Globalization Of Kodak

According to Parnell (2014), a company has to be aware of their industries external environmental factors because of the effects that they can have on the organizations strategic decisions. The near death of Eastman Kodak company is a direct result of the company failing to respond quickly enough to the evolving world of technology and societies demands to shift from film to digital photography. For Kodak, the advent of digital photography was ruinous (Hardy, 2015). Once a powerhouse in the film industry, the company is now just a mere shadow of what it once was. At the peak of its season, the Kodak company was a household name with as much as $19 million in sales, 145,000 employees, housed in the 200 buildings that once stood on the 1,300-acre …show more content…
Crippled by increasing competition, digital photography and debt, the company was forced into bankruptcy in January 0f 2012 (Parnell, 2014). The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2013 but as an entirely different organization. Since emerging from bankruptcy, the company has mostly served niche film markets (Hardy, 2015). Kodak reappeared on the public markets in September 2013, though the bulk of the company is still owned by private equity and investment firms. Kodak is now a commercial imaging company serving business markets like packaging and graphics (Kodak, Smaller and Redirected, 2013). Gone are the days of cameras and film that made it such a famous and wealthy company in its heyday. It hopes to replace them with new technologies like touch screens for smartphones and smart packaging embedded with sensors. According to Hardy (2014), Kodak has good ideas and their technology seems to be up to par with everyone else’s but the hazard is that their competitors, eight or 10 strong ones in each market; killing them on pricing which may prevent them from ever seeing any type of profitability on the new stuff. The employees simply are not ready to give up on the company just yet so they continue to look for innovative ways to survive. At one point the company was a major contributor to the Hollywood film industry, with an estimated 90% market share, but now the commercial film is a dwindling business (Marzola, 2015). According to Hardy (2015), Kodak manufactured 11.4 billion linear feet of film, enough to circle the earth about 88 times, but this part of the business has shrunk 96 percent. In a last ditch effort to maintain some type of business with the film industry and save the close to 300 jobs that would have ended in a layoff; the company reached an agreement with major