Kodak’s $100 Billion Mistake
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Kodak on life support. Yeah, they said that there’s a lot of doubt whether or not they can even stay in business. And they’ve been in this situation for some time. They filed for bankruptcy back in 2012. And this is a kind of a teachable moment. This is a really good lesson for people out there in a myriad of ways. First and foremost, okay, even blue chips die. They do.
I have written about this. They die. The bluest of blue chips of all time, the Dutch East India Company paid an 18 % dividend for 200 years. It is no longer. 200 years and 18 % dividend. It the first company that issued stock. Kodak was in the nifty 50. That was one of the Wall Street’s marketing campaigns in the late 1960s, early.
70s where there were 50 stocks that you could buy forever and never have to sell because nothing bad would happen to them. And again, if you go back and you take a look at that marketing scheme out of Wall Street, the companies that are still around, not many, many of them gone have gone under Kodak, Kodak, Rochester, New York. I keep thinking of Paul Simon there, the Kodachrome song.
I thinking back when I was a kid, know, the slides, you know, that’s how my dad used to do pictures back in the day. We would watch the old carousel there, watch slide shows and they were all there. He had to go to the old photo mart place and get the slides developed and all that stuff. The funny thing is, is that Kodak didn’t have to go under. They didn’t have to go under. You want to know why? They’re the ones that actually
developed digital photography.
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They invented the first digital camera in 1975. 1975. So they come up, they find this unbelievable technology, okay? And rather than develop it, rather than develop it, said, nah, we got too much of a good thing going right now with selling film and all this, and they did. But did they not think that
someone else might come along and develop that digital technology and take it to the next level. And they did. Again, Kodak got back into the game, tried to compete with Canon and Sony and Nikon. They embraced digital photography early on and they lost. If you’re not growing, if you’re not innovating, you’re dying. Again, this is one of the things that we look at.
Look at when we’re studying companies, looking at the fundamentals. If you’re not growing, if you’re not innovating, you’re done. Try to hold back. Try to hold back technologies. Try to reject it. There’s just countless stories about this. Steve Jobs and the guys going in there, the Microsoft and Xerox inventing the mouse, all these companies.
Back in the day, coming up with all these great technologies, we’re not gonna do that. We’re not gonna do that. And nope, somebody else took it. And boy, did they take it. Okay, again, either grow or you die. Kodak, Kodak decided that, we’re too fat and happy. we’re making too much money charging people to get their film developed and all that jazz. Yep.
Goodbye. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
