The business and accounting woes of Xerox Corporation have been well documented (no pun intended). But while the company has been busy getting its house in order, competitors in the market for office, specialist and production printing systems took advantage of the company’s travails to capture market share.
As a result, Xerox slipped from market dominance to holding only single digit share.
On celebrating the company’s 60th anniversary in Ireland, Xerox’s general manager, Joe Browne (pictured), has vowed to grow the printing business to 20-30pc market share within two years.
“We want our business back. We are taking it back. We invented it, we built it up. In many ways we forged innovation and then lost it, but we are going to grow from single digit to 20-30pc share within two years,” he says. “Our troubles are behind us and we are focused 100pc on market share and customers.”
Browne heads up Xerox’s 2,000-strong workforce in Dublin and Dundalk, which is spread across manufacturing, tech support, financial services, treasury and corporate governance roles. He explains that the company’s printing business — which was spread between office, production and specialist printing — was typically managed on a direct model, but has been restructured with the introduction of a dedicated group of distributors and corporate resellers.
“Our market share was reduced to single digits. We had no competitive offering and basically hadn’t gone to market in a competitive and meaningful way. While we got our house in order financially, on a business capture basis we were complacent.
“Our road-show strategy [entitled Extreme] will change as we introduce new printer lines and services to the market. We have refocused on innovation and recently secured our 15,000th patent,” Browne says.
He admits that losing the battle on business and innovation was hard to swallow for the company that invented the world’s first printer, computer icon and mouse.
“The restructuring of our sales and marketing efforts will mean definite changes for our direct sales organisation, but changes for the best. These people will be able to focus on demand generation and account and channel management.
“There will be further changes in the coming quarters, as we strive to take Xerox back to where it should have been”, Browne says.
