Wall street coma use few more speed readers. Al least, that is one implication of the sharp price plunge yesterday in Polaroid's stock.
Polaroid, once rated among the hottest of glamour stocks, plunged 10⅛ points to finish at 69½. It ranked as the most active issue with a turnover of 293,100 shares.
“They're really leaning on Polaroid,” one Manhattan broker observed during the afternoon.
What he — and nearly everybody else in the financial community — failed to realize was that day‐old news, in the glossy format of the 1973 Eastman Kodak annual report, really pulled the plug on Polaroid's price. Kodak, actively moving in the other direction yesterday, yesterday, saw its stock climb 2⅛ to 110⅞.
Copies of the Kodak report were circulating in Wall Street Wednesday, but evidently few people got around to reading and deciphering a statement on Page 28, nestled in the research and development section.
What sent the Polaroid stock down — and, simultaneously, the Kodak stock up — was Kodak's apparent confirmation of its prototype system for entering the vast instant‐photography market. Actually, Kodak did not put it precisely in those words. The deciphering was done by photography analysts in the Street.
What the Kodak report stated, in the critical passage, follows:
“In the field of rapid‐access photography the basic decisions have been reached concerning the chemical and physical configurations within which Kodak products will be realized. Productive work has made feasible a film that will yield dry prints of high quality without waste, to be used in equipment priced for a wide spectrum of consumers.”
Reached in the company's headquarters at Rochester, a Kodak public relations man was asked the meaning of those two sentences. “I honestly don't know,” he replied.
The Kodak spokesman was informative on certain other points. He said that annual reports were in the process of being mailed over the next two weeks to 233,000 stockholders. The four‐color cover photograph of a father and two children on a fishing trip was shot on Kodachrome film on an f6.3 rens at 1/250th second.
On Wednesday, Polaroid's stock actually added ⅛ to close at 79⅝ on a turnover of 40,600 shares. Some peo. ple might have been swayed sufficiently by the Kodak report to send that stock ur 1½ points on Wednesday.
But the critical market judgment — what's good for Kodak is bad for Polaroid, in this case — was not made by professional investors until yesterday.
Analysts who follow Kodak closely said yesterday that they have been aware of the company's “good progress” in instant photography.
“This development takes it one step further,” an analyst said yesterday. “Kodak will have a new film and camera. Any question about its entering the instant‐picture market with a system of its own is put aside now.”
Some Wall Streeters are guessing that Kodak will have its instant‐photography products ready for the consumer market by late 1975 or early 1976.
Polaroid, of course, has made a splash with its new SX‐70 instant‐picture camera, which the company has bankrolled at a cost of several hundred million dollars.
The SX‐70, with a suggested list price of $180, carried these lines in its advertising: “Just frame, focus and touch the red electric button. Your picture emerges outside the camera, hard and dry. There is nothing to peel, nothing to throw away.”
Certain industry followers believe that Kodak's new product, once it emerges into public view, will be more of the aim‐and‐shoot type. Also, they expect it to compete not so much with the SX‐70 as with Polaroid's lowerprice lines.
“This makes it all the more important that the SX‐70 succeed for Polaroid,” remarked one Wall Streeter.
In its heyday as a glamour stock, Polaroid proved to be a spectacular winner.
As recently as 1963, it traded as low as 15, adjusted for stock splits. Later, it sold at a record price of 149½ in 1972.
An eminent, retired stockbroker recalls the company well. “I had a chance to buy Polaroid stock 25 years ago, but first checked it out with our research people,” he said. “But research had no opinion on Polaroid, so skipped it.”
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