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Kodak Struggling to Stay in the Digital Race

The photography company, Kodak was once synonymous with top photography equipment and film. Anybody who had a camera usually relied on Kodak for their film and development needs. However, this New York based company is struggling to stay out of the red and adapt to the digital age, and its eighth consecutive quarterly loss shows that it has still a long way to go it wants to stay in the race.

The company?s shares climbed 4% because it managed to narrow its July-September losses to $37-million (against a disastrous $282-million in the three months before that). However, the company still expects to lose $400-600-million this year in total. Kodak is dedicated to restructuring the company, including letting 27,000 employees go ? mostly from their film manufacturing division. In 1998 ? at its peak ? Kodak employed 145,000 people and this number has dropped to only 50,000 worldwide in 2006.

Kodak used to rely mainly on the sales of traditional photographic film for its business. However, it today?s day and age when most people use digital cameras for their home photography needs, sales and demand for film have plummeted to all-time lows. Kodak is doing its utmost to keep up with the market by becoming a major player in printing devices and digital cameras ? however, if the latest quarterly report is anything to go by, these efforts are not helping in bringing the company back on track.