[vit05]

Xerox Holdings Corporation (XRX) =Market Cap 8.071B HP Inc. (HPQ) = Market Cap 26.638B Xerox ended Fujifilm joint venture today and is already trying a new multibillion-dollar business. I had no idea they still had some relevant product in the global market. But it is very likely that these advances are more about a financial game of activist investors than a long-term plan.

[Aloha]

Xerox is huge in the services business, that's why HP looks good to them, they also still make tons and tons of printers, from big to small

[perl4ever]

Xerox spun off their services business as Conduent, which was basically ACS that they acquired previously.

[Aloha]

This I didnt know

[perl4ever]

Ursula seemed to think her job was to diversify Xerox away from copiers, and then Carl Icahn came along and said, no, there's more value for shareholders in breaking it up.

The Conduent separation happened at the beginning of 2017. There were some dribs and drabs that were transferred to Conduent because they seemed to be services and not copiers, but most of it was the former ACS.

For perspective (if the numbers I just looked up are right), Conduent has 85,000 employees but averages less than $18K in revenue per employee.

[paxys]

What services business? Xerox makes almost all of its revenue from selling or renting printers/copiers. HP itself spun off its services business a little while ago (HPE is a completely different company now).

This is essentially a move for two companies in similar segments that see a slow death on the horizon to combine to cut costs and hope for a successful pivot. It makes sense as well, since the market for printers is already too small for two major players and is just shrinking every year.

[bArray]

> What services business?

They also do document conversion, although I'm unsure of what the business is called publicly (maybe this [1]). They take documents in practically any format and do language conversion, whilst maintaining formatting (a super hard problem). As I understand they get a considerable amount of business from converting technical documents.

[1] https://xeroxtranslates.com/

[daseiner1]

kudos. that's really interesting, actually. never would’ve pegged xerox to be in the high-end translation game. neat service

[tomnipotent]

> What services business?

According to their annual report:

https://www.xerox.com/downloads/usa/en/x/Xerox-2018-Annual-R...

2018

- Revenues: $9.8B

---- Sales: $3.97B

---- Services, maintenance and rentals: $5.59B

[tonyedgecombe]

>What services business?

As margins fell in hardware businesses most of the manufacturers shifted to selling what used to be included in the product as separate service. This then gets extended out to related domains. It's quite common for a corporation to outsource their whole print room to a company like Xerox.

Unfortunately Xerox it's also common to shut down your print room and send more emails instead.

[bluedino]

All the smart printer sales guys got out of the business 5-10 years ago. Companies renew less and less printer/copiers on the contracts every year.

Sadly, less printers = less document management so things are really bad at those places now.

Meanwhile in manufacturing, we still use printers and nobody makes a good laser with a rear paper exit anymore

[throwawayhhakdl]

Xerox spun off conduent, which provides tons of arbitrary business services such as call centers.

[tonyedgecombe]

This consolidation of printer companies has been going on for a long time now. When I started working in the field it seemed every large corporation had a printer division.