Imation is the latest company to withdraw from the recordable media business. The 'TDK Life on Record' recordable media brand is already history and also sales of audio products and accessories sold under the Imation, Memorex and TDK Life on Record brands will stop by the end of December. Imation has been a a developer amd manufacturer of magnetic tape and optical recording media. Obviously, the current demand for those products is very limited and the market has significantly shrinked, limiting the prospect for future growth.

The company plans to focus on the IronKey solutions - secure USB solutions for data transport and mobile workspaces - and the Nexsan portfolio, which features solid-state optimized unified hybrid storage systems, secure automated archive solutions and high-density enterprise storage arrays.

Product sales of the afformentioned products will end at the end of December, but the company will keep offering customer service and guarantees will be valid until 2020.

Imation's Board of Directors has authorized plans to wind down the non-European operations of the company’s legacy tape media business and Consumer Storage and Accessories (CSA) segment, and to end the long-term license agreement with TDK Corporation.

Barry L. Kasoff, interim President and Member of the Board of Directors, commented, "After careful consideration, we concluded these wind downs are critical in our ongoing effort to create a leaner, more focused Imation. Our TSS segment is the foundation for the Company’s profitable growth over the long term. The Board, together with management, remains intensely focused on building that business and driving efficiencies throughout the organization to enhance performance."

Imation also announced that current Board member Robert B. Fernander has been appointed Interim Group President, Tiered Storage and Security Solutions and will oversee the operations of the TSS business segment.

During 1950s, computer engineers at IBM turned to the data storage division of 3M, which later became Imation Corp. in 1996, to create a way to decouple data from the computer.

A pioneer in the development of the first reel-to-reel data storage tape, Imation (formerly 3M) technology was for decades the standard in increasingly high-capacity data cartridges that protected and archived the most critical information.

After 1996, Imation partnered with StorageTek (later a part of Sun Microsystems and now Oracle) to deliver next-generation tape cartridges.

Imation later received its first patent – for Travan technology that quickly became a standard for small business data backup – and launched the 120MB SuperDisk technology. By the end of the 1990s, Imation had also introduced a portfolio of recordable CD and DVD media.

In 2006, Imation began manufacturing advanced Blu-ray high-definition recordable optical media. The company added several brands, further strengthening its data storage position, including Memorex (2006), TDK Life on Record brand and XtremeMac (2008).