Spend much time
around Kodak, and the company’s faded glory is apparent. Mr. Clarke[, the new
CEO,] emphasizes the power that history still gives the Kodak brand. But the
odds are stacked against his salvage job.
“The question
isn’t tech-related, it’s competition,” said Amer Tiwana, an analyst at CRT
Capital Group. “Kodak’s intellectual property seems to be slightly better, but
the hazard is that their competitors, eight or 10 strong ones in each market,
kill them on pricing. They might never get to profitability on the new stuff.”
In 2013, Kodak
sold 1,100 patents related to digital image capture to a group of 12 companies,
including Apple, Samsung and Facebook, for $527 million. Kodak retained the
same access to the patents as the bidders, should it wish to compete in, say,
photography once again. And it kept about 7,000 other patents, largely
connected to the chemistry and physics of creating images, which the market
sees as having relatively little value.
I wonder about
the brand and the nimbleness of Kodak.
As we know, Kodak was slow to change its business model to adapt to
digital photography. Has it emerged as a
company able to react to the market quickly?
That is not so clear from the article.
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