This may be devastating for the small city of Lexington, Kentucky. Seems like this was one of the only major businesses in the area.
Large groups of Ex-Lexmark folk have ended up in other local tech companies, many ended up at OpenText (via HP via Exstream, the eventual successful startup from a local serial entrepreneur that basically makes the tools to do semi-individualized bulk mailing like bills), Badger (robots for doing retail work) was founded by folks leaving Lexmark, etc.
Amazon has been buying up their old buildings (long, long ago it used to be a sprawling IBM campus that did typewriters, printers, keyboards, compilers, EMI testing...) as they contract.
Like much of the US, Lexington has lost a bunch of manufacturing, but IBM/Lexmark as a major entity is already long gone.
It is funny that they've been bought by a cartridge cloner, and foreign private equity, and are now being bought by a competitor, they keep dying in new ignominious ways.
I really want to know what the deal is with OpenText (formerly MicroFocus). If you're not careful they will eventually buy your business and you will disappear.
That… wow…
We had huge teams of software engineers, embedded software developers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers chemists and specialists in microfluidics. We designed our own image processing ASICs, had specialists in color and perception, had a whole team dedicated to just Linux and dedicated software librarians. There was a team working just on Android. We contributed back to Linux as well as Yocto/Bitbake. The first sign of decline was when suddenly (for me anyway) they announced the closure and sale of their entire consumer inkjet division followed not long after by commercial inkjet. They sold all the inkjet assets off to a partner manufacturer company a bit like Foxconn.
It was wonderful for a while and I am sad to see things get potentially worse for them.
When they hired me out of college, they paid me a $5000 relocation bonus, paid a specialized company to organize the move (even offered to find me a realtor and help sell my house if I had one), paid the moving company in full, paid to have my car relocated there, paid for hotels during the move and then paid me another $5000 to cover any miscellaneous costs from moving that I might incur. They also paid the taxes for me somehow, I guess by adding extra to my paycheck. Never seen the like before or since.
I worked one internship in the color / image science lab, which was super interesting. I learned a lot about the human visual system and theories of image reproduction technology. One of the guys in the lab reached some legendary engineering status ("laureate", I think) for inventing a form of dithering that improved perceptual image quality.
Did you know Tempur-Pedic is Lexington grown? Fast food chain fazolis is based here, long John silver's was. Valvoline moved here a long long time ago.
Hall Rogers is trying to make "silicon hallow" a thing so there's a lot of funding for tech companies to setup shop in Kentucky
But yes, a Lexmark sale won’t make a large impact even if they shut down the HQ. There are local and remote (obviously) opportunities and the CoL is low here.
That’s not to say I don’t care or am happy they got bought but Lexmark has been circling the drain for a solid decade.
Lexington, Kentucky will not be “devastated” by this at all. I doubt Lexmark is even in the top 10 of businesses people would name for being big players in Lexington.
0: https://www.opi.net/news/region/001-north-america/ninestar-offloads-lexmark-assets/
1: https://www.lexmark.com/en_us/careers/job-locations/lexington.htmlApparently Xerox, out of all companies in the world, is in the small list of even bigger employers than Lexmark there.
(I lived for a year in Morehead, drove to Lexington regularly)
Most of the time, all you need is Walmart and Meijer, and you can also find those in Richmond, along with a decent number of other big-box stores and clothing stores and stuff. But yeah, Lexington is definitely a popular shopping destination.
Back when my grandparents lived in Richmond, we would go to Lexington for the mall (not the green roof one, the real one), because Richmond's mall was a decaying husk even in the 1990s, before Walmart moved out next to it, Sears went under, etc. I was surprised to see that it is still open, but I digress.
For context, Walmart employs about as many people in Lexington's three superstores and one neighborhood market as Lexmark does. Losing 2k jobs in a city of 320k people would not be catastrophic. And most of those jobs probably don't overlap with Xerox's business anyway, so I wouldn't expect that to happen.