What if you bought Kodak in 1990?
US Consumer · Cameras. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
Every dollar is gone. Kodak went bankrupt in 2012, so $1,000 invested in any of these years is worth exactly nothing today.
The story
Eastman Kodak dominated photography for a century by selling inexpensive cameras and earning its money on film, chemicals and processing, a razor-and-blades model with remarkable margins. Famously, a Kodak engineer built one of the first digital cameras in 1975. The company understood the technology; the trouble was that digital threatened the film profits that paid for everything.
Through the 1990s the shares held up, and around 2000 they still commanded a solid valuation. Then digital photography arrived in force, followed by smartphone cameras, and film sales collapsed. Kodak tried digital cameras, printers and kiosks, but these businesses earned a sliver of what film had. It cut tens of thousands of jobs, was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2004 and sold off assets, including its health imaging unit. In January 2012 it filed for bankruptcy and later sold a large portfolio of digital-imaging patents. A much smaller Kodak emerged in 2013, but the old shares were cancelled.
The lesson: Inventing the future does not help if your profits depend on the past; disruption usually wins when the old business is far more profitable than the new one.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $40.00 | $0 | $19,429 | — |
| 1995 | $47.00 | $0 | $14,783 | — |
| 2000 | $60.00 | $0 | $4,626 | — |
| 2003 | $35.00 | $0 | $7,727 | — |
| 2005 | $32.00 | $0 | $5,763 | — |
| 2007 | $26.00 | $0 | $4,789 | — |
| 2008 | $22.00 | $0 | $4,626 | — |
| 2010 | $4.00 | $0 | $6,071 | — |
| 2012 | $0.6 | $0 | $5,312 | — |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
There was no good entry point: every starting year ends at zero. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 from 1990 would be $19,429 today.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Kodak is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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