ROCHESTER, NY — Eastman Kodak Company (www.kodak.com) announced that it and its US subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for chapter 11 business reorganization in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The business reorganization is intended to bolster liquidity in the US and abroad, monetize non-strategic intellectual property, fairly resolve legacy liabilities, and enable the company to focus on its most valuable business lines. The company has made pioneering investments in digital and materials deposition technologies in recent years, generating approximately 75 percent of its revenue from digital businesses in 2011.
Kodak has obtained a fully-committed, $950 million debtor-in-possession credit facility with an 18-month maturity from Citigroup to enhance liquidity and working capital. “Kodak is taking a significant step toward enabling our enterprise to complete its transformation,” says Antonio M. Perez, chairman and CEO. “At the same time as we have created our digital business, we have also already effectively exited certain traditional operations, closing 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs, and reducing our workforce by 47,000 since 2003. Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core IP assets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company.
“Chapter 11 gives us the best opportunities to maximize the value in two critical parts of our technology portfolio: our digital capture patents, which are essential for a wide range of mobile and other consumer electronic devices that capture digital images and have generated over $3 billion of licensing revenues since 2003; and our breakthrough printing and deposition technologies, which give Kodak a competitive advantage in our growing digital businesses.”