Kodak's CEO Leans Into Biopharma Manufacturing – "I'm An Operator"

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

Kodak – the company and Eastman Business Park in Rochester, NY. – was the focus of a recent editorial.

But the man in front of Kodak’s attempted comeback is Jim Continenza, Chairman and CEO, a topic unto himself.

Continenza is as animated as any public-company CEO you’ll encounter. And he knows his audience; he reminds us early in our recent conversation Kodak has always supplied CDMOs, for example, with important chemicals.

Today he brings to Kodak – and our biopharma manufacturing industry overall – certain  operating philosophies, and an animated articulation of manufacturing in the U.S. (covered in the first part of our conversation).

“I’m an operator,” is his pat phrase when challenged on his assumptions of Kodak’s expansion to cGMP-compliant materials for the biopharm industy.

Now, he says, “We operate our way to success.”

A 360-Degree Turnaround

Before taking the helm at Kodak, Continenza held senior management roles at a range of companies, all in the middle of navigating difficult transitions, including communications and technology firms such as STi Prepaid, Teligent, and Lucent Technologies.

He joined Kodak’s board in 2013 not long after the company emerged from bankruptcy protection; in 2019 he stepped into the executive chairman role, and assumed the CEO position in 2020.

“At the time I joined, Kodak was losing about $160 million a year,” Continenza tells me. The problem was “they could not execute their plan.”

That plan was to focus on transforming Eastman Business Park into a (huge) biopharma campus (details here).

Instead, Continenza is fixing Kodak itself.

“We’ve gutted it top to bottom,” he says. “All new systems, everything.” The restructuring includes rebuilding internal processes, refinancing debt and investing heavily in the infrastructure at Eastman Business Park – this time to directly aid Kodak manufacturing.

No easy task. “It’s taken six or seven years to do all that,” he admits.

Continenza says Kodak has poured “hundreds of millions of dollars” back into the historic Eastman Business Park – upgrading utilities, refurbishing labs, and modernizing production capabilities.

“The park is my jewel,” he says emphatically.

Indeed, at its peak, the facilities in Rochester comprised one of the largest integrated-manufacturing complexes in the United States. “It’s a city inside a city,” he says. “To build something like this today would cost billions.”

The challenge now is to profitably use all that infrastructure and get back to what Kodak was always known for, and that's manufacturing. This time with a clear focus on the biopharma industry, as a reliable supplier of starting materials, intermediates, and regulated chemicals.

A Manufacturing Mindset

“I love manufacturing,” Continenza says at one point in the conversation.

That enthusiasm shapes Kodak’s current strategy, and its management/facilities teams – five of whom joined our recent discussion. They had titles such as VP Advanced Materials and Technology Solutions and Manager, Reagent Solutions, and all enunciated a positivism regarding the direction of the company.

There’s a sense of relief and revitalization among all of them in ditching those earlier plans to serve mainly as a landlord for biopharma companies, and for returning to the development and manufacturing capabilities for which Kodak was known over a century.

Speaking to that history, Continenza says, “Film is essentially small-molecule chemistry. That’s what we’re phenomenal at.” The chemical and coating expertise that produces photographic film can support other industries – including cGMP-grade pharmaceutical reagents.

Enthusiasm, though, requires discipline.

“We will play within our niche,” he explains, meaning specialized chemical inputs and materials used by research laboratories, drug sponsors, and contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs).

“We will fill the more complicated, higher-margin specialty products in small batch,” he adds, but then profers a metaphor for large-scale manufacturing.

“You could probably cook dinner for ten people,” he said. “But could you cook dinner for a million? You wouldn’t even know where to start on the ingredients.”

Industrial manufacturers know, he says. “Kodak knows.”

Indeed, Kodak’s expertise in large-scale process engineering – today combined with extensive automation – remains a central competitive advantage.

“Everything we do is automated,” Continenza says. “So we’re not dealing with heavy labor.”

“You know what I love about tech?” he continues. “It comes to work every day and never complains.”

Until it does, some readers might be thinking, but we’ll leave that as it is.

Continenza does, though, repeatedly return to the skilled workers at Kodak. Also to operational fundamentals: manufacturing efficiency, disciplined capital allocation, and execution.

When I mentioned the difficult macro environment, Continenza says the real challenge is internal. The market – the world – will take care of itself.

Some manufacturers today, he says, highlight tariffs, industrial policy, or other external factors as key drivers. (Actually, throughout the conversation, Continenza says reshoring and “America First” trends optimally benefit Kodak and is part of the marketing strategy.)

Specifically regarding the Trump administration he says, “Kodak has to be fully self-sufficient—with or without tariffs.” Kodak’s strategy must succeed on its own operational merits."

Blue Collar For Kodak Yellow

The Financial Times once described Continenza as a “blue-collar CEO,” a leader who prefers factory floors to executive suites and maintains a hands-on approach to operations.

Now he’s at the company bathed in an iconic yellow brand, with miles of history behind it – some of great disappointment.

We did discuss his views on the Kodak brand in part one, but Continenza always returns the conversation to internal execution. Reputation can open doors; manufacturing prowess keeps them open.

Continenza, perhaps part of his proud Italian heritage, speaks dramatically about his strategy, and we might say, Kodak’s reinvention and return to fundamentals.

Raise funds, invest them in facilities, but stabilize finances through a profitable business model.

A model that leverages core chemical and manufacturing knowhow, and now offers cGMP-grade material supplies for the biopharma industry, including those CDMOs who have always been customers.

For a company that once defined an era of American manufacturing – and then nearly disappeared – that sounds like the most practical formula, led by the right leader to get it done.