Eastman Kodak Co plans to pull out of direct sales of integrated office equipment in an effort to stem losses, and instead plans to switch to selling the components to third parties for integration and marketing. Kodak says its latest restructuring is different from four previous ones in the 1980s because now individual business units will have more autonomy to develop products and customise them for sale in different global regions, but it is taking a big stick to its office equipment business, where chairman Kay Whitmore described the US sales climate to Dow Jones & Co as just a touch short of a disaster. The target of the restructuring is 10% profit margins in 1995. In the past, the unit has sold complete information management systems – including software and printers – directly to customers. Now it will sell components to vendors instead of customers, and will combine the copier business with the image storage and retrieval business to try to sell more to each customer of either. The company has also called a halt to research and development of software that has nothing to do with imaging, saying that it will no longer invest in developing software to integrate different systems or process data rather than images.
