Kodak's New Click

At the Eastman Kodak Co., several things are sacred. One is the memory of prodigious George Eastman (1854-1932), the Rochester tinkerer who founded the world's biggest photographic supplier, pioneered a paternalistic system of employee bonuses and pensions, and built dozens of schools, hospitals and dental clinics. Another is research. Kodak assiduously collects Ph.D.s (more than 500 are on its staff), and lets them wade fearlessly into the chartless seas of pure research. The third is profits: the company's have tripled in the past decade, and so have its dividends.

No Fuss. Last week Kodak paid public reverence to all three. In Manhattan, President William Scott Vaughn, 60, a mathematician and onetime Rhodes scholar, announced that "George Eastman's idea was to 'make a camera as easy to use as the pencil'--and picture taking now becomes that easy." What makes it so, in Vaughn's view, is the latest developments from Kodak's researchers: new Kodak still-film cartridges that pop in and out like blades in a razor, and four new models of "Instamatic" cameras (prices: $16 to $110) that use the film and automatically set the lens opening.

Hoping for sales of 1,000,000 of the cameras this year, Kodak is counting on the new line to broaden its appeal to what Vaughn calls "the mass market, people who don't want to be fussy in their picture taking." That market is expanding so rapidly that Vaughn also announced that Kodak's 1962 U.S. sales--two-thirds in photography and one-third in synthetic fibers, chemicals and defense work topped $1 billion for the first time, and profits rose 8% to $140 million after taxes.

Counterattacking. There are also some things that Eastman Kodak would be happier not to have to talk about. Prime among them is monopoly; the company controls so much of the U.S. camera-and-film market (more than 40%) that the specter of the trustbusters always looms large. Then there is Polaroid, whose convenient "instant" photographs have caused something of a revolution in the camera industry. Dr. Edwin Land offered to sell his picture-in-a-minute system to Kodak in 1946, but Kodak's deliberative managers figured that the company was already too busy with seemingly surer projects, thought Land's camera would not click. Another sore subject is competition from those precise, lower-wage foreign camera makers who have won over so many camera buffs. Even though any widening of the camera market only helps to sell high-profit Kodak film--which accounts for almost half the world's film sales--Kodak's attitude toward the aggressive Japanese and German interlopers is one of competitive concern.

Outclassed by foreign camera makers and outresearched in one important area by Polaroid. Kodak is counterattacking by stressing its own low-cost convenience. Of course, admits President Vaughn, "holding prices down means cutting the finishing costs and the handwork on cameras.'' It also means invading the competitors' home grounds abroad, where Kodak sold more than $325 million in cameras and film last year and will invest $27 1/2 million in capital expansion and modernization this year. "If you can get a Frenchman to drink Coca-Cola," says Vaughn optimistically, "it won't be long before all Europeans will take to the idea of using Kodaks."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.