Xerox Considers Cash-and-Stock Offer For HP (cnbc.com) 43
According to The Wall Street Journal, Xerox is considering making a cash-and-stock offer for HP (Source paywalled; alternative source), which has a market value of about $27 billion. From the report: There is no guarantee Xerox will follow through with an offer or that one would succeed. HP, which installed a new chief executive just last week, is more than three times the size of Xerox and any bid would be at a premium to its current stock price, the people said. Working in Xerox's favor: It expects a $2.3 billion windfall from a deal to sell stakes in joint ventures with Fujifilm Holdings Corp., which was announced Tuesday along with the dismissal of a $1 billion-plus lawsuit filed against Xerox by the Japanese technology company. Xerox has also received an informal funding commitment from a major bank, known as a "highly confident letter," the people said.
A deal would join two household names with storied pasts that have been scrambling to retool their businesses as the need for printed documents declines. Both companies are in cost-cutting mode and a union could afford new opportunities to shed expenses -- to the tune of more than $2 billion, the people said.
A deal would join two household names with storied pasts that have been scrambling to retool their businesses as the need for printed documents declines. Both companies are in cost-cutting mode and a union could afford new opportunities to shed expenses -- to the tune of more than $2 billion, the people said.
There's only one solution (Score:1)
*rases and shakes cane* (Score:2)
I understood that reference!
Although I still don't know the point of a flechette ...
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The usual idea is that they will be hypersonic and explosive, so they will do more damage than a bullet, while being far less massive, enabling either much larger ammo loads or much smaller firearms (or both). Sometimes they are envisioned as being launched in quantity so that you'll be able to do buckshot-like damage and spread out of a pistol cartridge.
More mergers (Score:2)
Also I don't quite follow how Xerox is attempting to buy a company worth more than it is... this reeks of posturing.
Monopolism is the logical end state of capitalism. (Score:3)
At least as long as the market is "free" (to allow un-freeing the market).
Re:Monopolism is the logical end state of capitali (Score:4, Insightful)
Monopolism is the logical end state of capitalism.
Perhaps in a static world. In the world I live in, new products, technologies, and capabilities are continuously being produced which upsets the existing equilibrium. As a result, older dominant companies (HP, IBM, Sears, GM, the list goes on and on) fall out of favor and shrink. New markets emerge and flocks of startups pop up to frantically compete in the new market.
What we're seeing here is a classic example of two older, established companies trying to keep making money in a relatively static market. In printers, the name of the game is now incremental cost reduction and feature addition. Cash-cowing the product lines, in other words. In the mean time, all the investment, excitement, growth, and revolutions are in other markets.
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Perhaps in a static world. In the world I live in, new products, technologies, and capabilities are continuously being produced which upsets the existing equilibrium. As a result, older dominant companies
...buy the companies which develop those products, and ruin them
Re:More mergers (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we need a new Slashdot filter, any mention of Creimer in the text of a Slashdot post gets the -2 rating and becomes invisible.
Re:More mergers (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like an extremely bad idea... HP buying compaq ended up being bad.
And Compaq bought DEC. Xerox is just copying.
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Xerox is just copying.
Well, it is what they do best. *rimshot*
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Xerox is flailing for relevance and has been for decades. They bought ACS for $6.4 billion in 2009 and didn't know what to do with it. Xerox's core had bad management churn, and Xerox Business Solutions was even worse, with quarterly (and sometimes more frequent) emails to employees about executives and senior managers joining, leaving, or changing roles. Xerox sold off the IT outsourcing business--a very large chunk of what was ACS--to Atos for $1 billion in 2015, believed by many to have been a substantia
So they will finally be selling computers ... (Score:2)
After avoiding to, to not be split up, since the days before the Xerox Alto. :)
(Old people and Computerfile viewers will know.)
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After avoiding to, to not be split up, since the days before the Xerox Alto. :)
(Old people and Computerfile viewers will know.)
Not quite as old as the Alto, but I did LISP programming from 1985-87 as an undergraduate research assistant on a research project, funded by a NASA grant, on abstract data types and automated programming techniques on a Xerox 1108 Dandelion (running InterLISP-D). Here's one of the papers my professor produced: Analysis and synthesis of abstract data types through generalization from examples [nasa.gov]
Really nice system for the time and, yes, I'm old(er).
2 weak companies does not equal 1 strong company. (Score:3, Insightful)
The report [cnbc.com] by CNBC stated, "As both companies look to cut costs, sources told the Journal that combining the companies could save more than $2 billion in expenses."
Combining 2 struggling companies may produce only a bigger struggling company.
The precedent is the merger of Sears and Kmart into the Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC). SHC has been shrinking into an oblivion.
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Sears Holdings is failing in large part because Eddie Lampert gutted the company (in ways that benefited him) rather than doing the things that were needed to actually keep the company strong.
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Sears Holdings is failing in large part because Eddie Lampert gutted the company (in ways that benefited him) rather than doing the things that were needed to actually keep the company strong.
Sears Holdings is failing because the world that Sears and K-Mart once lived in no longer exists, and Sears couldn't adapt faster than Amazon could change the market. Lampert is smart. He's doing gradual decline management as he plans for what to do with the assets (like real estate) in the future.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sears is run by an ideological nutcase,
Sears is being run by a pirate who's put up some of his own money to make it look like he's a big loser who has to be satisfied first in a bankruptcy.
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The precedent is the merger of Sears and Kmart into the Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC). SHC has been shrinking into an oblivion.
Burroughs and Sperry merging into Unisys is another great example. They were trying to hold back the tide and failed.
Small fish eating larger fish (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the summary HP is larger than Xerox. In fact it is 27B vs 8B, which is more than 3 times the difference. They even have much less cash in hand (less than 1B in Xerox vs almost 5B in HP).
I do not understand these kind of "mergers". Obviously if there was any, it should be HP buying Xerox. In fact they can buy them almost outright with the cast they have. At least they can just purchase 51% with no issues. The only ways this would work are:
- "Reverse" mergers, where HP buys Xerox, but rebrands using the newsly acquired name / assets
- Lots and lots of leveraged financing. With that much debt (~26B), even at 2% interest, HP would have to spend 50% of their profits to pay off the debts incurred upon them by Xerox. They would be a walking shell of their former selves.
The last tragedy I remember is of Toys'R'Us. They had to service their new owners' debt instead of fixing their bottom line or upgrading their operations. We all know how it ended.
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There is another type of "reverse merger" sometime what see is the board of directors "buying" what they as a better or maybe just more agreeable management team at the smaller company.
However I agree with you here. This looks a lot like someone is planning to inflate Xerox with a massive amount of debt so they can swallow a giant like HP because "reasons","synergies", and widely optimistic predictions of cost cutting where by magic companies systems and process both people and technical so perfectly align
Re: Small fish eating larger fish (Score:3)
Indeed. Anyone invested in either company needs to divest. Any engineers at both should be running for the hills right now. Layoffs abound!
Sure, why not (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's make HP even less responsive than it already is. We have orders from back in May which are still unfilled, so what are they considering doing? Merging with another company and cut even more.
Their printers are even on back order. Went to order several of their color printers and was told by our supplier they won't come in until next month. If we're lucky.
Perhaps instead of cutting people, the ones doing work, HP should consider cutting the salary of those at the top for their boneheaded decisions which is driving the company into the ground.
One would have thought they would have learned from the disaster Carly heaped onto the company, but apparently not.
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You clearly don't know how business works (/s) They likely have downsized their production capacity below their demand with the expectation that it will continue to shrink, and are using the delta to keep their production pipeline full longer. This has the added benefit of stabilizing their quarterly numbers so that there isn't a constant downward trend, making their stock look more attractive, despite it just delaying the downward trend. Got to keep those stock options in the money you know!
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And the other reality is that sometimes a business like HP is just so structurally unsound with so much cultural and political baggage the best thing to is the somewhat orderly winding down you describe in terms of extracting the most value as compared with admitting the jig is up and holding a fire sale today. Its strange to think that with 58B in cash and considerable percentage of market share a company like HP can't be "fixed" but sometimes its true.
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The idea that the printer market means paper, is too limiting for use as a forecast of the printer industry, which continues to grow slowly. Artists use printers for small production runs, using the neologism "giclée" to hide what they're doing. Wallpaper is a potential market for printers, and decorating automobiles is an entirely untapped market.
Do you have a photograph that you'd really like to show off to the neighborhood? Where's the printer that can make the photo into a mural on the side of your
HP & /Samsung (Score:4, Insightful)
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H-P beware: Xerox destroyed SDS (Score:5, Interesting)
SDS legacies included its Fortran IV, the most amazing Fortran compiler I ever used; Meta-Symbol, a meta assembler of incredible power and versatility; and UTS and CP-V, which were operating systems for the 32-bit computers.
The astute
Of the dozen or more machines I programmed in assembler in my career, the SDS/XDS Sigma 5 through Sigma 9 and 5xx series of 32-bit machines were the only machines with an elegant, well thought out instruction set.
H-P beware, you could be the next casualty.
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Capital Extraction Move (Score:2)
There's no way a combined Xerox and HP will ever get back up. People still need PCs, but HP makes middle-of-the-road stuff in that sector. Printing is increasingly a niche market, so both companies are experiencing problems with that. Xerox owns an Indian outsourcer (ACS I think) and HP dumped their services arm into that toxic brew DXC when the split with HPE. Either way, the kind of mega-deal business process offshoring that Xerox does is waning outside of government. (Xerox apparently administers the red
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Palo Alto (Score:1)
Is Palo Alto Xerox Parc was light-years ahead of everyone else back when. Are they developing anything cool?
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Wait, what? (Score:1)
How is this not the other way 'round? When was the last time Xerox was actually relevant? I feel like I buy one photocopier every 15 years. Similarly, I feel like I buy HP laptops by the dozen.