This Week in Imaging: Turnaround Time at Xerox?

by Kathleen Wirth · Published February 7, 2019 · Updated February 26, 2019

This week’s news was dominated by Xerox, which at its Investor Day meeting this week, outlined a broad set of re-organization and cost-reduction goals, all designed to improve the bottom line, and all of which can ultimately be seen as the handiwork of activist investor Carl Icahn, who has long criticized Xerox management. Now that Icahn-backed management is in charge at Xerox, it remains to be seen how this will all pan out.

While some have compared Xerox to Kodak – the latter of which is currently trading at about $3.00 per share versus $29 per share for Xerox – we don’t agree. We believe Kodak’s woes were largely due to two key pivotal decisions: failure to capitalize on digital photography, which it’s credited with inventing, and a decision to enter the consumer inkjet-printer market at the height of the 2008 recession and just when consumers were turning away from at-home printing. (Xerox also had a brief foray into consumer inkjet printing – remember Blue Dog? – back in the ’90s but wisely got out of it.) It’s hard to see how Xerox has made such bad decisions, at least recently, but instead, like others, has had to deal with declining office print volumes for over a decade.

Icahn’s criticism of Xerox, however, has been that Xerox’s cost-cutting hasn’t been effective and that it’s become an unwieldy organization that he’s said is complicated and time-consuming to do business with. We can’t say if that’s true or not, but the new regime certainly believes it and is out to change it in a big way.

This Week in Imaging:

Xerox Unveils Sweeping Plan to Cut Costs, Simplify Operations

Xerox Outlines Strategy for Entering 3D-Printing Manufacturing Market

Xerox Outlines Three-Year Strategy at Investor Day Conference

Ricoh Reports Much Improved Profits, But Slow Sales, for Third Quarter

Konica Minolta Continues to Grow Profits

New Canon imageRUNNER Advance 3rd Edition with Beefed-Up Security

Canon Announces New Océ Arizona 1300 Series UV Flatbed Printers

Canon Launches Automatic Ink- and Toner-Supply Service

New A4 imageCLASS Desktop MFPs from Canon

OKI to Preview New ColorPainter M-64s Traffic Printer

Inkjet Printers Lose Consumer Reports’ Recommendation Over Reliability Issues