Summary
Anne Mulcahy took Xerox from near bankruptcy to a thriving company with a real direction and purpose. I at one time had a service company that repaired and sold Xerox printers. Before Mulcahy arrived, Xerox was in turmoil, poor quality printers, poor execution, poor performance all around. The first innitiative was to get in the color printing business by purchasing the color printers made by Techtronix. This addition actually gave Xerox a competitive color printer line that they could build on. Before this purchase Xerox had no good quality color printer line. HP was beating them to the punch at every turn. Next was the purchase of Global Imaging. Although Global Imaging is a competitor in many ways to smaller Xerox VAR's. The purchase has proven to be very benefical to Xerox, in the fact that it gave them another avenue to expand and generate revenue. Global Imaging has recently purchased "Comdoc" in Ohio. Comdoc is a terrific regional office document company, great buy!
Analysis
Anne Mulcahy is a tough act to follow. The succesor to this thrown should be prepared to execute as Anne did. There are a number of companies in the digital printing and imaging market that will be ready to take advantage of her departure. She brought a company from the brink of disaster to financial viability.
There were tough choices in the begining of her tenure. She bought Techtronix printer division and promptly fired a great many of the field sales reps at Techtronix. This was a tough decision, but you make tough decisions when your company is on the edge.
There is no doubt the new CEO will have to execute. There are companies waiting on the sidelines to pick up the pieces if there is any failure.
Hewlett Packard and Lexmark had little competition until Anne Mulcahy stepped in. Anne's vision of Xerox made the company once again viable and competitive. Anne made the right decision to pull out of the retail market and to focus on the commercial market. Xerox is now the favored vendor in a number of companies across the USA.
Focus was all apart of Anne's vision and it shows in a new Xerox that can be competitive.
