Lexmark Inc. is an American-based company specializing in the manufacturing of printers, scanners, and related computer peripherals. Lexmark was formed in 1991 as a divestiture of IBM’s Office Products Division. IBM’s first typewriters and keyboards were among the products originally manufactured by Lexmark. Under the five year license with IBM, Lexmark produced.
Today, the company has its headquarters in Lexington, Kentucky, USA. They now specialize in the manufacture of a variety of imaging products and laser printers. With numerous R&D facilities located in several places (including; Boulder, Colorado, US; Lenexa, Kansas, US; Cebu, Philippines; Kolkata, West Bengal, India; Berlin, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden and Irvine, California, US.) Lexmark has succeeded in creating a global presence for its products.
They also have a handful of has regional offices scattered around the world. Their offices can be found in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Africa. They offer a unique array of products and services. Some of the biggest items in their ever-expanding portfolio include the production of printers, toners, scanners, enterprise output management systems, managed print services, document management systems, and business process management. As of July 2018, the company had approximately 9,000 employees worldwide.
History
Lexmark was founded on March 27, 1991. They initially broke off from IBM’s Office Products Division when investment firm Clayton & Dubilier completed a leveraged buyout of IBM Information Products Corporation, the printer, typewriter, and IBM’s keyboard operations. They created several of IBM’s lead typewriters and keyboards at the time. The Model M keyboards, amongst others, were just a few of the devices created by Lexmark during its five-year license agreement with IBM. When the time came for the license to expire, Lexmark was no longer interested in producing Lexmark’s Model M keyboards. IBM shared this view, and so Lexmark split from IBM after buying out the machinery and production rights. Lexmark became a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange on November 15, 1995.
After its inception, Lexmark was involved in several projects and lawsuits; it also became an international company. It entered a period of relative dormancy while still producing its regulars. This continued to the late 2000s, and by 2010, the company was back, acquiring some companies and restructuring its management. Here are its major acquisitions through the 2010s
Lexmark started its acquisitions with Perceptive Software. Lexmark acquired this company in May 2010 for $280 million. The company; Perceptive Software, was originally a software firm that created enterprise content management (″Perceptive Content″ or ″ImageNow″) and document output management applications. Lexmark acquired Perceptive Software to build upon its software offerings.
The Netherlands-based Pallas Athena was the next on Lexmark’s list, and they acquired it in 2011. Lexmark International purchased Pallas Athena in a cash transaction that was valued at approximately $50.2 million. This acquisition expanded the business process management, document output management, and process mining software capabilities of Lexmark’s services.
Lexmark announced the acquisition of the Luxembourg-based BDGB Enterprise in March of 2012. This acquisition included BDGB’s U.S. subsidiary Brainware, Inc. the whole deal was priced for a cash sum of about $148 million. The US subsidiary, Brainware, had an intelligent data capture platform that extracted critical information from paper and electronic documents, validated the extracted data, and passed it to customers’ data management systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and/or financial management systems.
Next was the Australia-based ISYS Search Software and U.S.-based Nolij Corporation. These acquisitions were finalized in 2012 for a total price of about$32 million. ISYS specialized in enterprise search solutions, and Nolij created Web-based document imaging and workflow software.
2013 was a busy year for the company as it acquired a lot of companies this year. First, Lexmark acquired Acuo Technologies (based in Minnesota) in January 2013. Acuo Technologies primarily developed medical imaging document management software. The deal was worth about $45 million. In March of the same year, Lexmark announced acquisitions of two other companies, AccessVia and Twisting. It was a combined purchase with a price tag of approximately $31.5 million. Late in august of 2013, Lexmark bought the Germany-based Saperion AG for about $72 million. Superion specialized in developing and providing enterprise content management and business process management (BPM) software in Europe. Lexmark acquired PACSGEAR in October 2013 for approximately $54 million. PACSGEAR was a provider of connectivity solutions for medical image management and electronic health records
Lexmark acquired a Sweden-based company, ReadSoft, for $251 million in September 2014. ReadSoft was a financial process automation solutions company. It specialized in software solutions for document process automation on-premises or in the cloud.
Lexmark acquired Kofax in May 2015. Kofax had its headquarters in Irvine, California, US, and was a provider of smart process applications. They had a uniques system where they combined capture, process management, analytics, and mobile capabilities to organizations. The deal was closed at a sum of roughly $1 billion.
In April 2016, Lexmark was reported to be acquired by Apex Technology and PAG Asia Capital. This deal was said to cost around 3.6 billion United States dollars. Lexmark was to be acquired at $40.50 per share in the transaction. The first set of talks for the acquisition were begun at the Remax World Expo in 2015. The acquisition deal was closed on November 29, 2016, and Lexmark’s headquarters would remain in Lexington, and its enterprise software line of business would be spun off and “rebranded” to Kofax.
Part of the deal involved the sale of their Perceptive Business Unit portion of Lexmark’s Enterprise Software Services division (e.g., their non-Kofax branded document management products) to the Thoma Brava management group, who agreed with in-turn to sell the Perceptive Business Unit to the Hyland Corporation.
Conclusion
Today, Lexmark manufactures and distributes laser printers and accessories for the government, healthcare, retail, and education sectors. Its headquarters is in Lexington, Kentucky, with a revenue of about $3.6B and 9,000 employees. Lexmark has raised a total of $342M in funding. Lexmark’s main competitors are Dell, HP, and Canon. As of August 2019, Lexmark has 18.3K fans on Facebook and 6.8K followers on Twitter