Kodak Heads to Trade Show Anxious to Rebuild Confidence

[Anonymous]

Kodak heads to trade show anxious to rebuild customer confidence

Then a relative novice in the commercial printing world, Eastman Kodak Co. went to Drupa in 2004 to show off a range of new commercial printing products and its new Kodak Versamark brand.

In 2008, Kodak’s big focus at the massive commercial printing trade show was the unveiling of its superfast Stream inkjet printing technology.

And this May, the struggling company will be back at Drupa — held every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany — to show off its Prosper 6000XL high-speed digital printing press and its Achieve computer-to-plate printing plate-making system, and to remind the world that it still is alive.

Drupa 2012, which runs May 3 to 16, is the premier trade show in the commercial printing world, attracting hundreds of thousands of attendees from the publishing, packaging printing and commercial printing world.

“This is a selling show,” said Chris Payne, Kodak’s director of business-to-business marketing. “People come with their checkbooks.”

But with Kodak having filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Jan. 19, the company is going to Drupa with the challenge of assuaging the concerns of potential buyers.

“(Customers) are looking for assurance we’re going to be around,” Payne said. And attendance at events like Drupa “builds confidence,” he said.

Kodak increasingly is becoming a printer-centric company. It is banking on four growing lines of business, all dealing with printing, to offset the declines in its traditional, film-based business. And in 2011, its Graphic Communications Group sales were up slightly over 2010 while its film business sales and its Consumer Digital Imaging group both were down double-digit percentages.

Alongside Kodak at Drupa will be a who’s who of its competitors in the commercial printing world, including Xerox Corp., which will be demonstrating a variety of its services as well as such products as the Webster-made CiPress 500 inkjet digital printing press. Other rivals include Heidelberg, Epson, Ricoh, Canon and Fujifilm.

For each of those companies, Drupa is a major production. Kodak’s 27,000-square-foot booth — a relative pygmy compared to Hewlett-Packard Co.’s 53,000 square feet — will be filled with a slew of Kodak products, including a Prosper 6000XL, the Image Optimizer Station that lets its Prosper line print on more substrates, a Nexpress printing press to show off the printing effects and enhancements to the product line, and a Flexcel Direct System for packaging printing.

Along with the products, Kodak’s booth will host a number of live interviews, demonstrations, presentations, a working café and 200 to 300 Kodak staffers at any time, Payne said. “It’s not a small show,” he said.

Drupa comes even as Kodak has been axing what it spends on promotion in many other areas, such as ending its sponsorship of Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre and seeking court approval to end its sponsorship of professional golf’s PGA Tour.

While bankruptcy means that Kodak must get court approval for much of its spending beforehand, spending for attending a trade show like Drupa generally falls outside that, as companies in Chapter 11 are given flexibility to do what is considered a continuation of their existing, normal business, said Steve R. Jakubowski, a partner at Chicago law firm Levenfeld Pearlstein LLC and author of The Bankruptcy Litigation Blog.

And Chapter 11 didn’t change Kodak’s Drupa plans in terms of products or scope of its presence there, Payne said. “We’re going with the same plan we had before Chapter 11,” he said.

[Author]

March 13, 2012 at 9:20 AM