Eastman Kodak 1984

EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY

The Eastman Kodak Company is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated in New Jersey. Kodak provides packaging, functional printing, graphic communications, and professional services for businesses around the world. Its main business segments are Print Systems, Enterprise Inkjet Systems, Micro 3D Printing and Packaging, Software and Solutions, and Consumer and Film. It is best known for photographic film products.

Kodak was founded by George Eastman and Henry A. Strong on May 23, 1892. During most of the 20th century, Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film. The company's ubiquity was such that its "Kodak moment" tagline entered the common lexicon to describe a personal event that deserved to be recorded for posterity. Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s, as a result of the decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in moving to digital photography, despite developing the first digital camera in 1975. As a part of a turnaround strategy, Kodak began to focus on digital photography and digital printing and attempted to generate revenues through aggressive patent litigation.

In January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Shortly thereafter Kodak announced that it would stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames and focus on the corporate digital imaging market. In August 2012, Kodak announced its intention to sell its photographic film, commercial scanners, and kiosk operations, as a measure to emerge from bankruptcy, but not its motion picture film operations. In January 2013, the Court approved financing for Kodak to emerge from bankruptcy by mid-2013. Kodak sold many of its patents for approximately $525,000,000 to a group of companies including Apple and Google to finance its private equity-backed turnaround. On September 3, 2013, the company emerged from bankruptcy having shed its large legacy liabilities and exited several businesses.

The company’s stock received renewed interest in 2020, when Kodak announced in late July that would receive a $765 million government loan to begin production of pharmaceutical materials. However, the revival turned out to be short-lived. A few weeks later, the company announced that the funding had failed to materialize amidst allegations of wrongdoing and rumors of insider trading, and the stock plummeted back down to previous levels.