Xerox CEO Ursula Burns Kills The Company

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Ursula Burns, Xerox’s (NYSE: XRX) CEO for three years, has allowed the company to be crushed by the digital age. The trouble shows in Xerox’s shares which are down 40% in the last two years.

Xerox recently announced third quarter earnings. Revenue fell 3% to $5.4 billion. EPS dropped 9% to 21%. And, the company warned about future numbers

Burns said:

“Steady growth in services is consistent with our strategy. Scaling our offerings in business process, IT and document outsourcing gives us a diversified portfolio that helps mitigate declines in equipment sales and supplies”

But, the process has not worked.

Xerox’s technology revenue dropped 7% in the third quarter, and other units could not make up for that.

Burns cannot blame a poor economy for her inability to make the company thrive in a harsh economic environment, or even to hold its own. Revenue was up only 1% in the first quarter to $5.5 billion. Net income was down. The pattern repeated itself in the second quarter. The state of the economy has not been the major factor in the much company’s problems recently.

Xerox wants to be known as more than a printing company, and perhaps it is. But the transformation is far from successful.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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