How a Japanese film maker survived digital cameras by selling far more than film
By 2006 photographic film brought in just 3% of Fujifilm's sales, yet the company still vowed to keep making it. The firm that once fought Kodak over camera rolls now makes medical scanners, cosmetics, drug ingredients and data tapes, and in the 2020s its retro-styled digital cameras sold faster than it could build them.
Fuji Photo Film was founded in 1934 as a film-making offshoot of the chemical company Daicel. It moved into optical glass and lenses in the 1940s and in 1962 created Fuji Xerox, a joint venture with Britain's Rank Xerox. During the 1980s its digital research produced computed radiography, an X-ray technique that cut radiation exposure for patients and technicians.
At home, Fuji held a near monopoly on film, much as Kodak did in America. It pushed into the US by sponsoring the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, undercutting on price and building a local factory. Kodak complained in 1995 that unfair practices kept it out of Japan, and the case went to the World Trade Organization, which in January 1998 rejected Kodak's claims. In 1994 a Fuji vice president, Juntarō Suzuki, was killed by gangsters after announcing the company would stop paying protection money.
The digital era forced reinvention. A holding company was created in 2006, and a planned $6.1 billion takeover of Xerox in 2018 collapsed under pressure from activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason. Instead, Fujifilm bought out Xerox's 25% share of their 57-year-old venture in 2019, later renaming it Fujifilm Business Innovation. It paid $1.63 billion for Hitachi's diagnostic imaging arm and invested heavily in biologics manufacturing in Denmark. In 2020 it showed a magnetic tape cartridge able to hold up to 400TB.
Cameras made a comeback too. Demand for models such as the X100VI outstripped production, and Fujifilm's share of camera shipments among major Japanese makers nearly doubled between 2023 and 2025, climbing from 6.0% to 11.8%. With roughly 1.16 million cameras shipped that final year, it passed Nikon to take third place. Its Fujinon brand makes the world's most widely used television lenses.
Source: Fujifilm
