Despite the challenge of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Kodak CEO Antonio Perez painted a fairly bright picture of the legendary Rochester, NY-based company's future, in an exclusive interview with PrintWeek ahead of GraphExpo.

In a wide-ranging interview, Perez opined that much of what Kodak has gone through over the past few years has all been part of a painful but necessary transition from a consumer-facing to a B2B company.

Perez stressed that the sale of many of Kodak’s digital imaging patents had not been put on hold - despite reports to the contrary - but remained a complex, ongoing process in which the company is still making progress. He added that plans to sell Kodak’s personalized and document imaging businesses would go through only if the company can get the right price.

"We're trying to get the best possible deal for the IP - we could sell the IP very quickly but by waiting a little longer we’re trying to get the best possible deal," he said. "We put those two businesses for sale and with both those and the IP we can wait and if we don’t sell them we’ll do something else."

Chapter 11

Perez suggested many in the media and the investor community misread January's Chapter 11 filing as a sign of Kodak’s imminent demise, when in fact it was a deliberate step to address specific issues facing the company.

"The reason why we decided to file for Chapter 11 in the US was to meet four pretty clear objectives," he said. "Number one was to bolster our liquidity in the US. Most of our R&D is in the US and most of the overhead is in the US, but the majority of our sales are outside the US. So we don’t make money in the US, we make money outside the US and this is the nature of the architecture of this business."

The second objective was to facilitate Kodak’s shift from a B2C to a B2B company. "We used to be fundamentally a B2C company but we realized that the technologies that we had...drove us to markets that were sustainable, large and growing, but were B2B markets," he said. "So Chapter 11 allows you to shut down some businesses and focus on other businesses at the lowest possible cost.

The third objective was monetize Kodak's non-strategic IP portfolio. "If we’re not going to be a B2C company then consumer digital was not in our interest and we could sell those patents and get cash for the company that would be very useful for us," Perez explained, although this objective would appear to have proved more difficult than originally envisaged.