The collapse of the Xerox bid and taking full control of Fuji Xerox (2018)

The parent it could not buy, and the half it firmly secured

The heart of this decision lies in the fact that Fujifilm took the knife to the very mechanism of the joint venture — holding a single product line divided between Japan and the United States. What it first aimed at was a global integration that would buy out Xerox and bind the two companies into one. When that foundered on the opposition of activist shareholders and a court injunction, Fujifilm did not abandon the plan but narrowed its object to just the remaining 25 per cent of Fuji Xerox. What it could not buy was the Xerox parent in Europe and the Americas; what it did secure for certain was management control of the Asia-Pacific business it had shared for half a century.

It missed the integration that would have widened its scale at a stroke, but Fujifilm shifted its footing from a management shared with a counterpart — the joint venture — to a management it could decide on its own. The barriers of sales territory came down, and it gained the standing to fly its own brand, apart from the Xerox name, as the price it received in exchange. In recomposing the failure of an acquisition into managerial freedom through the second-best move of liquidating the joint venture, one can see the Fujifilm character that has parted from its founding business again and again inside a shrinking market. The Japan-US collaboration that began in 1962 thus entered a new stage as the business of Fujifilm alone.