Mafud jousts:: > How then, did FUJI become so well known so > quickly? The same way Japanese products, especially automobiles, took over so > many markets. Not with shoddy products but with government subsidies.
They didn't even have to do that. What Fuji did was to come into a market that Kodak owned and served with both high-profit and low-profit goods and services, and compete intensely with them *only* in the high profit products. They skimmed the cream off the milk and nothing else. If you look at a Kodak catalog circa 1965 and compare the range of types of photographic products offered to the sum total of all the types of photographic products Fuji has EVER offered, the strategy becomes clear. Kodak previously used profits from high-profit items to subsidize many low-and no-profit items. Before Fuji arrived, Kodak made some 70-80% of its profits on only two classes of products--consumer color negative film and long rolls of color paper used in automated processing machines. But they used the profits from these to subsidize essentially every product and service they could think of that photographers might need, from darkroom products to esoteric duplicating films to educational books to you name it. Fuji came in and targeted ONLY color films of all types and color paper long rolls. It competed fiercely. This threw Kodak into disarray, because it had to slowly and painfully abandon its old strategy and get cutthroat with the high-profit items in order to compete. Since Fuji's arrival, Kodak is, from the perspective of the photographer at least, a ghost of its former self. It has divested itself of many low-profit operations and jettisoned literally hundreds of types of products and services. It has had to. Fuji saw to it. > The operative word for nearly > all Japanese penetration of world markets being niche. Yeah, like TVs, consumer electronics, automobiles--niches like that. <Very Big G> > Once a year, when the entire KODAK imaging catalog is released, I am > thunderstruck by the depth and breadth of KODAK's photographic film > offerings. From tiny consumer APS to giant ~sheets~ of special order film. > KODAK offers ~every~ imaginable film product while upstart FUJI has just > begun to penetrate medium and large format film. Actually, again, not the case. If you look at the historical record, Kodak offered relatively few general-purpose films, with relatively infrequent new product introductions, before Fuji entered the fray. By spurring competition, Fuji is in fact responsible for the explosion in the numbers and types of color emulsions that have come on to the market in the past 20-25 years, and for the fact that new films have significantly shorter product lives than in the more stately days of old. > KODAK doesn't need to be in consumer film to make it In my informed opinion, kind Sir, absolutely and utterly untrue. Consumer film is where a great deal of the money is, and essential to the vital lifeblood of Kodak as well as to Fuji. --Mike - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
