Leanna Byrne

Hei, olen Leanna Byrn ja tämä on Business Daily BBC World Service. Tämä on paikka, jossa katsotaan maailmanlaajuisia rahoja ja työtä, jotka muodostavat maailmankuvaamme. Kodak oli kirjoitettu digitaalisen elokuvan jälkeen, mutta tänä päivänä yritys haluaa olla tutkijana.

Today we hear from the chief executive of how the company reinvented itself and what it takes to bring an industrial icon back from the brink.

You might be old enough to remember what a Kodak moment is. You think of handing in rolls of film, of glossy printed photos in your hand, organising them into albums. Even the brand is recognisable, that unmistakable high contrast red and yellow. But those were the days when it was a consumer camera brand. And those days are gone. We're an industrial manufacturer and we're damn good at it.

Se on Kodaksin puheenjohtaja Jim Continenza. Hän otti yrityksen ylös, kun se meni pankroptiin. Se oli yksi digitaalisen ajan suurimpia korporeita pankkauksia. Pankkaukset olivat todella rikkoja. Me olemme todella rikkoja ja menemme paljon rahaa. Joten miten yritys saa tämän asian? No, aloitetaan aluksi.

Kodak was founded in 1888 by George Eastman, a former bank clerk from Rochester, New York, where the company is still based. At the time, photography was expensive, technical and elitist. Eastman's slogan was simple. You press the button, we do the rest. Photography was something ordinary people could do.

Se ei ole kovin iso, onko se? Vain kaksi kautta kaksi kautta. Ja kun se näytetään huonekohdalla, näet kuvia niin isoja kuin elämä. Aiemmin 20-luvun ajan Kodak oli maailman suomalainen fotografia-yhteisö. Siihen kohdalla se kontrolloi 90 prosenttia USA-filmimarkkaita ja noin 85 prosenttia kameran sääntöjä. Se myös työskennelli tensiä tuhansia Rochesterissa.

Here's an interesting twist to the story. In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Stephen Sasson invented the first digital camera. But even though the company was first to the technology, they shelved it, patenting digital imaging only as a defensive hedge, rather than looking at it as the future to their business.

Jim Continenza ei ollut yrityksessä silloin, mutta hän oli saanut puheenvuoron, kun hän yritti elää. Meillä on noin 160 miljoonaa vuotta, me olemme saaneet käsin ja meidän oli tehtävä muutoksia. Vuonna 2019 Jim oli pyytänyt aloittaa ja ottaa kontroliin.

Up to that point he had built his career as a turnaround specialist. He held senior roles at firms including AT&T Intelligent and served in more than 30 boards, often stepping in when businesses were struggling and needed reconstructing.

Jim refers to the Kodak he took over as one that had lost its way. This point is probably best illustrated by a story that he's told in plenty of interviews over the years. It's when he had a big staff meeting and asked his workers...

And selling is what Jim turned to. He stripped the business back to its core competencies, skills Kodak still possessed that were genuinely hard to replicate. He sold high precision manufacturing, particularly in coating, chemistry and material science, capabilities developed over decades of making photographic film. When you took over, you initially went in and said, what does Kodak do? So I'm going to ask you the same question. What does Kodak do?

One of the most consequential decisions was to keep and reinvent in film, even when it was losing money. Jim invested millions in equipment that had not been manufactured for decades, restoring production capacity and fixing how film was made and sold. Did Jim ever consider scrapping that side of the business? Would it have made his life easier to say goodbye?

It drove us into doing substrate coating for EV batteries and other things. Very same process as making film. So it just levered other pieces of the business. So for anyone who's returned to analog film over the past few years, you can thank the acclaimed Hollywood director Christopher Nolan for having a word with Jim about it. He must have been convincing because to revive technology that is on its way out costs a lot of time and a lot of money.

The same coating and chemical processes that make film possible, he says, can also be used far beyond photography. It's investing about $20 million in a new manufacturing plant at the Eastman Business Park in Rochester, New York. The facility is part of Kodak's Advanced Materials and Chemicals division and will produce pharmaceutical products.

And if you think of how Jim approached the Kodak turnaround, he doesn't seem like a guy to wait around. Kodak today is smaller than it once was, but it's more focused. It's no longer trying to be a consumer electronics brand or chase the next digital platform. Instead, it's betting that industrial skills that were once lost and painfully rebuilt still matter.

That was Jim Continenza, chief executive of Kodak, wrapping up this episode of Business Daily from the BBC World Service. We heard about Kodaks revival, how the company rebuilt machines that hadn't existed for decades, invested in new ways of working and technology, and doubled down on what it already knew how to do well. I'm Leanna Byrne.

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