By the numbers:
$800 million: Cash Kodak has on leaving bankruptcy.
$100 billion: Value of commercial printing produced by Kodak customers worldwide.
40 billion: Number of pages printed on Kodak Prosper printing systems since 2011.
$2.7 billion: Kodak’s revenue in 2012.
12,000: Number of Kodak digital printing devices installed worldwide.
8,500: Number of Kodak employees worldwide.
450: Number of Kodak employees in Kettering.
Photo gallery: Check out our photos of the Kodak facility at MyDaytonDailyNews.com.
KETTERING — Kodak emerged last week from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection intent on grabbing a greater share of the more than 60 trillon pages printed every year.
To win that business, the iconic company will rely heavily on its commercial inkjet printing operations at the Miami Valley Research Park along Research Boulevard on the eastern edge of Kettering.
Chapter 11 was harrowing. Kodak, based in Rochester, N.Y., closed 13 factories, 130 film-processing labs and cut 50,000 employees at a cost of $3.4 billion.
But the Kettering site grew in importance. There, Kodak bases its commercial digital inkjet design, production and maintenance operations, which are key to the company’s pursuit of markets worth a combined $730 billion — graphic communication, goods packaging and functional (tablet and smart phone) printing.
The 450 employees in Kettering have expertise in nearly all engineering disciplines, chemistry, high-skills manufacturing, materials sciences, human resources and nearly all the jobs are high-paying, officials said.
Only days out of Chapter 11, company leaders declined to offer expected job-growth numbers, but Kodak spokesman Christopher Veronda said the company looks for “double-digit” growth in the markets it has targeted.
Kodak’s “Prosper” inkjet printing system is a “breakthrough technology,” Veronda said. With it, Kodak customers can customize printed products for customers and print those products at 3,600 pages a minute.
“You can print a book in 20 seconds,” said Randy Vandagriff, Kodak vice president, digital printing & enterprise, who oversees Kodak’s work in Kettering.
That means, for example, a book can be printed minutes after a customer orders it on Amazon, Vandagriff said. Some 30 to 40 percent of books go unsold and stored — or thrown out, he said. That doesn’t have to happen, he said.
“You print hundreds of (books), put them in a warehouse and hope people buy them,” Vandagriff said.
Prosper’s flexibility can let college texts be tailored to students at Wright State University or the University of Dayton, Kodak officials said. Newspapers or magazines can have editions tailored to readers in different locales.
With Prosper, supply chains for print can be immediate and direct, according to the system’s champions.
“Nobody else has technology like this,” Veronda said.
Many of the components of the world’s fastest digital printers are made in Kettering.
Kettering is Kodak’s second largest concentration of employees and technology outside the Rochester headquarters. But the Ohio and New York sites assist and boost each other, Veronda said. Vandagriff has an office in Rochester and has employees reporting to him from Kettering, Rochester and even Israel.
“There’s important work going on in (Kettering) and also back in Rochester,” Veronda said. “It’s complementary.”
“There’s a lot of sharing that goes on.” Vandagriff said.
“If they want to do digital printing, we want them to use our technology,” Vandagriff said.
Gregg Gorsuch, Kettering development director, said he couldn’t quantify Kodak’s economic impact on the city. But he believes the company’s future will be bright and he said Kodak did a good job of keeping the city updated as it navigated bankruptcy.
“I still think Kodak will be a household name,” Gorsuch said. “There is some prestige” attached to having Kodak in Kettering.
A Wright State graduate, Vandagriff himself has worked for the operation for 31 years, through its incarnations as Mead Digital Systems, Eastman Kodak-Diconix in 1983, Scitex Digital Printing, Eastman Kodak (again) in 2002, Kodak Versamark and today, a site fully integrated into the new Kodak.
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