The shares of the world's biggest copier maker fell 15% in early trading. Xerox said earnings will be in line the first quarter's 28 cents a share (all figure in U.S. dollars). Xerox was expected to earn 42 cents, the average estimate of analysts polled by First Call/Thomson Financial.
Xerox reorganized 15,000 sales people last year along product lines rather than geography. Problems arose when it retrained too many workers at once, cutting into sales and spurring a 41% drop in first-quarter profit. Richard Thoman resigned in May after serving as CEO for little more than a year, a period where Xerox's shares lost half their value.
"The problem with large companies is that when they go wrong, they stay wrong," said Jeff Pittsburg of Pittsburg Institutional Inc., which has a "buy" rating on Xerox and expects the shares to trade between $20 and $30 in the next six to nine months. The turnaround "is going to take longer than expected.""12172,0,"The Ottawa Business Journal
