Kodak officially exits bankruptcy, emerges as a commercial printing company

As expected, former camera-making company Kodak has climbed out of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy it entered in January of 2012. In a press release, the company says it finished its restructuring today, canceling its old stock and giving creditors a new set of shares. It’s the culmination of nearly two years of planning, as Kodak steadily sold off assets and pared down its workforce to emerge as a tightly focused business that had lost its best-known segment: the consumer camera business that it started phasing out early last year. Kodak’s website appears to still be in transition, showing the image above.

Having spun off or shut down its various consumer divisions, including digital camera and printing segments, Kodak will focus instead on commercial printing for packaging and other large-scale projects. To fund this transition, it sold off a roughly half-billion dollar patent portfolio and received $844 million in financing; its billions of dollars of debt were also reduced by issuing stock at a drastically reduced dollar amount for creditors. The company has roughly stuck to its restructuring timeline — it initially planned to emerge from bankruptcy in mid-2013 — and it crossed the last major hurdle in late August, when a court approved its bankruptcy plan and expressed hopes that a formerly iconic brand would recover some of its past glory.