Kodak to begin Imaging sell-off end of January

Last summer, Kodak announced it was selling its Personalized Imaging segment, which includes its film and paper divisions, after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US a year ago.

‘We have offered all of those assets for sale, including manufacturing facilities,’ said Laura G Quatela, president of Personalized Imaging, and President of Eastman Kodak Company.

The sale is one of the conditions of a deal in which Kodak secured the equivalent of around £500 million in ‘emergency funding’ from its lenders at the end of last year.

Quatela explained that Kodak wants to keep the brand ‘relevant’ on the consumer side.

‘Bidders are entitled to bid on whatever they wish. If they’d like one roll of film they can bid on that, or they can bid on the whole package.’

‘We are expecting that we will have our auction in late March and that we will be closing before the end of the first half.’

In an interview with AP, Quatela said that an auction of the company’s Document Imaging business will likely take place 3-4 weeks earlier, at the end of February.

After filing for bankruptcy protection in the US, in January 2012, Eastman Kodak announced plans to axe camera production and to stop making consumer inkjet printers.

Earlier this month, Kodak made public a ‘multi-year’ agreement it has signed with JK Imaging Ltd, a US-based company, to license the Kodak brand name for products such as digital cameras, pocket video cameras and portable projectors. The plans include an, interchangeable-lens, compact system camera – as revealed by AP at last week’s CES in Las Vegas.

Asked if Kodak has a message for customers in the UK – who may have written off Kodak after the avalanche of negative headlines last year – Quatela said: ‘We are back, strong… we have a great future.

‘We know that the brand is beloved, that’s the one thing that’s been reinforced to us over and over in the past 12 months and we intend to continue to make that brand available for consumers worldwide.’

She added: ‘We chose the Chapter 11 track – which is the emergence track, not the liquidation track – because we never intended to liquidate.’