Kodak’s Next Moment: How CEO Jim Continenza Is Reinventing The Brand

In the 1980s, Kodak’s brand was synonymous with photography.  When something memorable happened, everyone called it a “Kodak Moment.” It was a brand that most everyone interacted with on a daily basis, and it held a dominant position in the market.

Nowadays, the film camera is a relic of a time gone by.. And it would be easy to relegate the Kodak brand to the scrap heap of once major companies that are now forgotten, like Pan Am World Airways and Blockbuster.

But Kodak still exists, and it’s actually a pretty active company. It’s not just their brand licensing; the trademark yellow and red K adorns all sorts of apparel and other lifestyle merchandise in foreign countries, and brought in about $4 million in the first quarter of this year. Kodak’s high-quality film and printing is still its top-grossing business, but it’s also pivoting into new areas that use its core competencies. The Kodak of today and the future, CEO Jim Continenza told me, is a B2B company specializing in chemicals, materials handling and manufacturing. In May, Kodak announced it was working on a new $20 million plant in Rochester, New York making chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry.

“That’s a hard transition for people to accept,” he said. “You don’t get to go on the race cars, all those great things don’t happen. You focus clearly on your business. We had to focus on our customer, our capabilities, and then our profitability, which was way out of whack.”

Most companies will never have to make as sharp of a pivot as Kodak, but the company, under Continenza’s leadership, is an example of how it’s possible to make a turnaround with the right mindset and a willingness to focus on what’s central to a company’s function.

In the 1990s, digital photography began to take over. Kodak was integral in early digital photography research and development, but did not make a hard pivot until it was too late. As revenues plummeted, the company tried different strategies—purchasing chemical companies, leaning into digital camera manufacturing and investing in the home printer market—but the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2012.

Continenza, an experienced businessman who had helped lead other companies through turnarounds, was named to Kodak’s board of directors in 2013 while it was still in bankruptcy. “I’m the gift that came with it,” he told me. Continenza was named executive chairman in 2019, and became CEO in 2020.

“The board asked me to step in and I felt responsible,” he said. “Also, I was there too when it went down. ….I’m not exempt from it because I sit on the board and go, ‘Not my fault.’ At that point, you have an accountability to the shareholders that trust you.”

Continenza also said he wanted to make sure Kodak wasn’t letting down its employees purely based on poor management choices by past and present leadership. Those employees, he said, were counting on Kodak for their whole livelihoods—while executives in leadership would be less likely to face financial turmoil based on things going wrong with the company.

Continenza said the rough outline of how he got Kodak on the right path is relatively simple: When you’re losing money, stop spending so much. If consumers don’t want your products, figure out what they do want. And make sure your internal operations are actually running smoothly.

Of course, there’s more nuance than that. But the major issue was clear to Continenza on his first day on the job. He spoke to more than 1,000 Kodak employees in the company’s theater and asked them to tell him what Kodak did. Nobody could answer. And as Continenza dove deeper into the company, he discovered something that Kodak was good at doing: making products nobody wanted.

So Continenza went back and examined Kodak’s core competencies, and checked in with consumers—a group that Continenza said had been ignored at times. Historically, Kodak has been an innovator with more than 27,000 patents, and today’s Kodak is still incredibly innovative, he said. The company doubled down and improved on what it does best. Film and commercial printing is still the largest segment of the company’s business, making up about 72% of revenues in FY 2024. Kodak does top-of-the-line digital photo printing using lithographic plates—the best and fastest in the world, and the only ones made in the U.S., Continenza said. The company continues to make high-performance film, which nowadays is used by top-of-the-line filmmakers. Kodak also manufactures film for other companies, which use it for still photography, X-rays and video.

But Kodak also started branching out its chemical business for uses beyond coating film and photo paper or development. The same institutional knowledge now goes toward making coatings for EV and other batteries. And the soon-to-come pharmaceutical plant, which is expected to be operating later this year, will make FDA-regulated diagnostic test reagents. Continenza said he found that pharmaceuticals, an area Kodak first got into a few years ago, is a place that the company has expertise—but can also create a U.S. source for these critical chemicals.

Aside from finding areas where Kodak can succeed, Continenza has focused on paying down the company’s debt and obtaining more appropriate financing to go with the company’s restructuring.

Continenza said his top corporate value as he’s tried to reinvent Kodak is having the courage to compete—and try to win.

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