Fujifilm announced this week that it’s set to take a majority stake in Xerox. The news comes as the U.S. tech stalwart and photocopying synonym struggles to cope with an eroding demand for office printers and photocopies. The boards of both companies agreed to the deal this week, giving Fujifilm a 50.1-percent stake in the combined companies.
The naming conventions on this one are admittedly convoluted, but the situation essentially shakes out like this: Fujifilm and Xerox founded Fuji Xerox in 1962. The 75/25-percent joint venture largely operated in the Japan/Asia-Pacific region, with Xerox maintaining its own footprint in its native U.S.
Under this new deal, the existing Fuji Xerox is becoming a subsidiary of Xerox, with the combined companies now referred to as, get this, Fuji Xerox. In a somewhat futile attempt to avoid confusion, the company has temporarily taken to calling the joint venture, “New Fuji Xerox.”
Here’s a graph that may clear things up, slightly:
Both companies have struggled to maintain profits in a changing landscape that has rapidly moved away from paper driven offices. The newly formed company will result in some pretty big job losses. The companies will close some Fuji Xerox factories and cut north of 10,000 jobs by 2020, largely in the Asia Pacific region.
In spite of all of this, Fujifilm appears to be bullish in its projections. “The combined company is expected to deliver a total of USD $1.7 billion in total annual cost savings by 2022,” the company writes in a release, “with approximately $1.2 billion of the total cost savings expected to be achieved by 2020.”
