It was expected for months, but today it's official. Eastman Kodak, an iconic photography company founded in Rochester in 1892, just yesterday filed in a New York Chapter 11 court, the assisted bankruptcy procedure, declaring assets of 5,1 billion dollars and debt of 6,7 billion.
The activity of the company, which has closed 6 of the last 7 financial years with losses, will continue thanks protection from creditor action required by Chapter 11 ea a loan of 950 million over 18 months from Citigroup, capital that will be used to attempt a restructuring. The managing director Antonio Perez, who in seven years at the helm of the company has burnt a capital of 7 billion, declared that the one taken "is a significant step to allow us to complete our transformation" and that the hope "is to out of bankruptcy in 2013“. To do this, Kodak will have to dispose of assets and attempt to sell the approximately 1.100 patents registered to date, to bring in new liquidity.
With the "de profundis" to Kodak, the film era ends in a certain sense, while they remain the paradox of a company that has not been able to keep up with its own innovations (it was Kodak, in the mid-seventies, who invented the digital camera, without ever succeeding, afterwards, in the first person to carry out an adequate commercial exploitation of it) and a crisis whose end cannot be glimpsed and which , after cutting 13 manufacturing plants and tens of thousands of jobs from 2011 to today, he now sees at least another 9 workers at risk of being fired.
