Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, N.Y., announces that it (and its U.S. subsidiaries) has filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 business reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The 130-year-old American blue-chip icon says it had obtained a $950 million credit facility to stay afloat while it tries to cut more than $6 billion in liabilities. The company reports that it has sufficient liquidity to operate its business during Chapter 11, and to continue the flow of goods and services to its customers in the ordinary course.

Kodak, best known as a manufacturer of cameras and photographic films, at one time had been involved with the wide-format digital printing industry. In 2001 Kodak bought pioneering printer manufacturer Encad for $25 million. The acquisition made Kodak one of the top three sellers of wide-format inkjet products at the time, and enabled it to leverage its core capabilities in water-borne inks and coated media. But its’ re-engineered Encad printer—the Encad NovaJet 1000i—never took off while outdoor durable printing technologies rose in popularity. More recently, Kodak has dipped its toe back into signage markets by offering Kodak Professional UV-Curable Display Film-Plus, a wide-format printable media for UV-curing printers.

The business reorganization is intended to bolster Kodak’s liquidity, monetize non-strategic intellectual property, resolve legacy liabilities, and enable the company to focus on its most valuable business lines.

There is an assumption that Kodak’s bankruptcy resulted from its failure to re-invent itself in the digital age. But Kodak has made sizeable investments in digital camera manufacturing and materials deposition technologies in recent years, and it claims to have generated approximately 75 percent of its revenue from digital businesses in 2011.

“Kodak is taking a significant step toward enabling our enterprise to complete its transformation,” says Kodak Chairman and CEO Antonio M. Perez. “At the same time as we have created our digital business, we have also already effectively exited certain traditional operations, closing 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs, and reducing our workforce by 47,000 since 2003. Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core IP assets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company.”

Kodak expects to complete its U.S.-based restructuring during 2013. More information about Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing is available at www.kodaktransforms.com.