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Kodak to expand White City plant DryView X-ray film success drives growth By DAVID PRESZLER WHITE CITY -- With sales of its DryView X-ray film soaring, Eastman Kodak will invest more than $30 million in its health imaging plant here over the next three years. The expansion, which began this month, will bring new equipment to dramatically increase the plant's capacity and efficiency. "We're expecting over the course of four years to see our current 1999 volumes more than double," says plant manager Brian Melchiori. The majority of the expansion consists of equipment and it isn't expected to substantially increase the number of workers. The plant has added about 15 employees this year, bringing its total to 360. Melchiori says 10 more may be added by year's end and perhaps 20 over the course of the three-year expansion. While the expansion will affect all the operations, the physical size of the Pacific Avenue plant will grow only slightly. The company is considering building a warehouse, though no decision has been made. The growth is being driven by the success of DryView. Sales grew more than sixfold in the two years after the product's 1996 launch. This year's sales are expected to be 60 percent higher than last year's. DryView is an X-ray film that captures digital images from medical tests such as MRIs, ultrasounds and CT scans. But exposed film doesn't go through a wet chemical process. Instead, developing agents are applied to the film during manufacture, and health imagers in hospitals spit out film sheets much like laser printers do. Melchiori says the use of such systems -- which are easier to run, more compact and don't require wet chemicals -- is increasing rapidly in the medical community. In the Rogue Valley, he says, Providence Medford Medical Center has two of the health imagers, Southern Oregon Health Imaging has two and Ashland Community Hospital has one. And more and more images taken by conventional systems are being converted to digital images and then printed on dry film -- a process called computed radiography. The plant began producing DryView in mid-1995, when it was owned by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corp. 3M spun it and other plants off into Imation Enterprises in 1996 and Kodak bought the plant in 1998. The White City plant is part of Kodak's health imaging division, which accounted for about 15 percent of the company's sales in the second quarter of 1999. The division had sales of $525 million and net earnings of $90 million for the three months that ended June 30. More than half of those sales occurred outside the U.S. Kodak has been the industry leader in dry health imaging film, though other companies including Fuji and Agfa-Gevaert Group have launched products to compete with DryView. But Melchiori is confident that DryView sales will continue to grow. "Our whole business model is to continue to be the quality leader while continually driving down our production costs," he says. He adds that the DryView film being produced now is a third-generation product, having been refined twice since its launch, while competing products are in their first incarnations. Today's Business Index Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA