Kodak Is Relevant Again

For a company that became famous for making camera film, and then became infamous, and bankrupt, for missing the shift to digital photography, Eastman Kodak Co. sure is good at capturing the zeitgeist. The last time we talked about Kodak in this column, possibly the last time anyone talked about Kodak at all, was in January 2018, the height of pivoting-to-blockchain mania, when Kodak, which had emerged from bankruptcy and was still floating around, pivoted to blockchain. It “announced the launch of the KODAKOne image rights management platform and KODAKCoin, a photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.” It didn’t make any sense to me either, we talked about it twice in 2018 and then never again, it was some sort of weird licensing deal and it no longer rates a mention in Kodak’s annual report. Kodak noisily pivoted to the blockchain when that was fashionable, and then quietly pivoted away when it wasn’t.

But Kodak picked a good time to gesture vaguely in the direction of crypto, just a couple of weeks after Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp., which is a real thing that happened.1 The day before Kodak’s announcement, its stock closed at $3.10 per share, and it traded about a quarter-million shares. The day of the announcement, the stock closed at $6.80—up 119%—on volume of 71.4 million shares. The next day it closed at $10.70—up 245% from before the announcement—on volume of 107.5 million shares. Six months later it was back to $3.80 and a quarter-million shares, and by last Friday Kodak closed at $2.10 per share on volume of about 75,000 shares, but it was fun while it lasted.