AgfaPhoto

» see agfaphoto.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Agfa was the other name on the shelf. In Turkey through the nineties you bought film at the corner photo shop, and the boxes were Kodak and Fuji with Agfa sitting next to them, usually cheaper and usually German. That was the whole extent of what most people knew about the company, and it was enough. You bought a roll and shot twenty four frames badly, then paid again to find out how badly.

What most people did not know is that Agfa had been in this business since 1867, and that by 2004 the part of it making film for ordinary people had become a problem the parent company wanted gone. Agfa-Gevaert kept the medical imaging and the printing systems. It sold the consumer division, effective 2 November 2004, to a group of its own managers for 175.5 million euros.

The new company was called AgfaPhoto, based in Leverkusen, and it began with about 2900 employees, roughly 2275 of them in Germany. It also began with the film factories and with the minilab machines standing in developing shops across Europe. On paper it was a real company with a brand people trusted.

It filed for insolvency on 27 May 2005 at the district court in Cologne, six months and twenty five days after it started.

~ the chronicle ~

~ seven months ~

The arithmetic was never going to work. Consumer film volume in Europe was falling by double digits a year by 2004 and everyone at the table knew it, which is why the price was what it was. The plan was to shrink fast enough to stay ahead of the decline.

There was no time to do that. A film business is factories and chemical plants, and you cannot shrink either one inside a quarter. Cash ran out before any of the restructuring landed, and the parent company and the new owners spent years afterward suing each other over what had been promised and what had actually been handed over. Agfa-Gevaert booked a 430 million euro loss on the sale and still came out cash positive by 260 million, which tells you which side of that deal was the good one.

~ the brand without a company ~

The trademarks did not die with the factories. AgfaPhoto Holding GmbH kept them and started licensing the name out, so the logo now appears on film made by Lupus Imaging in Germany and on cheap electronics Agfa never touched. Buying an AgfaPhoto product today means buying a word.

The film had the strangest afterlife of all. AgfaPhoto Vista was for years a rebadged Fuji emulsion sold under a German name that no longer described anybody, and photographers in the UK bought it by the armful from Poundland until that supply ran out. A dead company's brand wrapped around a competitor's film, sold in a discount store for a pound. That is what a trademark is worth once the plant is gone.

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