Rochester, N. Y., a city of 325,000 souls near the shores of Lake Ontario, is the fine ready-made men's clothing centre of the U. S. But the world knows Rochester as the home & factory of the late George Eastman. Ten thousand people work in Kodak Park or other local Eastman plants. One out of every six citizens is supposed to be an Eastman stockholder, and swank East Avenue, where the Best Names live, is traditionally paved with Eastman certificates.
And for those who are not connected with the $150,000,000 concern, there are the good works of its autocratic founder: Eastman School of Music and other Eastman-endowed institutions like Rochester University, the Rochester Civic Orchestra, the Dental Dispensary.
From 1926 through 1930 Eastman Kodak's profits were about $20,000,000 each & every year, and many a good citizen of Rochester received annual dividends of $8 per share—$5 regular, $3 extra. And each & every year employes were paid wage dividends, which are declared when total payments to shareholders amount to more than $3.50. But as profits dropped to a low of $6.000,000 in 1932 and recovered to only $11,000,000 in 1933, the extras were dropped, the regular rate pared to $3 and for the first time since 1912 a wage dividend was omitted. The conservative directors refused to pay dividends unless earned, although one-half of the company's assets were current.
Last summer the directors recognized recovery by boosting the dividend rate to $4. In December they voted an extra, thereby putting employes in line for a 1935 wage dividend. Last week Eastman restored the old $5 rate. Eastman has yet to report in its usual abbreviated form but shrewd estimates place 1934 profits around $14,000,000.
Eastman Kodak has no bankers. It has no big stockholders. Founder Eastman gave away all but 17,000 shares of his personal holdings before he died in 1932, and the big endowment blocks once held by institutions like Rochester University were largely liquidated during boom days when Eastman stock touched a high of $264 per share. (Its low: $35.) Yet when it comes to revealing significant facts & figures, Eastman has all the stubborn reticence of the old-line corporation that is still traveling in the lengthening shadow of its founder. In Eastman's case this reticence is partly due to embarrassment: its monopolistic position in the photographic industry.
Eastman is primarily a film manufacturer whose chief job is to make a thin, flexible, translucent nitrocellulose base and coat it with light-sensitive silver bromide. Its camera business, both still and cinematic, is something in the nature of promotion for its film trade. And Eastman is generally credited with selling to U. S. snapshotters 85% of the 80,000,000 rolls of still film they buy annually. Furthermore, Eastman sells to Hollywood perhaps two-thirds of its positive cinema film (for projection), more than one-half of its negative film (for actual photographing). Its principal competitor in the Hollywood trade is Du Pont, which in the past ten years has built up its sales to about 40% of the more profitable negative film, 20% of positive. Eastman's only full-line competitor is smallish Agfa Ansco, which is tied up with I. G. Farbenindustrie, the German chemical trust.