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Eastman Kodak, the historic photography giant which has been caught off-guard by the digital camera age, says revenues from traditional film products continue to fall in the first three months of this year.

The New York-based company is in the process of cutting up to 15,000 jobs and closing factories. It closed down a plant in Nottinghamshire last year with 300 workers. At the same time, it has been investing in new technology to catch up with rivals.

Kodak said charges from ongoing cost cutting, as well as a decline in revenues, caused a swing to a loss of $142m (£74m) in the first quarter from a profit of $21m last year. “While the first quarter’s performance was disappointing, such short-term volatility is to be expected as we transform Kodak into a digital company,” Daniel Carp, Kodak’s chairman and chief executive, said.

The fortunes of Kodak, the largest photography company in the world, have suffered a severe decline in the past few years after it was slow to grasp the importance of digital technology fro America’s $85bn photography industry.

Last year it fell out of the Dow Jones industrial average, where it had been since 1930, as its traditional film and paper sales slumped and its shares tumbled. The company has embarked on a three-pronged plan to revive itself, including heavily investing in digital technology, and pushing into medical imaging and commercial printing.

It has paid $3bn for a string of acquisitions. In January it bought Creo, a specialist digital printing company. Kodak said sales of film and processing fell 18 per cent to $1.5bn in the first quarter, while sales of digital products surged 23 per cent to $1.3bn.

Kodak overtook Sony in shipments to the US of digital cameras last year, capturing 22 per cent of the market, up from 18 per cent in 2003, according to the market research firm IDC.

In January last year Kodak https://www.51lunwen.org/sydney/ unveiled a three-year cost-cutting plan expected to resulting total charges of between $1.3bn and $1.7bn, with cost savings of $800m to $1bn by 2007.

Under the plan, Kodak’s square footage worldwide is being reduced by about one-third. It said roughly 12,000 to 15,000 positions would be cut.

Griffiths, K. (2005) Kodak suffers $142m first quarter loss after missing out on digital boom. The Independent, (23rd April).

Story Three

Shareholders of Eastman Kodak were arriving for their annual general meeting in Rochester, New York, on May 11th, when they heard the news. Daniel Carp will step down as chief executive at the end of the month, and as chairman at the end of the year. After 35 years at Kodak, and five years as its boss, Mr Carp was implicitly conceding the obvious: even though he had correctly identified the mortal threat to the 113-year-old photography giant from digital technology, he had done so too slowly, too late.

Mr Carp’s moment of insight – analysts at the time derided it as his “sudden-epiphany strategic plan” – came in September 2003, when the displacement of silver-halide film, Kodak’s core business, by digital technology was already in full swing. Kodak would restructure, he said, letting its film business wither while re-investing the cas本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。