Nakamura Yoshisada had spent most of his career at Fujifilm developing film. Then the company put him on cosmetics. At first, according to a 2013 profile on Nippon.com, he was at a loss.
The company had been called Fuji Photo Film until 2006, and the name told you where the money came from. By The Economist’s count, film made up 60 percent of Fujifilm’s profits in 2000. Then digital cameras arrived, and demand for film fell drastically.
Fujifilm had seen the omens as early as the 1980s, The Economist wrote. Inside the company, the men in the consumer film business at first prevailed. The eventual winner was Shigetaka Komori, named boss in stages between 2000 and 2003, who chided them as “lazy” and “irresponsible” for not preparing better for digital.
In April 2006 Fujifilm opened a new research center, the Advanced Research Laboratories. That year it entered the cosmetics field, and in 2007 it launched a skin care line called Astalift.
The line came straight out of the film factory. Collagen, Nippon.com reported, accounts for about half of the materials in photographic film, and it is also a main component of skin. Making film meant spreading more than 100 kinds of fine particles, such as those that sense light and produce color, through 16 to 20 collagen-based layers. In Fujifilm’s own technical presentation, the whole stack was about 20 micrometers thick, each layer about 1.2 micrometers. And to keep printed photographs from fading, Fujifilm had done extensive research on stopping oxidation by ultraviolet rays. That work led it to astaxanthin, a natural antioxidant. The same oxidation that fades a color photograph, as Nippon.com put it, also ages skin.
Astaxanthin was hard to use in a cream: it doesn’t dissolve readily in water. The fix came from film again: the nano-level emulsifying and dispersing technology made it possible to keep the astaxanthin stable. According to The Economist, some 4,000 of the 200,000 chemical compounds in Fujifilm’s library were related to antioxidants.
Nakamura found he could draw on his old research after all. “We spent many years pursuing beautiful skin in our film imaging business,” he told Nippon.com, “and our accumulated technologies and perspective came in handy in our cosmetics efforts, too.” He summed up the company’s approach in one line: “Businesses have life-spans, technology does not.”
Face cream was one move among several. Fujifilm had put $4 billion since 2000 into optical films for LCD flat-panel screens, The Economist reported, and Nippon.com listed supplements and pharmaceuticals among its new fields.
In January 2012, The Economist put Fujifilm’s market value at some $12.6 billion. Kodak’s was $220 million. Five days after that issue, on January 19, Eastman Kodak filed for Chapter 11.