Mark asks:
Just curious does anyone know if Kodak is a union shop??
It was union here in Oz, but with a twist
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/koda-o06.shtml
Ignore the rhetoric from the author, most of the details are correct - Kodak
took millions in government subsidies after crying poor and threatening to
close the plant in 1990. After manipulating the unions and workers by
promising the factory would stay open, they managed to achieve massive
profits and unparalleled levels of efficiency that has never been bested..
All the while they still planning to outsource the production to China and
NOT North America and Europe as they later claimed at the closure. To
complicate things, toward the end of this saga they saw a substantial and
unexpected *increase* in RA4 paper sales (paper being what this plant
mostly made) which didn't help their claim that digital was killing
tradional materials - this claim was to be the final justification for the
closure of the Australian plant. When one of our investigative reporters
went through the whole mess they found Kodak had planned from the outset in
1990 to close the Oz plant and move it offshore to China where labour costs
were substantially less and that Kodak hid the fact that the plant was the
most productive in the Kodak empire because they had already preordained
that the factory was to close .. everything else they did here was just
dancing for the audience.
Nonetheless, the business community applauded the financial decision at the
time seeing only lower production costs = increased profits.
It strikes me that when Kodak found RA4 paper sales increasing against their
predictions, they might have taken advantage of the market trend and maybe
directed some of their effort into promotional marketting, advertising the
benefits of RA4 paper prints from digital cameras.. but instead they decided
to follow a plan that was some 15+ years old instead, ignoring the
unexpected windfall and kill off a profitable arm of their production.
As to Sony grabbing all the Konica patents, Sony had no interest in the film
side of things and probably would have had no real interest in Konica had it
been just Konica alone, but as Konica had merged with Minolta, they got Koni
when they aquired the merged company - they were really chasing the Minolta
camera.
Konica was also a maker of some very fine photographic inkjet paper and they
had some nice printers around too, but Sony was very clear on what they
wanted and they wisely (from a business perspective) didn't bother dabbling
in an area outside the realms of their expertise. Therein lies te sad truth
behind corporate takeovers - Even though they got both companies at a song,
it was more profitable right then and there for them to sell off the Koni
assets. It also made good business sense to kill the production of one of
the big film makers, increasing the chance of their digital lines
succeeding.
Kinda like the conspiracy theorists claims of petroleum companies buying up
clever fuel saving methods just to shelve them.. but in this case, it was
clearly real. It also sent a very loud message to the market "film is
dead".
k
