Kodak is no longer defined by film: its CEO puts it last on the list!

Jim Continenza, executive chairman and chief executive officer of Eastman Kodak, listed the lines he intends to sustain the company with: print, chemicals, batteries and film. Film came last. The order is not casual: it describes a company that no longer defines itself by its most famous product.

Kodak lays down thin layers: film is one of them

The film building at the Rochester complex covers blocks under one roof and is run in the dark. A chemical division and a battery division sit alongside. The sentence that orders everything else is this: Making film and coating batteries is almost the same thing.

Film and battery are made almost identically: one with light, one without. The rest shares the same principle, a mixture spread over a base. When the business is described that way, film stops being the heart of the company and becomes one of its applications.

Film is not doomed for being one application more. It stays alive because it shares a factory, though the company does not put it that way. Spreading layers is an expensive industrial operation: the machine only pays off if it runs a lot of volume, and film alone does not generate it. Offset plates, chemicals and batteries coming out of the same complex generate it.

Continenza names three manufacturing sites, and all three appear in the print section, not the film one: Columbus in Georgia, Osterode in Germany and Gunma in Japan. From the Gunma plant, 70 kilometres from Tokyo, Kodak publishes that offset plates come out, the metal sheets printing shops use.

The advantage Kodak is after, Continenza says, is having the chemistry, the materials and the machines that spread the layers in one complex. He also talks about demanding equal rules to protect local manufacturing in the countries where it sells.

The diagnosis: nobody knew what Kodak did!

When Continenza arrived, he gathered the employees and asked what Kodak did. He got no answer. Then he asked for the list of the twenty most important customers and it took ten days.

The ten days explain the word Continenza chose to describe the recovery: focus. A company that takes ten days to know who buys from it does not have a product problem. It has an identity problem, and cutting the business down to fewer lines was the answer.

Kodak also makes chemicals for reagents, in small, specialised batches. The defence of that line is explicit: do not judge it by today's size, because almost everything starts small. It is the same logic of spreading layers applied to another market.

Film as the exception, not the centre

Kodak maintains that film is growing across the three families it makes: still film, motion pictures and industrial uses. On that point the company has more room than elsewhere, because it publishes no volumes. Without a number, someone buying rolls cannot tell whether the market doubled or merely stopped falling. And that difference, for them, is called availability and price.

Continenza says there are people willing to travel to another city to see a film in 70 mm, and asks who would make that trip to see it digitally. The big screen, he says, produces something the file does not. It is his strongest argument, and it is not economic.

A phone impresses nobody, a digital camera is fine, and film turns whoever uses it into an artist. That ladder does not speak about what the material does, but about what it communicates about whoever uses it. And it is the weakest argument of all.

Digital will dominate, Continenza says, without any doubt, and film has its niche for the true artist. With that limit, film stops being the future of photography and becomes a profitable line inside an industrial manufacturer.

A story of rescue circulates among photographers: a brand that came back because people asked for it. Kodak tells another: a manufacturer that reordered its business and kept film as one more line. Both can be true, but only the second explains why the material is still being made.

It is not what it was, but it is fine to be something different. Film's continuity does not depend on nostalgia but on the business of spreading layers staying on its feet. If that base holds, film stays. No amount of memories pays for a production line.