. Any other company would promote the hell out of their profitable divisions and trim their losses. Are Kodak investors so deluded by digital hype that they refuse to admit even after this many years that there is no money for them in digital imaging? I can understand a reluctance to abandon what they poured so much investment into, but it doesn't make them money. Digital is killing Kodak, and not the way most people might think.

It's high time to see past the PopPhoto hype and drop the black hole that is Kodak digital. At least the consumer side, assuming they make anything at all from medical/industrial applications.
 
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