What should kodak do to survive

It was cheaper than film photography and the image quality was better. Around that time, a magazine stated that Kodak was being left behind because it was turning a blind spot to new technology.

The marketing team at Kodak tried to convince the managers about the change needed in the company's core principles to achieve success. But Kodak's management committee continued to stick with its outdated idea of relying on film cameras and claimed the reporter who said the statement in the magazine did not have the knowledge to back his proposition.

Kodak failed to realize that its strategy which was effective at one point was now depriving it of success. Rapidly changing technology and market needs negated the strategy. Kodak invested its funds in acquiring many small companies, depleting the money it could have used to promote the sales of digital cameras. When Kodak finally understood and started the sales and the production of digital cameras, it was too late.

Many big companies had already established themselves in the market by then and Kodak couldn't keep pace with the big shots. In the year , Kodak finally announced it would stop the sales of traditional film cameras. Also Read: Why Startups Fail? Case Study on Failed Startups in India. By January , Kodak had used up all of its resources and cash reserves. On the 19th of January in , Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection which resulted in the reorganization of the company.

The credit enabled Kodak to continue functioning. To generate more revenue, some sections of Kodak were sold to other companies. Along with this, Kodak decided to stop the production and sales of digital cameras and stepped out of the world of digital photography.

It shifted to the sale of camera accessories and the printing of photos. In September , Kodak announced it had emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Celebrated camera accessory manufacturers of yesteryear, Kodak, is looking to join Chinese smartphone manufacturing giant Oppo for an upcoming flagship smartphone. This new smartphone is rumored to have 50MP dual cameras, where the cameras of the device will be modeled upon the old classic camera designs of the Kodak models.

The all-new flagship model of Oppo is designed to be a tribute to the classic Kodak camera design. Furthermore, the phone will also embed a large sensor in its ultrawide camera as well along with a 13MP telephoto lens and a 3MP microscope camera.

The collaborations between Android OEMs and camera makers are not something new. Yes, numerous other companies have already come together with other camera manufacturing companies like Nokia, which joined hands with German optics company Carl Zeiss earlier in to bring in the camera phone Nokia N This can be concluded as the first of such collaborations that the smartphone industry has seen.

Numerous other collaborations happened eventually, which resulted in outstanding results. OnePlus' partnership with Hasselblad, Huawei pairing up with Leica and the recent news of Samsung's associating with Olympus are some of the significant collaborations to be mentioned.

Kodak had earlier made a leap into the smart TV industry and is ushering in success through this new move. Furthermore, the renowned photography company is looking to invest more than Rs crores during the next 3 years for making a fully automated TV manufacturing plant possible in Hapur.

Kodak's announcement, as it seemed, was further recharged with the Aatmanirbhar Bharat campaign launched by PM Narendra Modi in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic in Super Plastronics Pvt Ltd, a Noida-based company has obtained the license from Kodak Smart TVs to produce and sell their products in India in partnership with the New-York based company and has already launched a range of smart TVs already, as of September including:.

Few business cases are as rich with soaring success and abrupt failure than the story of Kodak. What was once considered a hub of technological wizardry suddenly became a bankrupt institution with little hope of surviving much longer into the future. All of this begs the question — what happened? Why was a company, full of intelligent people, so slow to adapt to a market that though seemed to change over night, actually transformed itself over the slow period of roughly 20 years?

The chart below illustrates sales of film alone, film cameras, and stand-alone digital cameras over time. Note that the film sales in blue are represented by the right side axis while the camera sales in green are represented by the left side axis. But this graph is just the output of what happened — or the end result. To understand that, we need to analyze the economics underlying the photography industry.

If you assume the storage is film and processing is taking the roll of film to the drug store for printing, this pretty much sums up the costs incurred for photos during the days of film. In digital photography the storage costs rapidly go to zero cost of memory that is amortized over limitless reuses and the processing price is also zero if you can simply share your photos online through social media.

The processing price was the cost to have the exposed film processed by a processing location usually in places like supermarkets or drug stores. On a per image basis, this comes out to 54 cents — the majority of the cost being driven by film costs or storage and processing.

Practically the same as the one-time use cameras. This is why one-time use cameras became so popular before the price of digital cameras came down. Digital cameras of the day required the user to have a computer to process the images on and a printer to print them out for sharing with others — a process that was foreign to all but the most techie of consumers.

With storage and processing costs virtually eliminated from the equation, the only thing digital cameras needed was time before they came to dominate photography. The graph above pretty much says it all. To make the comparisons fair, lets assume the digital cameras can take photos before wearing out. Digital was the only thing that made sense anymore.

Though they managed to maintain revenues somewhat in line with their historic performance, the foundation of their business began to show serious cracks.

It was a classic case of the innovators dilemma. By , stand-alone digital cameras were peaking in sales just as built-in digital camera modules, a new form of digital cameras, would begin to disrupt the photography market again. Owners of an iPhone now were able to take photos, store, process and share them all with one device. Benedict Evans has written a great post on this. With virtually no switching cost and extremely low device costs because it was bundled with the overall phone people would take more pictures than ever before.

But first lets compare Kodak in with Instagram in to give you an idea of how dramatic this market shift was. Here are some numbers for comparison where costs are listed from the consumers perspective:. From this data we can see that Kodak was basically the same size in , on a number of images processed basis, as Instagram was in On that same date, Kodak employed roughly 83, people. Kodak should have clearly invested in the Cell Phone Revolution.

Mark Fraser. Even today, there is nothing like photos on Kodachrome Grant Wright. Kodak died and so did Rochester along with it. Rob Norman. This changes everything I had though about Kodak! Glad you covered this! Share this article. Related articles Companies. Daniel Hall 0. Daniel Burrus 0. Anuja Lath 0. Latest Articles View all. High Energy Bills?

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