On the final evening of 2025, a significant move reshaped the global X-ray imaging landscape. On December 31, industry leader Carestream Health announced plans to split the company into two major business segments: one will continue to focus deeply on the U.S. domestic market, while the other, Carestream International, will cover global markets outside the U.S. and will be acquired by Midea Group. This news, which had circulated within the industry for over half a year, was finally confirmed. Carestream Health finds itself with a script similar to its "predecessor," Eastman Kodak Company: abandoned by its once-glorious era, struggling to survive even after extreme contraction. Since entering the medical industry in 2017 and gaining control of Wandong Medical for 2.3 billion yuan in 2021, Midea has consistently increased its investments in the healthcare track.
During the 2025 CMEF, Midea formally announced the establishment of a Medical Business Division, consolidating Wandong Medical, KUKA Medical (surgical and rehabilitation robots), Midea Biology (medical cold chain), Swisslog Healthcare (hospital logistics and pharmacy automation), and Midea Building Technologies (smart hospital construction and operation) under a single system, designating it as one of the Group's six core business segments. Last August, Wang Jianguo, a nearly 30-year veteran of Midea Group, was appointed Executive President, a move widely seen as positioning him as the likely key successor after He Xiangjian and Fang Hongbo. In December, industry sources indicated he also concurrently assumed the roles of President of the New Energy Business Division and President of Midea Medical, with the Medical Device Research Institute under the Central Research Institute integrated into the Midea Medical system—two businesses seen as Midea's future "second growth curve" are now being coordinated and advanced by the same core executive, significantly elevating their strategic importance.
Wandong Medical is the absolute leader in China's DR market, while Carestream Health has decades of deep experience in the global high-end X-ray imaging field—their strengths highly overlap. As of now, Midea has not disclosed specific integration details regarding Carestream. However, it is certain that with the simultaneous occurrence of "successor leadership," "strategic elevation," and "international acquisition," the collision of the old and new eras will make 2026 a year of reorganization for both Midea Medical and Wandong Medical.
According to the official announcement from Carestream Health, this transaction is not a full acquisition but a meticulously designed "spin-off and restructuring." Post-transaction, Carestream will be split in two: Carestream Health (the retained entity) will hold fast to the U.S. domestic market, its Mexican factory, its Chinese film business, and its non-destructive testing (NDT) business. Carestream International will be formally incorporated by Midea, encompassing most international operations outside the United States. This boundary division itself sends a clear signal: Midea wants not the "historical baggage," but the global capabilities; Carestream is no longer insisting on expansion, but is staunching bleeding and contracting.
As the legitimate successor to Eastman Kodak's medical imaging business, Carestream represented the "gold standard" in global radiological imaging during the long-lasting film era. However, the transformation path of this former霸主 has been arduous. In 2022, Carestream filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reducing its debt by approximately $220 million through restructuring. The deeper issue lies in the systematic collapse of Carestream's赖以生存的 "cash cow." With the widespread adoption of "cloud films" and digital imaging in China and globally, the traditional film market is rapidly shrinking: in 2024, the company conducted further layoffs and closed some production bases. Credit analysis from agencies like Moody's and S&P Global indicates that Carestream's annual revenue has remained in the $1.1-1.5 billion range in recent years, but growth momentum is clearly insufficient, especially during the window of AI and surgical robotics breakthroughs, while simultaneously facing competition from the "GPS" giants (GE, Philips, Siemens) in the high-end market and price pressure from mid-to-low-end brands.
In April 2024, Todd Clegg, known for expertise in capital operations and exit management, became CEO of Carestream, seen as a prelude to the company seeking buyers and moving towards a "split sale." This judgment proved accurate. By mid-2025, news of Midea's intended acquisition of Carestream International began circulating within the industry; by year-end, Midea successfully acquired its international operations. For Midea, this is a transaction driven by strong "industrial rationality": on one hand, it avoids the heavily impacted, shrinking film business subject to policy pressure; on the other, it directly acquires the global sales channels Carestream built over decades in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
The market anticipates several possibilities for post-acquisition integration: one is for Midea to inject Carestream assets into Wandong through methods like a private placement, achieving business expansion and valuation reshaping; another is for Midea to establish an independent platform. Considering compliance requirements related to intra-group competition, the industry widely believes that 2026 may become Wandong's "first year of reorganization."
Within the industry, Midea Medical's "cross-border hunt" is seen as underpinned by an extremely pragmatic strategic plan: first, how to escape the technological involution where domestic imaging equipment is sold at ever-lower prices; second, how to acquire global capabilities without retreading the old path of multinational giants; third, how to embed imaging, this "entry-level asset," into Midea's evolving "comprehensive medical system."
From a scale perspective, Wandong Medical remains the undisputed "number one" in China's DR market. Data from medical procurement tenders shows Wandong ranked first in market share for publicly tendered DR equipment purchases in 2024, a position held for over a decade. The problem, however, is that this "first place" increasingly resembles a passive defense. In the first half of 2025, Wandong achieved revenue of 843 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.46%, but its non-GAAP net profit plummeted by 56% year-on-year. The reason is straightforward: against the backdrop of widespread implementation of county-level medical consortia and centralized equipment procurement, Wandong has been pushed to the forefront of intense competition. Taking a May 2025 DR centralized procurement for a Xinjiang county medical consortium as an example, Wandong won bids for 267 units, including its New Oriental 1000FA dual-panel suspended DR, with a winning unit price of 206,700 yuan, down 77% compared to the average price of the same model in 2024; its dual-column DR won at 169,000 yuan, over 40% below budget. This low-price strategy was replicated in subsequent centralized procurements in Hunan, Henan, Heilongjiang, etc., and pressure extended beyond DR to CT and MRI systems. In fact, since 2024, Wandong's gross margin has been continuously declining, reaching about 34% in Q1 2025, significantly below the industry average (approx. 56%) and far below peers like United Imaging and Mindray.
In stark contrast to Wandong's situation, even in the fiercely competitive DR sector targeted by domestic substitution, Carestream Health has maintained its high-end position凭借高端影像系统与图像处理算法、探测器等核心零部件能力. In November-December 2025, Carestream successively won high-end DR projects at hospitals like the Third People's Hospital of Lüliang City and Bozhou People's Hospital with winning bids of 6.09 million yuan and 4.59 million yuan respectively; it also continued to win bids in projects for The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) Hospital, Shenzhen Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital, Xuzhou Infectious Disease Hospital, etc. These projects send a clear signal: stable import brand premiums still exist in the high-end DR market. This is precisely the toughest challenge for Wandong to overcome.
For medical device companies expanding overseas, the hardest part is never the product itself, but regulatory approvals, channels, after-sales systems, and the trust built up by generations of doctors. As early as 2022 public reports, Carestream disclosed that China had been its largest single global market for many consecutive years. Its "second kitchen" strategy is highly representative—the Shanghai R&D center聚集了全球60%以上的研发人员; achieved a high degree of localization from R&D, procurement, to assembly; the local team possesses far greater autonomy than most multinational corporations... This capability set essentially constitutes a pre-established global "capillary network" for medical imaging. Carestream currently has nearly 5,000 employees worldwide, most located in overseas markets. Through this acquisition, Midea effectively gains a "fast pass" to globalization.
If the first two calculations answer "why now," the third answers—why must it be imaging? Since entering the medical field in 2017, Midea has been waiting for a point where its "system could take shape." During the 2025 CMEF, Midea formally established its Medical Business Division, elevated it to one of the Group's six core business segments, and simultaneously announced its "5+2+X" technology strategy, including 5 medical business units: Wandong Medical (imaging), KUKA Medical (surgical/rehab robots), Swisslog Healthcare (hospital logistics/pharmacy automation), Midea Biology (medical cold chain), Midea Building Technologies (smart hospital construction/operation), and 2 group-level research platforms: Central Research Institute (including Medical Device Research Institute) and AI Research Institute. Among these, Wandong Medical is explicitly positioned as the core imaging "entry point." Imaging equipment naturally connects to CT, MRI, ultrasound, AI diagnostics and data platforms, as well as hospital information systems and process automation. The addition of Carestream further strengthens this entry-point attribute, potentially giving Midea the full-stack capability to offer global hospitals "infrastructure + automation + imaging diagnostics."
With imaging selected as the key to unlocking the "second curve," Midea faces several unavoidable critical questions: Under constraints of intra-group competition and regulation, how to achieve maximum resource integration rather than internal consumption? How to leverage manufacturing-grade process management and system capabilities to operate a highly specialized medical imaging system? And how to create genuine synergy between Wandong Medical and Carestream without diluting the latter's brand premium, achieving more than just a simple overlay? There may be no standard answers to these questions in the short term. Midea needs to treat the medical sector, this "slow track," as a long-term project it must win.