NEW YORK - Eastman Kodak's announcement this morning of its plans to buy Creo for $980 million brings the 117-year-old company's recent acquisition spree to a close, executives said on an analyst call today. Kodak will pay $16.50 per share for the company, which represents a 15% premium to the Vancouver-based outfit's Jan. 28 closing price.

Back in September 2003, Kodak (nyse: EK - news - people ) slashed its dividend by 72%, and vowed to spend $3 billion to buy the assets required to reshape its business into a digital one. While Kodak is still slugging it out with competitors like Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) and Fuji Photo Film (nasdaq: FUJIY - news - people ) in the consumer digital-camera arena, the Creo deal is aimed at rounding out Kodak's growing stable of commercial-printing units. The challenge will be to integrate these various divisions in a way that makes sense to customers.

On Jan. 12, 2005, Kodak announced plans to buy the 50% stake of Kodak Polychrome Graphics that it doesn't own from Sun Chemical, a company owned by Japan's Dainippon, for $817 million. In March 2004, Kodak agreed to buy two digital-imaging units, including NexPress Solutions, which makes digital-printing presses, from the German printing-giant Heidelberger Druckmaschinen for $150 million. And in January 2004, Kodak paid $250 million for Scitex's digital-printing business. Kodak had actually sold this unit to Scitex for $70 million back in 1993.

"All of these organizations have their own sales forces and bands, so they have to figure out how to pull all this together so that the different units aren't working against each other," says Lyra Research senior analyst Steve Reynolds.

Still, with so many new pieces of the commercial-printing puzzle now under Kodak's roof, it clearly needs the workflow software that Creo has in order to tie everything together. "Commercial printers buy a lot of different equipment and have a lot of different systems to look after it, but they need something that can pull it together," says Reynolds. He adds that competitors, such as Xerox (nyse: XRX - news - people ) and Electronics For Imaging (nasdaq: EFII - news - people ), are already equipped with such programs.

Kodak hopes to interject itself into the commercial-printing arena--which it says will be worth $23 billion by 2008--as the industry shifts from analog to digital methods. "The commercial printing space has to convert to digital," Kodak Chief Executive Daniel Carp said this morning, "and now we have a broad line of products to help our customers make that transition."

Kodak will finance the Creo deal by issuing debt, and says it will be accretive to earnings by five cents per share in 2006. Indeed, Kodak's finances are improving. The company restarted sales growth in 2003, growing revenue by 4% that year, and then by another 3% in 2004. Although Kodak did report a loss of $12 million for calendar 2004, Morningstar analyst Mark Lanyon points out that the company netted $236 million before restructuring charges.

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