Lexmark exists because IBM decided printers, typewriters and keyboards were not core business. On 27 March 1991 the investment firm Clayton & Dubilier completed a leveraged buyout of IBM Information Products, and the new company spent the following quarter-century as an independent maker of laser printers and multifunction devices — never a 1990s copier brand in the sense this survey otherwise tracks, but building, across the 2000s and 2010s, the A4-and-A3 enterprise fleet lines that eventually made it worth acquiring twice.

That independence lasted twenty-five years almost to the month. Lexmark announced in April 2016 that it would go private; the deal closed that November at $40.50 a share, valuing the company at $3.6 billion, funded by a consortium of Ninestar (trading at the time as Apex Technology), PAG Asia Capital and Legend Capital — the research department is precise about this because for the following nine years an American enterprise-print brand was quietly Chinese-consortium-owned, a fact rarely printed on the box. The number worth sitting with is the one at the other end of the ownership chain: Xerox paid $1.5 billion for the whole company in 2025, well under half the 2016 valuation. Whatever else changed at Lexmark in the interval, its headline price did not go up.

That second sale closed on 1 July 2025, Xerox having announced the deal the previous December. Xerox’s own chief operating officer told the trade press at the time that the Lexmark name would be kept “temporarily” while the two companies’ product lines merged — the kind of promise that is true right up until it isn’t.

It isn’t, already. By the time this note was researched, Xerox’s newsroom had folded Lexmark’s press archive into its own — the original announcement URL now redirects straight to news.xerox.com, checked live — and at least one Xerox marketing page had started calling the flagship A3 hardware “the Xerox 9-Series” outright, Lexmark’s own name surviving mainly in the image captions. There is one coincidence in all this that flatters nobody’s marketing department: the “X” in Lexmark’s model codes has meant multifunction, and the “C” colour, for years before Xerox came knocking — XC2235, XC9445, XC9525 and the rest predate the acquisition by the better part of a decade. It is, this magazine is assured, entirely a coincidence. We are choosing to believe the assurance.