bob fowler Posted February 21, 2005 Share Posted February 21, 2005 <a href="http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/business/general/s/146/146929_ 300_jobs_saved_at_photo_firm.html">Some really good news</a>. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todd_schoenbaum Posted February 21, 2005 Share Posted February 21, 2005 sweet... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris_waller Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 Praise the Lord! At last Ilford is back in the hands of people who know and care about photography. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_medeiros Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 I am very glad to hear this. Long may there be a place for traditional black and white! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris_waller Posted February 25, 2005 Share Posted February 25, 2005 Ilford's previous owners didn't understand the market they were in. They were still thinking in 20th century ideas - dozens of markets of millions of customers. When that stopped working they tried old approaches to fixing it and we all know the result. The twenty-first century is becoming a world of millions of markets of dozens of customers. The monochrome photography market is one such. If the new management play it right they could become once again the dominant player based on their record of innovation, quality and sponsorship of b+w photography. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robin_barnes Posted February 25, 2005 Share Posted February 25, 2005 This is indeed good news and we must hope that the management who will now own the company have what it takes to ensure its long term survival. However it seems to me that for this it will need to be involved in producing digital products (i.e.inkjet papers etc) as well as conventional photographic ones. The worrying aspect of the buyout is that it only involves the UK based film and paper business not the digital materials division which is located in Switzerland the future of which is still to be determined. The latter is trading profitably and may well be sold to a rival company. Ilford has had a history of being passed around from one parent company to another which cannot have been good for it. It was independent until 1969 when it was taken over by the UK chemical company ICI who later sold a 40% stake to Ciba of Switzerland (this is how Ilford gained Cibachrome and manufacturing facilities in Switzerland). Later Ciba bought the rest of the company only to sell it a some years later to a US company (International Paper I think). Finally 3 or 4 years ago it was bought by the private equity group Doughty Hanson. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
curt_sampson1 Posted February 25, 2005 Share Posted February 25, 2005 I'm not sure that producing digital products would be a good idea at all. It's certainly a distraction from what I would hope would be the company's main focus, and a more profitable distraction is likely to kill the less popular products. I think that Ilford can do fine if it settles down into being a small company than it has been, serving a small core of users that are going to be sticking to black and white for a long time to come. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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