

In the 1950s and 1960s, 3M ventured into the related fields of dry-silver microfilm and photographic products. With the marketing help of singer Bing Crosby, 3M's branded "Sound Recording Tape" transformed the music industry and by the 1950s had evolved into a new product, Scotch Commercial Videotape, just in time to supply the blossoming U.S. Its first foray into the businesses that would comprise Imation began in 1947 when its engineers unveiled the first magnetic recording tape, the forerunner of the cassette tape. Through strong management, an unusual research- and innovation-driven corporate culture, and an unbroken string of successful new product launches, 3M had grown by the mid-1990s into one of the 100 largest and most profitable companies in the United States. Transparent Scotch tape, the dry-printing photocopy process, and the ubiquitous "Post-It" adhesive note pad were only the most prominent of the tens of thousands of new products it introduced over the next 90 years. On July 1, 1996, Imation would officially begin business as a public corporation.ģM's penchant for creating (if rarely spinning off) new businesses had begun within a few years of its founding in 1902 as the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company.

Those who opted out-there were more than 3,000-would be given early retirement packages and 3M's gratitude. Those "Imation designees" who agreed to the transfer would retain their 3M salaries and be relocated to a former 3M office complex in Oakdale, a suburb of St. Thus, as 1995 drew to a close, 12,700 of 3M's 70,000 employees received a letter informing them of their reassignment to the new company. 3M management decided a spinoff would not only remove the drag on its own balance sheet but might give its flagging businesses the capital and operational independence they needed to grow their way out of their earnings funk. Little mystery surrounded the reasons for the $2.3 billion divestiture: since January 1994, 3M's data storage and imaging operations had been posting stagnant revenue growth year after year. In the closing months of 1995, Minnesota's 3M Corporation, one of the bluest of America's blue-chip companies, announced that five of its businesses would be spun off the following year to form a new data storage and medical imaging company named Imation Corporation (from the words imaging, information, and imagination). Imation's vision is to deliver unsurpassed value to our customers, shareholders, employees and communities throughout the world.
IMATION SUPERDISK DRIVE WINDOWS 10 SOFTWARE
SICs: 3679 Data Storage & Imaging Systems 3695 Magnetic & Optical Recording Media 3695 Computer Software Tape & Disks, Blank: Rigid & Floppy 3555 Printing Machines & Equipment 3861 Photographic Equipment & Accessories, Camera & X-ray Film 3844 X-ray Apparatus & Tubes: Medical, Industrial, Research, & Control
