一年入账72.8亿 破产巨头“起死回生”

This article examines how Kodak, the once-bankrupt film giant, has revived its business through brand licensing. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Core performance metrics: In 2025, Kodak posted total annual revenue of approximately 7.28 billion RMB. Its brand licensing division generated around 157 million RMB in revenue, delivering 136 million RMB in operating profit. As Kodak's highest-margin business, it achieves nearly zero-cost profitability.

2. Operational strategy: Kodak fully licensed its apparel division to South Korea's Highlight Brands, collecting only licensing fees and avoiding responsibility for production and inventory. The line incorporates Kodak's iconic vintage film aesthetic into designs, and has collaborated with Pop Mart's Hirono IP on a limited collection. Resale prices for the limited-edition collab hanging cards have surged to over 800 RMB on the secondary market, successfully capturing the attention of young consumers.

3. Existing shortcomings: Kodak Apparel currently faces challenges including a high average order value, overly simple designs that risk aesthetic fatigue, and low public awareness due to low-key marketing.

This article shares actionable insights for traditional legacy brands pursuing transformation and brand licensing operations. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. A proven successful model: Following bankruptcy, Kodak pivoted to a light-asset brand licensing model, awarding category-specific usage rights to specialist operators in each sector. It avoids production and inventory risk, collecting only licensing fees – a structure that delivers extremely high profit margins. In 2025, the licensing business, which accounted for just 2.2% of total revenue, contributed a disproportionate share of total profit.

2. Brand marketing strategy: Kodak capitalized on the current retro trend and young consumers' willingness to pay for emotional resonance, translating its vintage brand heritage into design language. It has collaborated with popular trendy toy IPs and opened stores in youth-focused fashion districts, successfully building a connection with Gen Z consumers.

3. Key risks to avoid: Brands should avoid arbitrary licensing that dilutes brand equity, and steer clear of common pitfalls including overpricing, design homogenization, and insufficient marketing investment, to strike a balance between brand monetization and brand value preservation.

Kodak's transformation offers actionable opportunity insights and risk warnings for sellers of trend-driven products. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Untapped market opportunities: The ongoing revival of vintage film culture has led young consumers to eagerly pay for nostalgic sentiment and collaborations with classic IPs. Kodak's collaboration with Pop Mart's Hirono saw secondary market prices surge over 200%, creating profitable upside for sellers in both IP-collaborated product sales and secondary market trading.

2. A adoptable business model: The light-asset brand licensing model allows sellers to secure brand usage rights from legacy IPs, leaving product development to specialized teams while focusing on their core operational strengths. This structure eliminates the burden of high production and inventory costs, reducing transformation risk.

3. Critical risk warnings: Sellers must control product pricing – Kodak Apparel's high price point has eroded its competitiveness in the mass market. Design should go beyond simple logo printing, integrating authentic brand culture to build differentiation. Sellers should also prioritize digital marketing to avoid leaving valuable growth opportunities on the table due to insufficient exposure.

Kodak's brand licensing transformation opens new business opportunities and transformation insights for factories. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Evolving product requirements: As licensing operators work to revitalize classic IPs, they now demand stronger design capabilities from manufacturers. Products can no longer rely on simple logo branding; factories must help translate a brand's original cultural heritage into on-trend design language, creating products aligned with current fashion trends. This shift benefits factories with strong in-house design capacity.

2. New business opportunities: A growing number of bankrupt legacy brands are pursuing brand licensing transformation, with third-party operators handling all front-end operations and outsourcing manufacturing. This creates a stable stream of orders for factories, particularly apparel and cultural goods manufacturers that can tap into these IP projects to drive new growth.

3. Transformation insights: Factories can also partner with underutilized classic IPs to launch differentiated products that avoid cutthroat price competition in homogeneous markets. That said, they must control production costs to remain competitive on pricing, and gradually transition to flexible production to meet the demand for small-batch, multi-style trend-driven products.

Kodak's transformation provides insights into industry trends and strategic directions for IP operations and brand service providers. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. New industry growth trends: Many century-old legacy brands that have emerged from bankruptcy restructuring are looking to unlock their brand value and monetize through light-asset models. The trend-driven revitalization of classic IPs has emerged as a new industry growth engine, driving sustained increases in demand for professional third-party services.

2. Core client pain points: Most classic legacy brands lack in-house capabilities to execute trend-driven repositioning. Pursuing heavy-asset transformation on their own carries high risk, while unregulated licensing risks diluting brand equity. These brands lack a clear path to reconnect with Gen Z consumers, creating demand for full-stack professional solutions from specialist service providers.

3. A actionable service model: Service providers can build full-stack IP operation services to help classic legacy brands execute light-asset licensing, hand off category operations to specialist teams, extract core brand cultural elements for product design, and collaborate with high-profile contemporary IPs to capture young consumers' emotional demand. This model delivers both brand revitalization and monetization for IP owners, while opening new growth avenues for service providers.

Kodak Apparel's market expansion offers valuable insights for the leasing and operations of offline shopping districts and e-commerce platforms. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. New sourcing opportunities: Trendy brands built on revitalized classic IPs already come with built-in nostalgic appeal that resonates strongly with young consumers. Kodak has already entered the Chinese market with offline stores and pop-ups, and is expanding its online presence. Platforms can attract these inherently traffic-driving brands to grow their own user base.

2. Optimized operational direction: Since the core customer base of these brands is Gen Z, platforms can help connect them with local popular trendy toy IPs, access digital traffic resources, and launch co-branded marketing campaigns. This solves the original pain points of low marketing activity and low public awareness, helping the brands break into the mainstream.

3. Key risk mitigation: After onboarding these brands, platforms should guide them to optimize their product mix, adjust price tiers to reach a broader consumer base, and refine designs to avoid homogeneous aesthetic fatigue. This improves the brands' market competitiveness while protecting the platform's own operational efficiency.

Kodak's journey from bankruptcy to revitalization through brand licensing offers a defining case study for research on traditional industry transformation. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. New industry directional shift: Legacy brands in declining traditional industries are no longer pursuing a return to their former large-scale operations. Instead, they are exploring small, profitable light-asset transformation paths, monetizing their century-old brand equity through licensing, and reconnecting with younger consumers by aligning with current trends. This has emerged as a new mainstream transformation direction for traditional legacy brands.

2. Business model innovation: The light-asset brand licensing model eliminates exposure to production and inventory risk, and delivers far higher margins than traditional physical business. It not only enables ongoing monetization of brand value, but also maintains consistent brand exposure that in turn drives growth in the brand's original traditional business. For example, Kodak Apparel's rise has coincided with the broader revival of analog film, strengthening Kodak's position in the original film market.

3. New avenues for future research: The model currently faces ongoing challenges including overpricing, design homogenization, and insufficient marketing. How to balance brand monetization and brand value protection, and avoid diluting core brand equity, remains an important open question for future industrial research.