Kodak announces plans to sell consumer film division

[rdenney]

Maybe some of us would rather make a modest but honest middle-class living than puff
ourselves up using political personality tricks. There's more to life than money, and greedy
people never seem to be happy or ever have enough - it's always more, more, more.
Maybe I'm just experienced enough to see thru their tricks - but's that's what I'm paid to do. Don't get me wrong - I do know certain CEO's who are truly competent and truly earn
their pay - but that's more typical of privately rather than publicly-held corporations.

Inherent in this statement is that the driving motivation of typical CEOs is personal financial greed. I've known my share of egotistical CEOs, and of CEOs who don't know their industry and don't want to listen to their experienced people. I've known CEOs and CEO wannabes whose main qualification is their HBS degree or their golf partner. I've even watched one of my previous bosses, who owned his company, go straight to prison. But I've known very few who would throw their company under the bus just to sweeten their compensation package. They all wanted the company to succeed, seeing that as the path to achieve their personal goals. Even the one who went to prison was caught paying off a bureaucrat (who spend even longer in prison) in order to improve his chances of winning projects.

But we weren't talking about CEOs in general. We were talking about Perez, and Kodak, and sheet film. Let's assume, just on a lark, that Perez is trying to find a path forward for Kodak that successfully takes them out of bankruptcy into long-term sustainability. Will maintaining consumer film production do that? I don't see how. Sure, stopping that production might undermine any chance of getting a return on investment on the development of newer films such as Ektar, but ROI for one tiny sliver of the business footprint might not be important when cash flow is in crisis. Selling off the branding might be the only strategy for survival.

Selling their intellectual property does seem like selling blood, and they are anemic as it is. But that's not the issue that affects us directly.

And how is selling a piece of a company to a competitor so that the competitor can throw it away and remove the competition a useful description here? There is no competitor for color negative sheet film in the U.S. Fuji has abandoned the U.S. market altogether. If they bought the consumer film division, shut it down, and imported their own stuff now that it was free of competition, that might actually be the best thing for us. And it may be our only hope of having available color sheet film.

What I do see is Kodak trying to keep consumer film in production...somehow. If the company was driven solely by the motives you ascribe, they'd have dumped it altogether long ago. Nobody among their stockholders, big or small, would have shed a single tear.

Rick "who has known quite a few CEOs" Denney

[rdenney]

I'm in more of a service industry and just want to serve my customer well... only to face politics and numbskulls on both their side and ours. Grrr... another decade of this is in the cards.

So now I'm off to build some EOY briefing charts for the execs on all the good things "they" did this FY.

It could be worse. You could work for government.

Rick "!" Denney

[Steve Goldstein]

OK, I give up. A few posts back Sal mentioned B&H's stock quantity of 320TXP in 8x10. How do you guys figure that out? I couldn't see anything on the page Sal linked to that would tell me, or lead me to the answer.

[Drew Wiley]

It's called a phone call ... that's how you find out. Anyway, its nice to know that B&H is also stocking 8x10 TMY, Ektar, and Portra. Seems that these particular films are doing quite well and justifying relatively frequent runs. But is that due to us hoarders buying up
several years worth at at time? And how long can that habit last? And how much of the
cumulative overhead of that particular division does even this particular arena of success
actually offset? Difficult to say, since one of things typical mgt does is play shell games
with numbers. And I don't understand how Kodak can divorce the overhead of commercial
film from "consumer". Distribution per se can be accomplished a number of ways, some better some worse - but who wants to buy the brand label too if they can't control the fate of actual manufacture? (No, it won't be Fuji - they probably have better things to do
and are inscrutable anyway, just several Japanese corporations I can think of).

[Drew Wiley]

Rick - I don't pretend to know what's going on in the head of Kodak's CEO because he's
apparently willing to go down with the ship. I'll give him credit for that. But to suggest that
certain others don't have bad motives is pretty naive. They have every financial incentive
to run the ship aground. Simply stated, they get paid way more if they get fired than if
they run the company intelligently. And given the fact that a lot of them don't last more
than a couple years anyway due to the instant gratification model of Wall St, why would
they have any loyalty to anything but themselves? The folks from the GE background were
positively the worst, and anytime any of them was put in charge running something else,
it was "dump it fast" from anyone in the know.

[BradS]

OK, I give up. A few posts back Sal mentioned B&H's stock quantity of 320TXP in 8x10. How do you guys figure that out? I couldn't see anything on the page Sal linked to that would tell me, or lead me to the answer.

easy, goto the B&H web site, find the page for 8x10 320TXP, click add to cart then click view cart. Now change the quantity to 200 and click update cart. it does not complain so, change the quantity to 300 and click update cart. it complains and tells you it only has 262 available.

[Jan Pedersen]

OK, I give up. A few posts back Sal mentioned B&H's stock quantity of 320TXP in 8x10. How do you guys figure that out? I couldn't see anything on the page Sal linked to that would tell me, or lead me to the answer.

Steve, put a high number of the film you want in your shopping cart, if the number exeed the available qty you will get a message with the number they have in stock.

Brad beat me on the keyboard.

[Sal Santamaura]

...A few posts back Sal mentioned B&H's stock quantity of 320TXP in 8x10. How do you guys figure that out?...

http://www.largeformatphotography.in...l=1#post817518

Brad and Jan both beat me to the keyboard. This time -- not last December.

[Sal Santamaura]

...its nice to know that B&H is also stocking 8x10 TMY...Seems that these particular films are doing quite well and justifying relatively frequent runs...

Since I notified everyone here about B&H's decision to stock 8x10 TMY

http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ing-8x10-TMY-2

they've had no need to reorder it from Kodak. Of the original 271 boxes, 85 remain in stock. Even with a $3.00 lower price than Canham wants per box. It's no wonder Canham currently shows he still needs 91 boxes ordered before submitting and hasn't successfully completed such an order since January, 2011.

B&H has sold much more 8x10 320TXP in that almost 7-month period; I can recall them replenishing it on at least three occasions, each time going from somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 boxes back to near 275 boxes.

[Drew Wiley]

Relatively low demand compared to TMY. Each time I ordered some 8x10 TMY it came in a different batch code, so was being coated frequently. Even TMX seems to be getting cut
at least annually. I should look at my various purchases of Ektar sheet film to see what that sequencing look like. Compare that to something like Tech Pan, which allegedly took
over a decade to clear off the shelves after the last run.