Fujifilm Holdings Corp. may get snubbed by cross-town rival Olympus Corp. in its attempt to move further away from the photographic film business that dragged down industry pioneer Eastman Kodak Co.
"We aren't too optimistic" that Olympus will welcome a takeover approach or collaboration, CEO Shigetaka Komori said in a recent interview at Fujifilm's Tokyo headquarters. "Olympus will most likely want to run the business by itself."
The two companies together would control about 85 percent of the global market for the tiny cameras that doctors use to peer inside patient's bodies, according to Komori. The 72-year-old CEO wants to add Olympus — which lost more than half its market value last year amid an accounting scandal — to the ¥650 billion Fujifilm spent on takeovers in the past decade to buffer it from a collapse in color film demand that pushed Kodak to the brink of bankruptcy last month.