Your first camera may be a Small yellow or black box, plastic, with a metallic click and a reel that you carried to reveal to discover photos of bright colors. Before there were mobile phones and Instagram filters, Kodak was the entrance door to photography for millions of people. Yesterday, that same company warned in its quarterly report (Form 10-Q that presents before the SEC) that its continuity is in doubt. The market responded to the announcement with a fall close to 26% of the shares in the subsequent moments.
According to the aforementioned document, Kodak closed the last quarter with a net loss of 26 million dollars, compared to 25 million benefit a year earlier, and 155 million box to June 30. The problem is that in less than a year obligations over around 500 million and today it has no compromised financing to cover them, which activated the notice of ‘Going concerns‘. To gain margin, the company has launched extraordinary measures, but has indicated that “these conditions raise serious doubts about the company’s ability to continue operating.”
To invent the easy photo to existential doubt
Far from their domain days in cameras and reels, Kodak operates today in commercial printing, chemicals and advanced materials, and film for cinema. Its brand is licensed for consumer products, while reinforcing businesses where it retains industrial technology and capillarity. Besides, It already has a regulated installation in Rochesterregistered by the FDA, which will start with PHOSPHATE BUFFERED SALINE (A buffered saline solution with phosphates that is usually used in laboratories and biomedical processes) and aspires to produce intravenous sera later. His footprint in consumer photography is, today, more symbolic than real.
As we mentioned above, the pressure of that short-term debt is combined with loose income and limited liquidity, according to 10-Q and the results note. To win oxygen, Kodak has decided to close his Company Pension Plan in the United Statesa corporate system that guarantees retirement payments to former employees. The company plans to clarify on August 15 how it will serve all participants and complete reversal in December 2025, with the idea of amortizing part of the term loan and renegotiating or refinancing the rest.
Kodak camera
In 1975, Steven SassonKodak engineer, presented a digital camera prototype who captured images with a CCD sensor and kept them on tape. It was rudimentary, but marked the beginning of a technological revolution that would end up imposing. The company decided not to market it then for fear of cannibalizing the road business and for the immaturity of the product. This caution delayed its entry into the digital market, allowed rivals to consolidate positions and weakened the model that had made it unbeatable for decades.
In 2020, Kodak tried to reconvert the pharmaceutical ingredients with a letter of interest from the United States Development Bank for a loan of 765 million dollars. The stock market reaction was glowing, but the process was paralyzed between research and criticismand the loan was not formalized. That ambition survives today on a smaller scale: Rochester’s CGMP installation, already registered by the FDA, will begin with PBS as the first product and will serve as a basis for exploring materials of greater regulatory value.
What happens in the coming months will be decisive for Kodak. The company argues that it may pay a significant part of the loan and expand or refinance the rest, while executing the closure of the pension plan and Light your new pharmaceutical line. The market, for now, observes skepticism. For a brand that defined photography for more than a century, the challenge is no longer to innovate, but simply survive.
Images | KODAK | Bady Abbas
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