Matthew Daneman

Staff writer

On one hand, the moment was fairly prosaic: Kodak Alaris Inc. finalizing much of the paperwork needed to operate as a legal entity on its own.

On the other, it was a very big deal for the company — big enough that Kodak Alaris marked it with confetti and a ribbon-cutting ceremony in China as it held a sort of coming-out party.

The United Kingdom-headquartered photo kiosk, document scanner and camera film company — carved out of Eastman Kodak Co. last year as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy — had a slew of its U.S. and U.K. executives in China last week for what it called the official launch of its China operations.

That legal paperwork is just the latest on a shrinking to-do list as the company moves toward becoming fully independent of Kodak. Kodak sold its Document Imaging and Personalized Imaging businesses in 2013 to the U.K. Kodak Pension Plan to settle a shortfall there. Alaris today employs about 700 locally and has manufacturing and R&D operations at Eastman Business Park.

But some Kodak business ties still bind.

"We still use their email (system)," Document Imaging President Dolores Kruchten said Monday. "We'll be moving off that in the next few months."

And Alaris doesn't anticipate moving off the Kodak IT system until sometime in 2015. After that, their relationship will be more customer/supplier, with Kodak making the camera film that Kodak Alaris then resells.

That transition from being part of Kodak "has gone incredibly smoothly," Kruchten said. "Doing a carve-out of a company can be incredibly complicated. Everything's been ahead of plan."

Kodak Alaris has operations in 34 nations around the globe. And when it officially began operating on its own in September 2013, it was a separate legal entity in most of those countries.

"This is a big deal," Kruchten said. "You cannot operate like this on a long-term basis. Every company has to have its own legal entity."

However, some nations took longer, with the legal separation coming in France in October, in Brazil on April 1, and in China — for the most part — earlier this month, though there still remain a few issues with one manufacturing site.

However, Kruchten said, China warranted special attention and a major event, both because of its huge importance as a potential market and due to the fact so many of Alaris' products, from its scanners to components for its media business, are made there.

"In the next few years, they'll surpass the U.S. as the largest economic country in the world," she said. "It's a market we're very interested in."

MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

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