Kodak focuses on Asian market MR FISHER: It has been one year now this month since I joined Kodak. I was very optimistic when I joined, and I'm even more optimistic now.

We will have our financial house in very good order by the end of this year. We will have reduced our debt, but more importantly we will have tactical and strategic flexibility financially to really go after imaging.

Ultimately, though, the key to Kodak's future success has to be growth in new markets such as China, Indonesia, India and Brazil.

Take China for example with 1.2 billion people. If we as an industry, not just Kodak, could get the picture taking up [in China] to the levels of Taiwan, you could increase the number of exposures in the world by 50 per cent. That's huge potential.

In China at the moment there are only about 100 million rolls of film sold a year, which is about one-tenth of the current United States market.

I took Motorola from a position of non-existence in the Chinese market to where it is probably the most successful company of all the companies in the world by selling cellular phones, which are expensive, and pagers, which are more expensive than a camera. So the money is there.

The Post: Kodak has provided the chip for the Apple QuickTake 100, the News Camera 2000, and your own digital cameras, including the new DCS 420. You're developing a multimedia software product in Portfolio CD. Other products you have are, among others, Photo CD and Pro Photo CD. What's happening? Mr Fisher: We will pursue all aspects of digital photography and digital imaging, the computer side as well as the photography side. We will emphasise equipment manufacture more than we have in the past - that's scanners, printers, digital cameras and communication devices.

I think I understand better than most what the prospects for semiconductor technology are and it is still going to be a long time before there are cost-effective electronics means of capturing the high-resolution provided by silver-halide film. Most of the computer world believes that the next big step will be documents with high-quality images embedded in them that can be transmitted over communications networks.

The computer companies are moving to operating systems that enable a lot more high-quality, image-rich environments. There is the challenge and excitement about getting images either by scanning them or digitally capturing them so you then can transmit them on the information networks everyone is talking about. In doing so you are able to provide new types of services with image manipulation and using images in documents - what I call compound documents.

The Post: When you were running Motorola, you, with strong backing from the US Government, finally broke into the Japanese market. What's Kodak's plan for the different Asian markets? Mr Fisher: The fact of the matter was that in the late 1970s Motorola was not allowed to offer even a pager in the Japanese market because all pagers went through NTT.

So we did get the US Government and the Japanese Government to co-operate to allow us to at least submit a product. In the end we not only submitted a product that was able to compete and meet the reliability levels, but we quickly became the number one provider of pagers in Japan over three years.

For Kodak, we don't have the same situation, but we have some parallels. And we will be very aggressive in Japan.

The Post: And for China? Mr Fisher: Certainly the government in China plays such a big role in any business transaction that unless you work effectively with the government, and unless you can demonstrate to the government that what you are doing is not just taking advantage of the market but helping the country grow - especially in a technology sense - then you are not going to do very well in China.

But in China, currently for Kodak, it is not that trade barrier issue but more identifying the ways we can serve the customers there - and the government is a big part of working that out.

The Post: And for Hong Kong? Mr Fisher: I'm including Hong Kong when I talk about China. I really talk about China as Greater China, which is Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. I've just assigned one of our three executive vice-presidents the job of developing an overall Greater China strategy - because you cannot think of one of these countries, in particular Hong Kong and People's Republic of China, without the other.

The Post: Do you believe that Fuji has the jump on you in this part of the world? Mr Fisher: In some countries, yes, and in other countries we have a surprisingly dominant position, we have done very well. But in other countries I think it is our fault more than anyone's. Fuji is a good company, does a good job, is very aggressive and has a good product. They are very good, we just have to be better.

The Post: How important is the Australian operation to your regional plans? Mr Fisher: They are exporting a lot of product and they are producing very high-quality product. Kodak Australasia is doing well.

The Post: What can we expect from Kodak in the Asian countries? Mr Fisher: I think we are already here. Look at China; Kodak has been in China since 1921. We have a great name virtually everywhere we go but we haven't been aggressive enough.

We really haven't looked at how we can serve those customers better than our competitors, largely because we have been looking at it too much in American terms and not enough in local terms.

So I think what you're going to see more is more tailoring to particular cultures, offering different products based on culture.