Kodak Updates Company Logo and Continues to Streamline Operations

Recent announcements, including the roll-out of an updated logo, have drawn attention to the evolving digital strategy of Eastman Kodak Co. According to a recent Newsweek article, "The decline of traditional cameras and film, and the explosive rise of digital photography, has sharply cut into sales and set its stock back 74 percent over the past five years. Antonio Perez, 59, a veteran of Silicon Valley's Hewlett-Packard, joined the Rochester, NY-based Kodak in 2003 and took over as CEO last June. In the past two years, Perez has slashed Kodak's U.S. manufacturing, announced plans to lay off 25,000 employees and doubled down on consumer electronics, digital printing and health-care imaging."

In the article, Perez noted the company is mid-way through its four-year restructuring, and now has his "second wind". Before he joined the company in 2003, Kodak needed a "new vision." "You could sense that the majority of people in the organization were in a desperate search for what was next," he said. "Luckily we had been investing in digital, and we have the intellectual property and a strong brand. 'This is not desperate, but if we don't [restructure the company] we will cease to exist.' That is what we kept saying to each other during that time.

Citing Kodak's digital heritage, Perez notes, "What we have done with digital cameras is use a piece of silicon instead of silver. We still have [the] same architecture we had before. With film we could only have one light path. Why can't we have more than one digital light sensor? And why use a flash? You needed it for film but you don't need it when you have light sensors that can see with a lot less light than your eye can. We have just carried on the limitations of the old architecture. That is why we're coming in with worldwide firsts-last year it was the first Wi-Fi camera and now the first dual-lens camera. We are the ultimate film company telling the world that film architecture is wrong for the digital space."