Word: kodaking
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...business and legal communities were astonished in January when a federal jury of two men and eight women found Eastman Kodak Co. guilty of monopolistic practices in a case brought by New York-based Berkey Photo, Inc., a relatively small competitor. When the same jury last week fixed the penalty, the reaction was genuine shock. Kodak, said the jurors, should pay Berkey $37.6 million in damages-and that was just the beginning. Because standard procedure is to triple damages for violation of antitrust law, the court is expected to raise the award to $112.8 million, one of the largest judgments...
Most of that competition, however, is coming from foreign companies. In the U.S., only Polaroid, with its instant cameras and film, remains a strong competitor of Kodak's in the amateur camera and film market. GAF abandoned that business last year because, said Chairman Jesse Werner, "it has become impossible to compete." Bell & Howell, which reached an out-of-court settlement of an antimonopoly suit against Kodak, has incurred losses in its consumer photo business since 1974 and has joined forces with two Japanese firms to market their products...
Legal echoes of its competitive battles will keep Kodak tied up in court for years, whatever the final Berkey verdict. GAF has filed an antitrust suit asking the courts to splinter Kodak into no fewer than ten separate businesses. Pavelle, a tiny New Jersey firm that sank into bankruptcy in 1975, has brought suit asking, among other things, that the trademark "Kodak" be as freely available to the public as the term aspirin. Polaroid has also sued, contending that Kodak's instant cameras and print film infringed on Polaroid patents. Most ominous of all, the Department of Justice...
Nobody on Wall Street is confident enough to assess the long-term legal dangers to Kodak. But the company's stock has been sliding since 1973, when it reached an alltime high of 151%. Last week, in heavy trading after the Berkey verdict, it dropped more than 3 points, to a close...
That seems a rather drastic devaluation. Kodak, which has spent more than $2 billion on research and development during the past decade, is still a prime moneymaker. In the first nine months of 1977 it earned profits of $417.3 million, down slightly from $429 million a year earlier, but Kodak's pretax operating profit is a lofty 26? of each sales dollar...