Xerox ups bid for HP takeover, sets March offer date

NORWALK, Connecticut and PALO ALTO, California — Xerox Holdings Corp. (NYSE: XRX) upped its bid to purchase HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) by just under $2 billion Monday morning in its continuing effort to take over a computing giant and one of the largest players in Northern Colorado’s technology sector.

The Norwalk, Connecticut, printer maker is now offering HP stockholders $18.40 in cash and 0.149 Xerox shares per one share of HP in its efforts to buy the personal computing giant. The revised bid now values HP at $34.8 billion, up $1.8 billion from Xerox’s original $33 billion bid last November.

Xerox plans to tender the offer to HP’s shareholders March 2 alongside its efforts to stock HP’s board with a slate of pro-acquisition director candidates at the company’s annual meeting this spring. Attempting to acquire a majority of a target company’s shares by directly appealing to its stockholders and loading the target’s board with friendly directors are both common hostile-takeover tactics.

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HP has consistently warded away Xerox’s advances since last fall.

HP was once Northern Colorado’s premier tech employer, but has since reduced its footprint to an estimated 600 people at its Fort Collins office, according to LinkedIn estimates.  At its peak in the ’60s and ’70s, it employed more than 3,000 people in its Loveland campus alone and produced the first commercial scanners in its Greeley plant.

HP Enterprise Inc. (NYSE: HPE) also has offices in Fort Collins and Boulder, but is a separate company from HP Inc. created from a 2015 spinoff. Xerox’s takeover efforts would not affect employees at those two sites.