Short answer: probably not. But there's opportunity there, too, at least for a clever company that's mostly about imaging.
First, the news: Kodak shares dropped precipitously on Friday after news that the company was drawing down a substantive portion of its available credit line. This was taken as a sign that cash flow may still be a problem at the company, which had almost US$1 billion in cash at the start of the summer (though that was down by over a half billion dollars from the start of the year). At Friday's close of US$0.78 a share, the market cap on Kodak approached US$200 million dollars, a fairly pitiful sum for the former giant, and a very small amount for a company producing US$7 billion in sales a year. (This morning shares are back up just above US$1 a share, but the market cap is still very low.)
So put a nice premium on that and for almost US$500 million what would you get? Well, a patent portfolio that supposedly is pulling in about that much a year and worth as much as US$3 billion according to some, for one. A digital camera division that's weaker than I was as a 90-pound teen. Some interesting Flip-like video cameras that used to sell well. A group producing digital picture frames. A line of consumer all-in-one printers. The Easyshare software solution, plus Kodak Gallery print services. A professional and business-oriented group that produces printers, high-end document and printing solutions, motion picture film, and the remaining film and developing goodies. Plus a lot of miscellaneous stuff, including sensor design and digital R&D groups, plus products such as branded memory cards and batteries.
How well do those things fit with Nikon? Pretty well, actually. The low-end digital cameras basically overlap with Coolpix, so you would mostly jettison that business, cannibalizing only those things that would help Coolpix long term. The Easyshare/Gallery stuff would need to be integrated with myPicturetown (or rather myPicturetown should be subsumed by Easyshare/Gallery ;~). Nikon doesn't have printers, nor commercial document groups, yet they compete against companies that do, so this business would be an interesting expansion (and the consumer printer group is one of the few areas of strong growth within Kodak). Basically, it's hard to find something within Kodak that wouldn't fit well with or supplement Nikon's current imaging division. Buying Kodak would significantly bolster Nikon's intellectual property, move it strongly into the image output business (printing, display, sharing), provide it a great deal of additional people, property, and products to cherry pick from, and basically give Nikon an even stronger focus on imaging than it already has.
Of course, Kodak's last reported quarterly numbers were sales of US$1.5 billion with a loss of US$179 million, and everyone is now expected the quarterly numbers to be announced later this month to indicate things have gotten worse (or why else would they need a large cash infusion?). So there's a high likelihood that a lot of painful choices would have to be made, and fast. Spin out the film and high-end document businesses, for example. Kill most of the existing camera products and make the rest Coolpix. Downsize Rochester until it barely shows up on a map, basically.
The reason why Nikon probably wouldn't buy Kodak has nothing to do with what I've written so far, though. The simple problem is that Nikon isn't an overly acquisitive company, and I doubt that it has the management skills necessary to take on such a huge reclamation project and make it work. Basically, they couldn't pull all the decisions out of Rochester to Tokyo quick enough and make that work. They might actually slow the decisions that Kodak needs to make to survive at all. Someone else would need to come in and prepackage the deal and all the sub-decisions for Nikon, I'd think, and that's not going to happen.
On the other hand, opportunities like the one that Kodak now represents don't happen very often. And many more months of driving the Kodak plane towards the ground will result in it completely crashing and leaving only embers to pick up. It's like watching a car wreck in progress right now. We can't take our eyes off it, but we don't want to see it.
So what's Kodak's own plan? It appears that Kodak wants to sell off the digital camera patents for a huge sum (more than the market cap of the company) to raise short term cash. Then they want to use that cash to keep the printing and document businesses growing. The film and digital camera businesses are barely profitable and are being managed for end of life, as far as I can see.
Frankly, Kodak's survival strategy is not one I'd endorse. Essentially they're trying to make a strong brand mean something different than it used to. Might as well start another company if that's what you want to do, as then you don't have to bring along any baggage.