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Comment by agmater | Hacker News Reader

Why would Ninestar sell off Lexmark, is it just that they got a good price? I thought the pantum and printer business was an interesting move, but maybe they just couldn't make it work.

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Ninestar was already having problems in the US. In 2023 they got an import ban by the DHS [0] and Lexmark had to find a new supplier for whatever Ninestar was sending them. Lexmark had to sell some assets this year to add a bit of liquidity [1].

I guess this is Ninestar "just" getting rid of Lexmark because it was getting a bit messy for them.

  0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-puts-chinese-company-with-kentucky-ties-on-forced-labor-ban-list-ce2e8d00
  1: https://www.opi.net/news/region/001-north-america/ninestar-offloads-lexmark-assets/

1. To allow the merger, Congress imposed some pretty onerous restrictions on any collaboration between the two companies. There is a Lexmark board of former US generals who are supervising the divison. 2. Nine star is the owner, but a lot of the preferred equity used to fund the deal came from PAG, an asian private equity firm. Their investment accrues at a pretty high interest rate and eats into Ninestar’s returns. 3. The whole thesis was that Ninestar would be able to control the amount of counterfeit ink for Lexmark printers. But with another Trump term, and lack of ability to integrate the two, the thesis is broken.

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