That may have been what the participants of last Friday's Kodak Analyst and Investor Day may have asked themselves in case they know the title of the British comedy game show.
Apparently investors did not like what they heard and reduced the stock market value of the company by some 36% over the next three sessions.
Apparently investors did not like what they heard and reduced the stock market value of the company by some 36% over the next three sessions.
The - in Kodak's case not exactly new - explanation is that the old cash cow businesses continue to shrink faster than anticipated and the new growth businesses do not grow fast enough. Revenue guidance for 2015 is now $1.8 to 2.0 billion, compared with $2.7 billion under the long scrapped 2013 post-bankruptcy plan. Beyond that some quite interesting details were discussed.
New Prosper 6000 machines average about $3.5 million in sales value and currently still generate a loss, but it supposedly is still a great business because of about $1 million in annual ink and services provided by Kodak. While I have always been impressed by Kodak's Stream technology, one has to ask if this cost model will really allow Kodak to convert many of the "old iron" sheetfed and web presses to digital, or if printers will invest only when they need to print variable data. For most printers cost per copy is still the magic word. Let's also not forget that these machines fit somewhere in between sheetfed and web when it comes to plain productivity, so the real addressable market for this remarkable technology may be smaller than hoped for.
In terms of complete systems Kodak is planning to install some twenty to twenty five machines in 2015, compared to 39 over the last four years. That is progress, but probably does not help move the needle that much short term. Management emphasized the opportunity to install Prosper heads on existing offset presses and noted that of the roughly 70 trillion pages printed per year globally 69 trillion were still printed offset. Being a little careful on global statistics in this industry, I can only hope that somebody double checked that number ;-)
The continued delays in getting the growth businesses to take off resulted in further negative cash flow, apparently including some customer financing to jump start growth.
All in all cash has gone down from $844 million after emerging from bankruptcy to $521 million at the end of September.
New Prosper 6000 machines average about $3.5 million in sales value and currently still generate a loss, but it supposedly is still a great business because of about $1 million in annual ink and services provided by Kodak. While I have always been impressed by Kodak's Stream technology, one has to ask if this cost model will really allow Kodak to convert many of the "old iron" sheetfed and web presses to digital, or if printers will invest only when they need to print variable data. For most printers cost per copy is still the magic word. Let's also not forget that these machines fit somewhere in between sheetfed and web when it comes to plain productivity, so the real addressable market for this remarkable technology may be smaller than hoped for.
In terms of complete systems Kodak is planning to install some twenty to twenty five machines in 2015, compared to 39 over the last four years. That is progress, but probably does not help move the needle that much short term. Management emphasized the opportunity to install Prosper heads on existing offset presses and noted that of the roughly 70 trillion pages printed per year globally 69 trillion were still printed offset. Being a little careful on global statistics in this industry, I can only hope that somebody double checked that number ;-)
The continued delays in getting the growth businesses to take off resulted in further negative cash flow, apparently including some customer financing to jump start growth.
All in all cash has gone down from $844 million after emerging from bankruptcy to $521 million at the end of September.
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