Xerox To Buy Printer Maker Lexmark From Chinese Owners in $1.5 Billion Deal (xerox.com) 27
Xerox has agreed to acquire printer maker Lexmark for $1.5 billion, bringing the Kentucky-based company back under U.S. ownership after seven years of Chinese control.
The deal, announced Monday, will be financed through cash and debt, creating a vertically integrated printing equipment manufacturer and service provider. Lexmark, formed from IBM in 1991, was previously acquired by Chinese investors including Ninestar for $2.54 billion in 2016. The merger comes as Xerox faces declining equipment sales and a 50% year-to-date stock drop, with its market value at just over $1 billion.
The deal, announced Monday, will be financed through cash and debt, creating a vertically integrated printing equipment manufacturer and service provider. Lexmark, formed from IBM in 1991, was previously acquired by Chinese investors including Ninestar for $2.54 billion in 2016. The merger comes as Xerox faces declining equipment sales and a 50% year-to-date stock drop, with its market value at just over $1 billion.
Good start (Score:1)
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Better yet, do away with all the attempts to force buyers to only use OEM toner. (Though they're at least better than Dymo, who are currently losing customers after converting their product line to printers that will only work with OEM labels. [ycombinator.com]
Personal anecdotes and history... (Score:2)
Why did you feed the sock puppet and propagate it's vacuous Subject?
Actually surprised to learn that Lexmark still exists. I was working at IBM on various occasions during my freeter youth, and during one of those periods the Lexington printer plant was sold off to create the Lexmark brand. I was told it was the first time that IBM employees were not given any option to stay with the company. One of the major steps on the path to "Who cares about IBM?"
But the jokes I am looking for now are more like "What c
Re: Personal anecdotes and history... (Score:2)
Why did you use it's when you needed its, and why the random capitalization?
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I was working at IBM on various occasions during my freeter youth
I suppose you were working on the Dehomag project, grandpa?
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Now bring back the Model M.
We have good news and bad news...
The good news is: We're bringing back the model M!
The bad news: Our Chinese manufacturing partners no longer have the capability to make mechanical keyboards without animated garish colored LEDs under each key. So you're getting those, too. Oh, and the font on the keycaps looks like something on a screen in The Matrix.
Unreadable keycaps joke (Score:2)
Good enough. Please mod parent funny.
Re: Unreadable keycaps joke (Score:2)
Why do you think you get to tell people what to do, and why do you think anonymous coward is a "sock puppet?
Re: Unreadable keycaps joke (Score:2)
Most use of the anonymous coward functionality is trolling. It's probably mostly from people with accounts they use regularly, or at least occasionally. Signal to noise has always improved when AC posting has been disabled.
Re: Good start (Score:3)
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Now bring back the Model M.
The Model M keyboard assets belong to another (USoA) company called unicomp. You can buy a Model M (with windows key or Mac layout) here:
https://www.pckeyboard.com/pag... [pckeyboard.com]
robbing blades with a broken razor handle (Score:5, Funny)
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What kind of company has to pay $15 billion every six months?!? That level of debt is insane.
Re:robbing blades with a broken razor handle (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm assuming this is a joke.
Xerox is buying Lexmark by spending more money than Xerox is actually worth, though possibly less than Lexmark is worth (it's a private company, so there's no way to know), which is potentially a bit like buying a printer for less than it costs to make it.
A lot of printer vendors are known for selling printers below cost, but then requiring you to buy their ink cartridges at an exorbitant markup, and requiring you to replace them before they're actually empty to keep the printer running.
So I'm assuming that's the joke.
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Okay, guess that just flew over my head but yeah.
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Lexmark makes inkjet printers. Just like HP, it's freakishly expensive to use them to actually print. Every 6 months, if you haven't changed the ink cartridge, you need to spend a fortune on replacement cartridges
That's the joke. Xerox paid the "starter price" for Lexmark, and six months down the line they need to buy replacement consumables that cost more than the printer ever did.
It's why printers are among the la
After loading up the company with debt (Score:4, Insightful)
...they will need to invent some really horrible ways to abuse the customers in order to make a profit
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Out of moderator points, otherwise +1 Insightful!
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...they will need to invent some really horrible ways to abuse the customers in order to make a profit
OK, allow me to help them invent stuff:
- The printer has to phone home every so often or it simply won't work
- Phoning home will allow Xerox to gather data from your print jobs for targeted advertising, training LLMs, etc.
- The printer could print out advertising randomly, using ink and paper you paid for
- It could also require a driver/app combination which allows it to put advertising on your computer screen as well
- It could contain a microphone to monitor your conversations for all the usual profit-ori
Forced labor act fallout? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lexmark is a private company owned by three companies. It's unclear whether Xerox is buying out all three or just Ninestar. I'm assuming this sale is fallout from Ninestar getting listed under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Besides being one of Lexmark's owners, Ninestar was also a major ink cartridge supplier for Lexmark prior to their listing, which banned any future imports of those cartridges into the U.S. That can't have been good for Lexmark's bottom line.
Lexmark being a private company means we don't know how bad things were, but they sold off their real estate earlier this year and are leasing it back, presumably because they needed that money to stay in business. That's never a sign of a healthy company.
So from the outside, it looks like one money-bleeding company is merging with another money-bleeding company. That's not usually a successful strategy, but we'll see. Maybe not competing against each other will mean that they can raise prices to a level where they aren't in the red.
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Property leasebacks are a sign of being infiltrated by a Corporate Raider. Sears is a good example.
In this case, though, surprisingly not. Lexmark has been owned by the same three companies since 2016, which is why I'm assuming that the loss of cheaper ink cartridges from their parent company pushed them to the point where they were circling the drain.
It doesn't help that they're still playing the same old tricks with selling their printers below cost, using technology to limit third-party toner cartridges, etc., and that almost certainly doesn't help sales when competing against other companies that do
More bad decisions. Typical Xerox (Score:3)
Yet another dumb decision from Xerox. One sinking ship towing another one.
My employer had been a pure Xerox shop for decades. A legendary loyal customer. That changed when Xerox stuck us with a couple junk color inkjet machines that are absolute trash. We are lucky to get one day a month of run out of them.
Meanwhile, we risked buying a competing machine which turned out to be an incredible workhorse. It never breaks. It runs circles around Xerox. Our workers love it. Management actually listened to the workers and bought more of them and now we are laughing at Xerox as their service techs continue to retire and leave anyway.
There's almost nobody left to fix their machines. Dozens of techs in our city alone have left. They have like one guy left and he's ready to leave.
There is absolutely no way in hell anyone in our area would invest in more Xerox printers at this point.
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Anyone who knows anything about printers knows that the best printers all come from Japan (Canon, Epson, Brother etc).
Your printer/scanner now bricked by Xerox (Score:1)
Somehow I don't think this will affect the usability of third-party toner cartridges, or a neverending barrage of stupid "for your safety we have bricked your printer" messages.
Lexmark was a piece of shit. Color it with whatever new logo you want ('X' seems to be a popular new logo) but it's still shit. So is X.
Do I get this right (Score:1)
a company that's worth X pays, or rather is eventually expected to pay, 1.5X for something?
How the heck does that even work? The only reason for me, as a bank, to finance this thing seems to be that after acquiring Xerox when it finally goes belly-up, I can fillet it and sell off the pieces.