In a recent article I looked at supplier companies from Rochester N.Y., Kodak and Xerox, to illustrate that while transformation is crucial, how you plan and proceed is really what makes the difference. 

Continuing that discussion is the recent merger/acquisition dance going on between Xerox and HP. I briefly made mention of in that last article, but really didn’t go into any depth. So, let’s start from the beginning. As I previously mentioned, the state of the market for consumer and, more importantly, enterprise printers and MFDs has been in a steady state of decline affecting all of those printer manufacturers. As we previously discussed, you can cut staff which could help the bottom line, but that is really a short-term solution, and won’t necessarily buy you the resources necessary to innovate and grow in the future. 

When you are trying to compete and grow in a declining market, you need to innovate, which usually takes time and, more importantly, money. Or you can merge with a competitor to soften the slide and bring in additional resources and buy time to innovate. I provided some of the earlier Xerox transformational history in the last article. In January 2018, Xerox and Fujifilm announced an agreement to merge the two companies. There were some synergies since they had been in a joint venture, FujiXerox, for more than 50 years. Additionally, a large percentage of the enterprise printers and even some of the production printers Xerox has been selling have been developed and manufactured by Fujifilm.