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Fuji has also conducted a textbook brand-building campaign designed to raise its awareness among consumers and retailers. For instance, the company sponsored soccer's World Cup, which is beamed to hundreds of millions. At this year's U.S. Open, a Fuji blimp ceaselessly circled the Arthur Ashe Stadium. At the same time, the company has cut deals with retailers to gain shelf space and displays. There's no question about quality: both companies make excellent products. But given comparable quality, the price gap between the two becomes telling.
Losing isn't supposed to happen under the charismatic Fisher, 56, a native of Anna, Ill., who holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University and is one of corporate America's highest-profile executives. For leading once sleepy Motorola into the digital age, Fisher is on the short list for many high-profile ceo jobs that become available. He spurned an offer to head IBM before Louis Gerstner took that turnaround job in 1993. More recently, Fisher was widely viewed as a possible successor to AT&T chairman Robert Allen. Perhaps partly to scotch speculation that he might be leaving, Fisher agreed to lead Kodak until December 2000 and was rewarded with options to buy 2 million shares at an exercise price of some $90 per share--now far under water. "My job here is only half done," he acknowledges.
Fisher has had plenty to brag about since his arrival. He shook up Kodak with rigorous pay-for-performance standards and refocused the company by selling off ill-advised acquisitions like drugmaker Sterling Winthrop, thereby cutting Kodak's $8 billion debt burden to a comfortable $1 billion. At the same time, he has greatly accelerated Kodak's once sluggish product-development cycles. "There is no self-doubt as to where the opportunities lie," says company president Daniel Carp, a 27-year Kodak veteran and Fisher's presumed heir. Nor, Carp adds, is there any lack of confidence in Kodak's ability to cash in on those opportunities or to meet Fisher's goal of increasing the company's per share profits an average of 10% annually.
Yet Kodak's bets on the future have so far brought more problems than profits. After investing billions of dollars to create the industry's most extensive line of digital cameras, Kodak could pile up losses of more than $100 million this year, and some analysts doubt that the effort will ever pay off. The devices (price range: $200 to $900) record images on microchips for computer users. But the field is already glutted with dozens of rivals, from traditional camera makers such as Canon and Nikon to Silicon Valley giants like Hewlett-Packard. Fisher counters that naysayers saw few profits in the 1980s in the business of cellular phones and pagers, which have grown into two of Motorola's most lucrative products. Says he of his record for confounding such doubters: "Been there. Done that."