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Xerox to acquire Lexmark
- onemoresoop 2y agoI wasn’t even aware Xerox was still around..
- astura 2y agoNot only are they still around, they are a Fortune 500 company with over 7 billion dollars in revenue. They offer not only printers and copiers, but they are also a a business services company.
- ghaff 2y agoBasically there are a ton of very large companies that even people in at least adjacent spaces just aren't aware of. Way back in my product manager days, we'd have companies into our executive briefing center who made 80% of the country's <fill in utterly pedestrian product you never even think about>.
- addicted 2y agoSo many people have and are making so much money just doing mundane business things. It’s quite a change from the fast moving world of tech startups.
- Y_Y 2y agoIt's probably a market failure if you can make loads of money (profit rather than revenue) doing mundane things. If your moat isn't something like novelty or patents or concentrated unique expertise then you should be just scraping by in an ideal scenario. You might say they have trust or brand recognition or whatever, but that shouldn't prevent new entrants in a market where the products aren't developing quickly and you can undercut them by taking a smaller margin.
- linksnapzz 2y agoDoing the mundane exceptionally well is...exceptional. No reason why that shouldn't also be profitable.
- Y_Y 2y agoNobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well. But seriously, you'd have to say how it is that your maker of mundane widgets can do a much better job than any competitor. Maybe the company is run by a printer savant, ok. But if it's just because you have good practices they should be copyable, if it's the best employees it should be possible and worthwhile to coax them away, etc. A reasonably defined "efficient" market is one that will chip these differences until you have only normal profit being made while making an acceptable product. A long term super-normal profit making a commodity is the opposite of efficiency.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago>Nobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well. My first job (in 1982) was writing barcode software for Printronix printers. They still make them now, largely unchanged [1]. They were built like a tank. [1] https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/ https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/
- philistine 2y ago> Nobody has ever made a printer exceptionally well. Brother.
- ghaff 2y agoAt least as a consumer printer, they do seem to have emerged as a can't really go wrong option. I finally junked my inkjets because I didn't use them enough to keep the ink from drying out. I don't print a lot but I find it useful to have a printer in the house to casually print out recipes, travel info, and the like.
- ghaff 2y ago
- tonyedgecombe 2y agoMeanwhile Xerox is making little money or even a loss doing mundane things. Look at their share price over the last 25 years if you want to see what a dismal company Xerox is.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoFortune 500 seems irrelevant these days. Xerox market cap being $1B while their revenue is $7B means investors are pricing quite a bit of downsizing in their future. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XRX/xerox-holdings/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/XRX/xerox-holdings...
- jolt42 2y agoSame. I had to look them up, apparently PARC is still a thing. I had no idea.
- cowsandmilk 2y agoPARC isn’t part of Xerox any more. https://www.news.xerox.com/news/xerox-announces-donation-of-palo-alto-research-center-parc-to-sri-international https://www.news.xerox.com/news/xerox-announces-donation-of-...
- philjohn 2y agoYep - I bought a Xerox colour laser printer a few years back (C405) and it's legit one of the best printers I've ever had, and runs circles around the last colour laser printer I had (a Canon). Just works on any computer that sees it on the network, print quality is fantastic, never jams, just all around brilliant. It's also got a warranty that extends every year that you buy Geniune Xerox toner. An onsite parts and labour warranty at that.
- projektfu 2y agoApparently it may already be a Lexmark. I have a C315 and I am super happy with it. They offered cheap extra paper trays, too.
- lexicality 2y agooh no
- TomMasz 2y agoThis is unfortunate for Lexmark employees.
- silisili 2y agoLexmark is unfortunate for Lexmark employees. Knew a guy who worked there - constant layoffs and train-your-replacement offshoring, nearly every year. It's a shell of what it was 20 years ago, but that's probably to be expected for a printer company.
- TomMasz 2y agoSounds like Xerox. I got out after 20+ years with the last of the good voluntary layoff packages. The ones that hung on got a lot less than I did.
- tecleandor 2y agoSpun off from IBM to end up at Xerox 30 years later. I haven't followed Xerox in the last - 20? years, so I don't know how terrible could this be.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryao 2y agoXerox is essentially a Lexmark reseller at this point. You can look at what Xerox technicians are posting on reddit if you need evidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/15sa0q4/why_do_the_lexmark_mc3326i_and_the_xerox_c235dni/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/15sa0q4/why_do_th... As per a comment there, even the toner cartridges are the same, with the only difference being the chip used. This acquisition should make Xerox into a company that builds its own printers again.
- tecleandor 2y agoAh, interesting. I guess they were manufacturing the bigger corporate machines, and rebranding this medium/small sized printers. They also had solid ink printers (we had one in the office a long time ago) but I think they aren't doing them anymore. I bought past year a bunch of Xerox branded toners for an HP printer, and I didn't know they had diversified the business that much. I wonder if they manufacture them.
- bradfa 2y agoXerox still manufactures a lot of toner. It’s where all the money is in the market. They have a massive plant making EA toner and then a packing plant next door in Webster, NY USA at the main campus.
- drewda 2y agoIntersting, I didn't realize there's a relationship. But Wikipedia says: > Lexmark was formed on March 27, 1991, when investment firm Clayton & Dubilier completed a leveraged buyout of IBM Information Products Corporation, the printer, typewriter, and keyboard operations of IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark
- donohoe 2y ago[flagged]
- dudeinjapan 2y agoI had to Google what "send me a Xerox" means.
- hobs 2y agoThen you're just dating yourself at likely less than <35 years old (or never worked in an office during those years.) Also if you don't know what a Xerox is, then you might not know about PARC and The Mother of All Demos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY If you're a computer nerd and don't know about this, you are welcome.
- astura 2y agoXerox PARC invented the desktop metaphor, the GUI, and the computer mouse.
- kstrauser 2y agoYour comment made me reach for a kleenex to wipe my eye.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- geraldwhen 2y agoThis may be devastating for the small city of Lexington, Kentucky. Seems like this was one of the only major businesses in the area.
- malfist 2y agoLexington has a surprising amount of employers, we should be fine. I doubt they're going to close the HQ anyway. Did you know Tempur-Pedic is Lexington grown? Fast food chain fazolis is based here, long John silver's was. Valvoline moved here a long long time ago. Hall Rogers is trying to make "silicon hallow" a thing so there's a lot of funding for tech companies to setup shop in Kentucky
- parpfish 2y agoFazoli’s is still around? I don’t think I’ve seen one in 20 years
- DHPersonal 2y agoI have a Fazoli's and a Xerox facility within 20 minutes of where I sit. I'm unsure I should see that as sign of a healthy economic situation for my neighborhood.
- joshstrange 2y agoYep, land-locked Lexington, Kentucky, home of Long John Silvers though we don’t even have one in town anymore. The last one closed a few years ago. But yes, a Lexmark sale won’t make a large impact even if they shut down the HQ. There are local and remote (obviously) opportunities and the CoL is low here.
- rgreasons 2y agoLexington is the home of the University of Kentucky. Lexmark shuttering their plant wouldn’t be _good_ for the economy, but Lexington is first and foremost a “college town.”
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- i80and 2y agoI got a Lexmark for their driverless IPP Everywhere support and it's the best zero-fuss printer I've ever owned. Xerox doesn't have any IPP Everywhere devices, so I hope this isn't Lexmark's death knell.
- nottorp 2y agoI don't know what an IPP is but I bought a networked Xerox all in one, plugged it into my network and it just showed up on all my devices (mind, they're mostly Apple). So whatever they're doing, it ain't so bad. I did have to cover the power led with black nail polish though. It was lighting up the whole room.
- MrMcCall 2y agoI use black electrical tape for those ever-more-common nuisances.
- xattt 2y agoPainting the printer in Vantablack is also an acceptable answer.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoThat might be the one thing more toxic than toner powder particles.
- vidarh 2y agoYou can also get sheets of hundreds of small little black dot stickers that are perfect to use on LEDs. Some of them are thin enough to let some light through an individual one, so you can choose to dim or entirely block by adding one or 2-3...
- layer8 2y agohttps://www.lightdims.com/ https://www.lightdims.com/
- casenmgreen 2y agoWonder why it happened? anyone know the back story?
- mritchie712 2y agoMaybe the both had a similar AI strategy
- rbanffy 2y agoAnd the AIs decided they should merge.
- einpoklum 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codegladiator 2y ago> I would think that the market for printing is shrinking with more documents being sent via the Internet https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol-wwJBVncQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol-wwJBVncQ
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jasoneckert 2y agoWhile many here will note the potential downsides for Lexmark here, the strategic fit statement of "Xerox and Lexmark have complementary sets of operations" likely means that Xerox will keep Lexmark operating as usual in the short term. And in the long term, there is a greater possibility of them growing the Lexmark side with their resources because Lexmark is an established brand, was already an existing partner/supplier for Xerox, as well as focused on certain growth areas (e.g., IoT, WFA) that Xerox did not. Now, if Broadcom were to acquire Lexmark, they'd likely get rid of 70% of the people and focus on extracting more money from the top 10% of Lexmark users via a subscription model that would make HP look tame by comparison.
- ryao 2y agoIf I recall correctly, Xerox printers are rebadged Lexmark printers, with the exception of the highest end models.
- mastax 2y agoDell printers are also rebadged Lexmark’s. Or at least they were 20 years ago.
- lanstin 2y agoYeah, both Xerox and Lexmark are such blasts from the past for me. Surprised they still exist in any form.
- shiroiushi 2y agoYeah, this article was a bit of a surprise to me. I would have assumed Xerox at least had been out of business for ages.
- nimajneb 2y agoI saw an ad for Packard Bell on Instagram yesterday. I looked it up quickly, apparently they've been selling computers this whole time, owned by different parent companies though.
- agmater 2y agoWhy would Ninestar sell off Lexmark, is it just that they got a good price? I thought the pantum and printer business was an interesting move, but maybe they just couldn't make it work.
- tecleandor 2y agoNinestar was already having problems in the US. In 2023 they got an import ban by the DHS [0] and Lexmark had to find a new supplier for whatever Ninestar was sending them. Lexmark had to sell some assets this year to add a bit of liquidity [1]. I guess this is Ninestar "just" getting rid of Lexmark because it was getting a bit messy for them. 0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-puts-chinese-company-with-kentucky-ties-on-forced-labor-ban-list-ce2e8d00 1: https://www.opi.net/news/region/001-north-america/ninestar-offloads-lexmark-assets/
- iav 2y ago1. To allow the merger, Congress imposed some pretty onerous restrictions on any collaboration between the two companies. There is a Lexmark board of former US generals who are supervising the divison. 2. Nine star is the owner, but a lot of the preferred equity used to fund the deal came from PAG, an asian private equity firm. Their investment accrues at a pretty high interest rate and eats into Ninestar’s returns. 3. The whole thesis was that Ninestar would be able to control the amount of counterfeit ink for Lexmark printers. But with another Trump term, and lack of ability to integrate the two, the thesis is broken.
- numbsafari 2y agoT-Rex feasts on Triceratops carcass, Asteroid Nears Earth, … all that and more Dino News just ahead… but first, why are some brontosaurus investing in these new small fuzzy creatures?
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoBrontosaurus and T-Rex are separated by 80 million (!) years. To put it another way: We are closer to the the asteroid than Brontosaurus is to T Rex.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago...and they both will sell rebadged Samsung printers happily ever after.
- ryao 2y agoHP brought Samsung’s printer division, while Lexmark makes most Xerox branded printers, so that seems unlikely.
- bentt 2y agoGrowing up in Rochester, NY, where Xerox was founded and has/had the most employees... I'm just glad to hear they have enough resources to acquire something. Been a rough couple decades.
- chiph 2y agoLexmark was the supplier of Model M keyboards for a while, after IBM spun their printer & keyboard business off. Which they later spun off into Unicomp (pckeyboard.com) who still manufacture them in the town of Lexington. If you've never used a Model M, they're beasts. Great mechanical feel (they have buckling spring technology). And they're heavy enough to not slide around on your desk.
- onre 2y agoI have the 122-key version and a ton of Emacs bindings to make the most out of the 24 function keys and the 12-key panel on the left. It is simply the best.
- bombcar 2y agoSomeone started making them new: https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/product/classic-style-f122-model-f-keyboard/ https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/product/classic-style-f122-m...
- kstrauser 2y agoI bought a Unicomp Type M once to replace my IBM because it had USB, more keys, etc. It was Model M “Lite”: same key feel, same delightful clicky, but much lighter and more flexible. You could march into battle with an IBM Model M. I don’t think you could take on more than one local thug with the Unicomp version.
- jhickok 2y agoNew keyboard testing metric just dropped over Christmas break.
- kstrauser 2y agoI mean, this is the keyboard people use to run through the dishwasher to clean it. You have to come up with more advanced criteria to really tease them apart. (I just realized that "flexible" above might be interpreted positively, like "applicable in more situations". No, I mean "flexible" as in "may not be satisfactorily used as a bridge over a pothole in case of emergency", which the original would be able to pull off and still be used to write a blog post about the experience afterward.)
- volkk 2y agothis headline feels like i'm in 1996 again
- dangoodmanUT 2y ago> Lexmark creates cloud-enabled imaging and IoT technologies that help customers worldwide quickly realize business outcomes. Through a powerful combination of proven technologies and deep industry expertise, Lexmark accelerates business transformation, turning information into insights, data into decisions, and analytics into action Great, so I have no idea what they do.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 2y agoI'm convinced only CEOs know how to translate that into English. Company descriptions like this ought to be written as if you're explaining what your company does to a 6 year old. Imagine explaining your job to a class of first graders and telling them "I accelerate business transformation!" Yea, they'll be as lost as the rest of us.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoEveryone at the top is clueless, faking it, and anxious they’ll be found out.
- deskr 2y agoAnd based on social media, taken out.
- mrobins 2y agoBut seriously, what’s the point of putting out this drivel. Isn’t the point of these statements to excite investors and potential big customers. Who in the publicity chain thinks these statements move anything closer to a goal?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- elorant 2y agoBought a Lexmark E232 laser printer back in 2006. 18 years and 110k pages later the damn thing still works flawlessly. I have nothing but admiration for their printers.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoHow do you know it’s been 110k?
- sunnytimes 2y agoI used to fix Lexmark printers , they are "PC load letter" printers. not as bad as HP but lexmark printers stop working for various no reasons. Most of the time the trays would mess up due to a little dust or you would have to get the person to smack the drum over the phone and that would usually help. they never stop working but they will crumble 10 pages into a ball inside the machine ha.. side note . HP printers are the worst for PC load letter. I've fixed HP printers my whole life. I love reading the manuals and they use "might" or "maybe" to describe fixes or errors.
- Shakahs 2y agoCounterpoint: I also used to fix Lexmark printers as a field tech servicing pharmacies. It was routine to see Lexmark MS711dn printers with page counts in the millions. They did not need more than basic maintenance.
- sunnytimes 2y agono fuckin way .. i used to work for Kroll Pharmacy in Toronto!! where were you!?
- Suppafly 2y ago>They did not need more than basic maintenance. The other guy was probably working on ones that didn't get the basic maintenance. People always skimp on preventative care and then are surprised when things break. When I worked in a computer lab 20ish years ago, being consistent about which side of the paper we loaded when we loaded paper made a huge difference. They are always stacked on the pallet the same way and had a little indicator on the flap of the wrapper around the ream that pointed down. I'm always surprised when schools want people to donate reams of paper, instead of just ordering a pallet of paper, swapping between a bunch of different weights and qualities is going to cause more way more costs in repairs than just ordering paper by the pallet.
- sunnytimes 2y agoone of the main ones with the tray printers is dusty rollers . the rubber rollers that roll the paper out of the tray will get dirty and the paper will slip and cause jams or miss printing. of course theirs no error code for dirty rollers so the printer would say all kinds of shit because it would end up being a paper jam. we also used labels in the pharmacy and those would peel off and end up stuck all over the inside of the printer, good times haha.
- acjohnson55 2y agoI spent some of the formative time in my career at Lexmark. They sponsored my GEM Fellowship for grad school, and I worked there for 4 internships in 4 years in the mid 2000s. It was an interesting window into the business world. - Lexmark came into existence when IBM wanted to spin off their declining printer, keyboard, and typewriter businesses, which were headquartered in Lexington, KY, hence the name. - According to some of my coworkers, IBM brought all the most dynamic leaders back to the mothership, so Lexmark was left with whoever stayed behind or was left behind. These folks weren't highly respected by the engineers I knew, but I can't really judge, personally. - As many of you all know, some IBM/Lexmark manufacturing folks arranged a deal to take the keyboard business independent, as Unicomp. - In a major settlement with HP over patents, the two companies had a full exchange of printing technology, resulting in Lexmark gaining cutting edge laser printing tech. According to people I know, this turned a moribund company into a player. - Lexmark became most well known for bringing the "razor blade" business model to consumer inkjet printing. They would literally give printers away with a manufacturer's rebate, hoping to make the money back on supplies (e.g. ink cartridges). Unfortunately, there were so many printers floating around that many people would just throw out the old one when it was out of ink. It was a catastrophe. - When I was working there, one of the major initiatives was to create the cheapest possible inkjet printer. On the other hand, there was still a lot of pretty cool R&D going on. Just nowhere near the level of investment HP was making. - Lexmark became infamous for attempting to enforce DRM on its supplies to prevent people from refilling ink cartridges, forcing them to buy high margin supplies. While I was there, we were shipping cartridges with write-once memory for tracking usage. - In parallel to consumer inkjet, Lexmark had an almost completely separate business unit doing business printers, based on laser printing technology. In this market, you sell full on documents capabilities and services, with the printer merely being the central piece of hardware. - A few years after my last stint there, Lexmark exited the consumer inkjet business and became solely B2B. I didn't follow the company closely after this point. Working at Lexmark was one of the things that convinced me to leave tech for education. I enjoyed my short stints there, but just found the environment completely uninspiring as a place to really establish my career. Being my main exposure to the tech career (along with previous internships at manufacturing companies), I assumed that this was what the whole industry was like. (I returned to tech a few years later, but that's a whole other story.)
- Narishma 2y agoTIL both Xerox and Lexmark still exist. I haven't heard those names for a couple of decades.
- hipadev23 2y agoIs this comparable to when two extremely old widowers decide be roommates and live out their remaining days?
- ks2048 2y agoIs there any printer company that is not 30+ years old? What is stopping a start-up from making a printer people actually like?
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoPeople speak highly of Brother printers and I've been happy with mine. On top of it, lots of people don't really print anything day to day.
- shiroiushi 2y agoI really liked my last Brother printer before I had to sell it in a move. However, Brother is anything but new; it was started in 1908. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Industries
- SoftTalker 2y agoPrint is dying. It took a while to realize the "paperless office" and we aren't quite there yet, but in my office, the amount of stuff people print has really dropped in the past decade. Stores offer email or text message receipts, doctor's offices have you fill out forms online. Printers are not a growth market, so not very attractive to a start-up.
- starik36 2y agoEven back in the last decade, the only thing I ever printed in the office was return labels to slap on a package.
- hollerith 2y agoPrinters are a shrinking market.
- trollbridge 2y agoAnd it's dominated by players who (a) make a good product, (b) produce very diverse lines of printers (such as equipment that prints on fabric - not a dying industry at all, as people continue to desire to wear clothes with designs printed on them), and (c) make other things similar to printers, like sewing machines. Examples of these players would be Epson (who also make gigantic direct-to-fabric printers) and Brother (who still make sewing machines and popular label printers to print labels to stick on packages). HP and Lexmark are not leaders in the aforementioned spaces - at all.
- sedatk 2y agoI didn’t know these brands still existed. The title felt like “East India Company to acquire Silk Road”.
- selimthegrim 2y agoEspecially among drug dealers game recognize game.