The US private equity fund buying EFI has brought long time industry leader and former Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson onto its team, sparking speculation that it may be intending to have a look at the big red.
Siris makes no direct mention of EFI in its announcement of Jacobson's appointment as an executive partner, but with the buyout imminent it is a clear move to provide it with print industry oversight. Executive partners are not employees, they operate as consultants.
Siris is paying $1.7bn for EFI in a leveraged buyout that will see EFI gain a debt of around $1bn. EFI has just passed the $1bn sales marker. Alongside its consistent inkjet revenues Siris is aiming to realise super-charged growth in packaging and textile printing from EFI for its returns.
Industry insiders are also speculating that bringing Jacobson on board could point to Siris putting a bid in for Jacobson's former employer Xerox, which had a year-long dance with Fujifilm over who will own the company – a dance which cost Jacobson his job as CEO, and which currently has Fujifilm suing Xerox for US$1bn over the failed US$6.1bn merger.
Jacobson has had several high profile roles in the supply side of print, rising to prominence as CEO of Kodak Polychrome Graphics, then as chief operating officer of Kodak Graphic Communications, before he took over as CEO and president of Presstek.
In 2012 he joined Xerox as its CEO, before he was ousted a year ago after a bitter boardroom battle with major shareholders Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason over the proposed sale of Xerox to Fujifilm, which Jacobson wanted, while Icahn and Deason did not.
Siris says Jacobson “will collaborate with the firm’s investment team and executive partners to help evaluate potential investment opportunities for Siris, as well as help oversee the operations of its portfolio companies”.
EFI was established in 1989 by Israeli genius Efi Arazi, who had previously founded Scitex, Israel's first high tech company, which developed and sold its hugely successful electronic page make-up systems to printers around the world in the 1980s. Arazi was the first to see the writing on the wall for the million dollar systems when the rudimentary Apple Mac appeared, and sold Scitex to Creo before the end of the decade. Creo was later bought by Kodak as part of its strategy to deal with the impending end of its film business. EFI sales in its first year were around $2m, last year they touched the $1bn marker.