Xerox Buys Lexmark For $1.5 Billion As Print Industry Clings To Relevance (nerds.xyz)
- Reference: 0178247960
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/07/01/2247221/xerox-buys-lexmark-for-15-billion-as-print-industry-clings-to-relevance
- Source link: https://nerds.xyz/2025/07/xerox-buys-lexmark-printer-merger/
> In a move that feels straight out of a different era, Xerox has officially [2]acquired Lexmark for $1.5 billion . The deal includes net debt and assumed liabilities, and it pulls Lexmark out of the hands of Chinese ownership and into a freshly restructured Xerox. That's a lot of money for a company best known for making machines that spit out paper.
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> According to [3]Xerox , this is all part of a "Reinvention" strategy. The company now claims it will be one of the top five players in every major print category and the leader in managed print services. [...] Xerox says the new leadership team will include executives from both sides, and the combined business will now support over 200,000 clients in more than 170 countries. They'll also be running 125 manufacturing and distribution centers in 16 countries.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli
[2] https://nerds.xyz/2025/07/xerox-buys-lexmark-printer-merger/
[3] https://investors.xerox.com/news-releases/news-release-details/xerox-completes-acquisition-lexmark-uniting-two-industry-leaders
I print more than you'd think given the times (Score:2)
The kiddos like their coloring pages. And a printed chore chart is a lot neater than a hand-written one on a whiteboard.
At work there's still the need to print out a slide deck and lay it out on a big table to mark up with a red pen before briefing it to a bigwig.
I understand that typed and printed homework is still a thing and might be around when the kids are old enough for that to be relevant.
Not all contractors are online. The bigger ones are but a few small ones still need contracts and such signed on
Re: I print more than you'd think given the times (Score:3)
You got that right. Last time I checked, there was still a huge appetite for printing ...
how else would you print something for safekeeping and then lose that or file it then never refer to it again?
I have clients that still think like that.
Back in the early 2000s (Score:2)
I remember when Lexmark was the new upstart against Epson, HP & Canon.
Re: Back in the early 2000s (Score:3)
I don't think they were ever an upstart, wasn't Lexmark just the spinoff of IBMs printing business?
Re: (Score:2)
> I don't think they were ever an upstart, wasn't Lexmark just the spinoff of IBMs printing business?
Lesxmark was the Spinoff of IBM's PERIPHERAL's business, and included amazing things like the M2 buckling spring keyboards. Then they specialized in printers. Having said that, their printer's division was small an scrapy in comparison with Canon, epson and HP
Re:Back in the early 2000s (Score:5, Insightful)
An upstart they never were - they're a spinoff of IBM. The company entered the world with a large blue spoon in its mouth. From IBM, Lexmark inherited a ton of government contracts and did quite nicely, thankyouverymuch.
You know AI is going to hit (Score:4, Interesting)
The print industry like a brick now that I think about it. As it rips through white collar jobs you're going to see a hell of a lot less printing.
There is a shitload of people who just make documents out of documents and move them up to chain so that information can be summarized and the CEO can decide what he wants to do next.
All of that is going to be done by AI pretty soon. You might have one or two data scientists programming the AI but the reams of people who had the job of taking the data scientists ugly data and making it pretty for a CEO that scraped by on a "gentleman c" is definitely going to get taken by ai and there's no way in hell those are going to be printed.
"known for making machines that spit out paper" (Score:1)
The only thing I remember Lexmark making was the crappy versions of the IBM keyboards. I never associated Lexmark with printers.
Re: (Score:1)
That's a stupid fucking take. They indeed briefly had the keyboard division (before that was bought by Unicomp) but those keyboards were made using the same machines and tooling as when they were owned by IBM. In fact, early on (this was around 1997 when I bought mine), they still had the IBM logos on the housing. The only difference was, they went back to the detachable cord design (later iterations of the Model M, when made by IBM, had non-detachable cords). I was given the choice of an AT or PS/2 connect
Re: (Score:2)
> I also had one of their laser printers, Optra-something-something -- it was 1200 dpi when HP was nowhere near that, fucking fast (yeah, hilarious how the MCU in the laser printer was a gazillion times faster than the 286 in my machine) and it had Postscript 2 support, very cool to write postscript programs that ran on the machine and spit out the results on paper.
While in the uni, a friend was part of the bio-electronics group, they had a super-fast printer, connected to a 286 running OS/2 2.1 acting as a print server for the whole group. You made me remember. Fun times.
I've been in this business 43+ years (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when the "paperwork reduction act" came along in the 90's. People told me I better find another line of work since copiers wouldn't be around much longer. (tech, not sales). Every time a new government rule/law comes along, it "required" more paperwork. Now, all the machines are pretty much multifunction devices. Print, copy, scan, fax, email. Mechanically, they are pretty stable, but it's the SOFTWARE that can drive you nuts. The part that ticks me off about this industry is the RIPOFF of toner/ink. Black toner/ink is one price, but the color is 3-4-5 times more expensive. IT'S THE SAME! Just the pigment is different. When I'm teaching new techs in class, just to screw with them I will switch around say magenta & yellow when they are on a break. When they come back, and make a color copy, the look on their faces is priceless! In troubleshooting, it's common to swap components from one color to another to see if the problem follows the color or stays. If the toner wasn't the same, it wouldn't work. Also, if it were different, the DRUMS would be different for each color. Same with the carrier/developer. If you are 100 miles from the office, on a Friday and the customer really really needs the machine, you need one color of carrier/developer but only have a different color, You install it, run enough copies to run out the wrong color in the carrier (carrier is the "super tiny iron pellets that the toner sticks to) and then supply the correct toner, recalibrate and you are good to go. Yeah, it's a ripoff, but it is what it is.
This is not your dad's Lexmark or my dad's Xerox (Score:2)
Xerox mostly operates in Enterprise printing now, and believe you me, campanies still print a lot. Lexmark operates both in consumer and entreprise printing, so a bunch of new customers for xerox.
The newly joined company will probably be able to do a best of breed product roadmap in HW and SW going forward.
Also, I do not know, and I am to lazy to ask, but there may be geography complimentarities (i.e. markets were Xerox is tronger but lexmark was weaker and Vice versa), that would allow a best of breed appr
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
In what way are they a scam? The user buys printer, hits print, and a print comes out? Are you not using English words correctly?
Re: Lexmark (Score:1, Informative)
The consumer grade stuff has tiny ink tanks packed inside of drm'd cartridges. The machine is sold at a loss and all of the profit is in selling the vendor-locked consumables at a markup.
All the big names are like that and have been since the 90s when "consumer grade computer printer" became a market.
Office/commercial grade stuff is less bad. I have some sort of ink tank printer downstairs that takes actual liquid ink that lasts longer and isn't as marked up.
Re: (Score:2)
Their inkjets may be junque but their big enterprise printers are amazing pieces of engineering. Bulletproof, built to print hundreds of thousands of pages per month without skipping a beat.
Re: (Score:2)
> They're another scam inkjet company. Why do people keep falling for this, over and over again?
They stoped selling inkjets in 2012... It seems they live in your head rent free.