Xerox said on Tuesday its chief executive officer and most of its board will step down to settle a lawsuit by activist shareholders Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, paving the way for new management to reconsider the contentious deal with Fujifilm.
The company said on Wednesday that it will not provide a forecast for 2018 due to the pending director appointment, nomination and settlement agreement with Icahn and Deason.
It would have reaffirmed its full-year guidance on revenue, adjusted operating margin, cash flow and adjusted earnings per share, in the normal course of business, the company said in a statement.
Xerox, whose shares closed down 9 percent on Wednesday, also canceled a scheduled post-earnings conference call with analysts.
Icahn and Deason, who together hold 15 percent of Xerox, won a rare court order to temporarily block the deal with Fujifilm, which they said undervalued Xerox.
Separately, Fujifilm filed on Wednesday an objection with a U.S. Supreme Court judge over Xerox’s settlement with Icahn and Deason, criticizing the way the company handled the process and said it had not followed proper procedure to change control of its board.
“The current hurly-burly of private communications with the Court, make-shift submissions and midnight filings is not the proper procedure to decide the fate of a $7 billion publicly traded company,” Fujifilm said in the letter to the court that was seen by Reuters.
Fujifilm and Xerox struck a complex deal in January to combine the U.S. company into their existing joint venture, Fuji Xerox, to gain scale and cut costs as demand for office printing equipment declines. Fujifilm was to then take a majority stake in the combined company. read the rest here
