U.K.柯达养老金计划振兴了柯达的美国成像企业

In the 1880s, when George Eastman was developing his fledgling film company, he wanted a name that was short, easy to pronounce and unique. Kodak, the brand that would become synonymous with photography, was born from Eastman playing anagram games with his mother and his insistence that the name start with the explosive sound of the letterk。Now,121 years after the founding of the Rochester, New York–based Eastman Kodak Co。那two key divisions of its business have emerged from the company’s 2012 bankruptcy into a new concern called柯达alaris.那itself a made-up name meant to represent speed and agility and sound like nothing else previously in existence.

Following Eastman Kodak’s emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, what remains of the iconic film and imaging company is a piecemeal collection of businesses and patent portfolios split between Kodak and Kodak Alaris. The latter is completely separate from the original Eastman Kodak and comprises its document imaging business (scanners, software and service) and its personalized imaging business (photo paper, film, single-use cameras and photo kiosks). The full owner of Kodak Alaris is yet another collective: a holding company controlled by the U.K.-based Kodak Pension Plan (KPP).

Kodak once reigned supreme in the world of photography and imaging. As of 1976, it controlled nearly 90 percent of the U.S. film market. That same year the company developed the world’s first digital camera. It rivaled the size of a toaster — although compared with the computers of the era, its construction was rather sporty. But despite having this patent in its arsenal, Kodak was reluctant to embrace digital photography during the late 1990s.

去年柯达经过2007年的利润。五年后，2012年1月19日的2008年级金融危机风化了2008年的金融危机，该公司提起破产。8月柯达公开打算销售其照片印刷亭，商业扫描仪运营和摄影电影业务，除电影电影外，随后价值为6.5亿美元。2013年1月，美国破产法院为纽约南部区批准了柯达2013年中期批准的融资计划。

KPP是柯达最大的无担保债权人，凭借28.4亿美元的界定养老金计划索赔。为了帮助偿还其债务，柯达销售了约1,100个数字专利的投资组合，期望在KPP受托人安德鲁布拉德肖的说法，为其知识产权（IP）获得了20亿英镑（32.3亿美元），他们参与了解决方案讨论与Eastman Kodak。但是，专利申请了5.77亿美元的火灾销售价格，包括一组包括在内的一组高调公司Amazon.com那Apple, BlackBerry, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. This massive funding shortfall put in peril the retirement funds of the 16,000 members of the KPP, who, if negotiations had failed, would have seen their scheme go into administration by the Pension Protection Fund (PPF), the U.K. statutory fund charged with underwriting insolventpensions。

4月的桥梁,KPP同意购买Kodak’s document and personalized imaging businesses for $325 million, at which time the pension fund agreed to drop its legal claims. “It was quite clear that Eastman Kodak didn’t have $1 billion lying around,” says Bradshaw, a director of Ross Trustees, an independent company located 25 minutes west of London that provides support services to U.K. pension schemes. “But they did have two businesses, and they needed cash.” On September 3, Eastman Kodak formally emerged from bankruptcy and the KPP-owned businesses were spun off into Kodak Alaris.

For its part, Eastman Kodak’s U.K. subsidiary, Kodak Ltd., stayed solvent and maintains its own trading operations. It was the sole sponsoring employer of the KPP and thus has legal responsibility for the pension plan. But in 2007 a retainer was put in place that ensured that Eastman Kodak would have to provide funding to keep up with the U.K. pension fund’s payment plan and ensure its funding through the end of 2014. Between 2007 and 2009 the plan’s deficit widened from £281.5 million to £607.8 million, which prompted the KPP’s trustees to push the funding requirement out to 2022. Following the postbankruptcy spin-off of Kodak Alaris, the U.K. branch of Kodak is exempt from its obligations to the U.K. pension fund.

我根据柯达Alaris-backed计划,养老金mbers are to receive 100 percent of the benefits to which they would have been entitled under the old Kodak scheme. Ninety-three percent of the fund’s pensioners voted to join the new scheme. They will not see their benefits capped, and pensions will rise to keep up with statutory increases. For some members, the benefits will exceed the amount that the PPF would have offered but may be less than what they would have received under the prebankruptcy Kodak Pension Plan. Since March 31, 2012, the plan has been closed to future accruals.

柯达·阿拉利斯代表了养老金计划资产的约30％（其其余额外的投资组合在债券中蔓延，股票那private equity, real estate andhedge funds）。根据Bradshaw的说法，2013年柯达Alaris的收入预计为13亿美元。柯达Alaris业务于2012年的收入为14亿美元，利润为1.55亿美元。来自柯达·阿拉利斯的利润和来自KPP的投资的回报将被达到一项信任，反过来又将汇款，根据成员界定的福利计划规定。U.K.的养老金监管机构已为2014年4月正式推出的新计划进行了许可。

“The U.K. Pensions Regulator forced us to do some novel thinking,” says the fund’s lead regulatory counsel, Katie Banks, of the London office of international law firm Hogan Lovells, which advised on the fund’s claim against Eastman Kodak and on the acquisition of the businesses that became Kodak Alaris. “If we hadn’t managed to create enough value on the pension fund, we would have had a deficit of £1 billion, and we would have had to come up with an even more innovative solution.”

Kodak Alaris有许可使用柯达品牌在永恒，包括某些设计，商标，贸易连衣裙和分段信件的知识产权。它将在伊斯特曼柯达开展业务的同一个30个国家保持业务，其中700名4,700名全球员工从其罗切斯特总部工作。剩下的雇员基于主要市场，包括美国柯达·阿拉里斯集团财政总监菲利普·吉布尔斯（印度）巴西，印度和俄罗斯的中国和中国和较小规模的行动。Dolores Kruchten是Kodak Alaris的文件成像业务总裁;丹尼斯奥尔布里奇抬起其个性化的成像业务。两位高管都在伊斯特曼柯达的角色谴责史蒂文罗斯，嘉宝独立主席和罗斯受托人的创始人。

The spin-off of Kodak Alaris to KPP is the latest example of how intellectual property and other corporate assets can inject funding into flagging pension plans. “These sorts of pension-funding partnerships have been around for a while now in the U.K., effectively using other assets,” says John Illsley, valuation director for Intangible Business, a London-based consulting firm that specializes in the appraisal of intangible assets.

During the past decade, major U.K. supermarket chains Sainsbury’s and Waitrose have used their real estate properties to help fund their pension schemes. This type of plan funding works largely the same way as an IP-funded scheme. The assets are transferred into a special-purpose vehicle, which then effectively leases or rents the assets back to the company, generating an income stream for the pension fund. The value of the SPV represents a plan asset that can be securitized and sold by the pension fund in the event of default.

基于U.K.基于GKN的GKN于2010年4月宣布，与其养老金计划受托人达成协议，以利用来自航空航天和汽车工程公司的五个租赁的收入，以及来自其知识产权产生的特许权限。根据GKN控股的年度报告，投影显示，超过二十多年来一年的持续超过3000万英镑的计划 - 这是一个基准，它达到了去年的基准。

TUI Travel, Europe’s largest tour operator, announced in May 2011 that it was merging four of its then six pension schemes into three defined benefit pension plans with a limited interest in a partnership that receives royalties from its Thomson and First Choice brands, which consist of package tours for European holidaymakers. The agreement was intended to cover a £431 million deficit running in the company’s pension schemes at the time. Under the partnership, the plans will receive some £16.5 million during the next 15 years to lessen their funding gap. In addition, TUI Travel has pledged up to £275 million in payments by 2026, should the pension plans still be running a deficit. “TUI really put their brands into the pension,” says Illsley, whose firm worked on the valuation for the TUI pension partnership.

Betting on a brand isn’t without risk, of course. The fate of Kodak’s U.K. pension plan is tied to some of the very same assets that put Eastman Kodak into bankruptcy almost two years ago. The question that KPP participants should be asking is, How much is Kodak Alaris’s imaging business going to be worth going forward?

柯达alaris.is looking to profit from the growth of mobile devices. ItsMy Kodak Moments appallows tablet and smartphone users to upload photos from Facebook via infrared technology to one of 105,000 locations worldwide. These include kiosks where customers can print photos, greeting cards and books on professional-grade Kodak paper. The photo-printing stations are located at several major retail chains, including drugstores dm in Germany, CVS in the U.S. and Boots in the U.K. and hypermarkets like France’s Carrefour. “We have a worldwide footprint and are the top performer in this space,” says Kodak Alaris’s Gibbons. “Other brands don’t have anywhere near the reach.”

该公司的活动成像解决方案业务为全球游乐园提供数字纪念品照片 - 柯达时刻，捕获由过山车或伴随着服装字符的儿童吹回的头发。柯伦约翰逊，首席增长官和柯达·阿拉里斯的个性化成像单位副总裁，该公司的电子影像稳定或模糊技术在全球范围内使用500多个主题公园和旅游目的地。

Kodak Alaris最近推出了两个新的成像平台，信息激活和信息洞察力，将光学字符识别（OCR）软件集成到文档扫描中，以与Microsoft SharePoint这样的协作程序一起工作或代替。该公司将大公司和当地，州和联邦政府定位为潜在客户。

柯达·阿拉利斯在美国和加拿大拥有近2,000个渠道合作伙伴，并在大约90个国家销售其产品和服务。从伊斯特曼柯达分拆之前，其主要市场仍然是美国和西欧，亚洲是扩张的目标。“显然，该业务被收购，”Gibbons说。“它以前正在运行并且仍在运行。”

柯达alaris.also inherited Eastman Kodak’s analog film and film-developing business, which, according to Johnson, is still the top performer globally in the dry-lab segment. Films and papers that were in production prior to bankruptcy are still available, although some products are available on a special-order basis only. Much of the attraction is felt by younger photographers who appreciate the tradition and decidedly retro appeal of film photography.

柯达alaris.has an interesting value proposition in developing market economies. “What you find inemerging markets这是消费者采取技术飞跃，“吉堡说。他解释说，Em-Markets消费者而不是购买电影或数码相机，而不是购买带内置相机的智能手机，说明这些市场中的照片亭的需要。

But without decades of development of analog photography, smartphone imaging would not necessarily exist. At the heart of this legacy are Kodak’s present-day pensioners. In the case of the U.K. Pension Plan, the spin-off of intellectual property to form a new business that funds the system has not only preserved the nest egg of pensioners. What they created during the span of their careers can live on and prolong not only their pensions but also the pursuit of photography itself.

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