Uni-Pixel installing equipment in Kodak joint venture

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Texas-based touchscreen film company Uni-Pixel Inc. and a team of Eastman Kodak Co. workers are installing the equipment that will be the basis of a joint manufacturing effort between the two.

Kodak and Uni-Pixel earlier this year announced they were jointly putting $24 million into establishing a Uni-Pixel plant at EastmanBusiness Park Building 326 for manufacture of Uni-Pixel’s UniBoss touchscreen film.

Uni-Pixel CEO Reed Killion said that in addition to setting up the manufacturing space, Uni-Pixel also is working with Kodak on other aspects of getting its film to market, such as rebranding UniBoss. Within the next few weeks, Uni-Pixel plans to roll out “a more suitable product name for our touch sensor,” Killion told Wall Street analysts in a conference call.

The 100,000-square-foot Eastman Business Park plant will have two roll-to-roll printing lines and up to 15 roll-to-roll plating lines for Uni-Pixel’s UniBoss product. The printing equipment was delivered in late June. The company also has orders for plating machines to be delivered to Kodak this quarter.

According to Uni-Pixel, the printing lines will be able to turn out as much as a million square feet per month of UniBoss. A license agreement with another company requires Uni-Pixel to be able to produce a million square feet of the UniBoss sensor film a month by April 2014. “In partnership with Kodak, we are well on our way to meetingthat requirement,” Killion said.

Killion told Wall Street analysts that Kodak now has more than 40 full-time workersdedicated to the Uni-Pixel effort. “We have and expect to continue to benefit immensely from Kodak years of operational and technical expertise and manufacturing and coding films,” Killion said. The Texas site currently can produce 200,000 square feet a month, and Uni-Pixel expects to be able to turn out 1.3 million square feet a month by late January.

Uni-Pixel also is building out its plating lines at its Texas site.