On January 31, Fujifilm Holdings acquired Xerox Corp in a $6.1 billion deal that will combine the operations of the U.S. company with an existing joint venture between the two corporations. The historic deal will see Fujifilm own a little over fifty percent of Xerox Corp's shares, making the Japanese corporation the sole owner of Xerox. The resulting company will operate as Fuji Xerox, using the name under which Xerox and Fujifilm have run their fifty-year joint venture.
The acquisition deal merges Xerox with the Fuji Xerox program, which has been in operation since 1962 and primarily does business in Asia and the Pacific region. As a subsidiary of Fujifilm, the new Fuji Xerox will operate out of New York and will be headed by Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson. The CEO of Fujifilm Shigetaka Komori will serve as the company's chairman. The move will allow the existing Fuji Xerox program to expand its market beyond Asia and the Pacific to include Xerox's clientele in North America and other parts of the world.
Fujifilm's takeover of Xerox comes at a time when the print technology industry faces growing competition from smartphones and other innovative devices that threaten to make the sector obsolete. Fujifilm CEO Komori has praised the deal in interviews as a "game changer" - speaking to the Nikkei Asian Review, the executive said, "The combination will create synergies and produce cost savings worth $1.7 billion a year."
Though the deal may be a boon to both companies, Fujifilm's acquisition of Xerox is projected to result in 10,000 workers in Asia losing their jobs. In a January 31 statement, Fujifilm announced that the employees, who work for the existing Fuji Xerox program, would likely see their positions cut by March 2020.
A historic company in the U.S., Xerox was started as the Haloid Photographic Company in 1906 and has become ubiquitous in the vocabulary of the corporate world, if not in its offices. The company's name is synonymous with the activity of its most iconic product, the copy machine. The inventor of the copy machine, Chester Carlson, first filed patents for the invention in the 1930s, but it was with the help of Xerox founder Joseph C. Wilson that Carlson's invention became a widely commercialized and successful retail product. Having seen a period of growth and innovation in the 1960s and '70s, the company eventually saw a diminished market share after the emergence of stiff competition from other print technology companies. In more recent years, new technologies threatened to render Xerox's products obsolete. At the time of Fujifilm's acquisition of the company, Xerox had around 36,000 employees around the world.