Brand Mission

Imation is a global developer, manufacturer, and supplier of data storage—whether that’s magnetic tape that’s used in computer data centers, CDs and DVDs, flash drives, or removable hard-drive formats. Our sales in 2007 were slightly over $2 billion. Most of the revenue is outside the United States. We operate in about 60 countries worldwide, and have slightly less than 2,000 employees worldwide.

In 1996, Imation was spun off from 3M, and its first chief executive officer, Bill Monahan found himself with eight unrelated businesses. The question was, “How do we try to survive with these businesses that aren’t related, that aren’t necessarily performing all that well?” There was a strong 3M legacy in technology and manufacturing that came with this start-up.

The business that we retain today is data storage—3M invented computer tape. By 2002, seven of the original businesses had been shed. We started focusing on data storage because that was really the only business each year that had been growing. By this point, about 65 percent of the employee base was still 3M. In 2006, Imation acquired Memorex. Then in 2007, TDK Media, and followed that up with a company called Memcorp. Memcorp had the license for the Memorex brand in audio and video consumer electronics, so by the purchase of Memcorp, we then had control of the Memorex brand in all of its forms.

Our portfolio has expanded into consumer electronics and accessories with these acquisitions. Today most of the employees at Imation are not from 3M, and we find ourselves in need of transforming our skill sets. We have a portfolio of brands and a much broader portfolio of products, which creates a lot more complexity as we try to unleash growth.

Our new corporate strategy was articulated on May 22, 2007, which was my second day at the company. We had a meeting with analysts in New York, and we started talking about our business transformation, moving from a data storage company to a brand and product management company. Now, you can imagine lunchtime, all the analysts just circling around me and asking all sorts of questions, and I hadn’t even found my desk in Oakdale yet.

In 2007, we could have considered ourselves a removable data storage media company. We had an even balance between our commercial segment and our consumer segment. The goal was to become primarily a consumer company, but with a significant piece of business still in B2B.

Imation is the world leader in magnetic tape, and every year more and more data is archived on magnetic tape. You think of magnetic tape as something that went away with the dinosaurs, but in fact, enterprise operations are still archiving their data on magnetic tape.

Over time, the magnetic tape revenue was not growing the way we would like it to grow, and that led us to start looking at other opportunities. We’ve been focusing on three in data storage—optical, flash, and hard drive—as areas where we saw growth coming. But in addition to the growth in those areas, we recognized that we had an opportunity to extend our brands beyond storage into consumer electronics and accessories, particularly on the basis of an acquisition of Memorex and Memcorp, which established a couple of hundred million dollars worth of revenue in consumer electronics and also an opportunity in accessories.