The Xerox Dundalk Closure and the Next Category for Copier Dealers

Xerox’s Dundalk closure is not a local story. It is a measurable signal for a channel built on pages.

By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2025

In Dundalk, County Louth, there is a building that once did the sort of work you only notice when it stops. It made toner. Not the abstract idea of “supplies,” but the black powder that kept invoices, patient charts, school packets, and lease agreements moving through the world.

That facility is closing at the end of the year. Xerox has sold the site. The last remaining workers have received redundancy packages. A Xerox spokesperson confirmed the plant “will close at years end,” and explained the decision as part of an effort to simplify the business and align with what clients need today. Some of the toner manufacturing will move to Xerox’s Webster, New York facility.

It reads like a small corporate note, the kind that lands in a regional paper and disappears under holiday headlines. For anyone who owns or runs a copier dealership, it lands differently. This is the supply chain talking out loud.

Dundalk was once a symbol of arrival. In 1999, Xerox’s decision to open manufacturing in the area, alongside another facility in Blanchardstown, was treated as a major win for Ireland’s development agency, the IDA. Projections swelled to thousands of jobs. Then technology moved on, the way it always does when it is being honest. The employment promise did not materialize. Operations downscaled over decades. The closing feels sudden only if you have not been watching the slow-motion version.

The copier business has always been good at watching slow motion. Dealers built companies on patient math: a device placed, a contract signed, a click rate that covered toner and parts and a technician’s time. The entire model assumed pages. Pages were the tide.

Then the tide kept going out.

There were years when the industry tried to describe this as a temporary inconvenience. A cyclical soft patch. An economic hangover. Then came digital documents that did not need to be printed to be “real.” Then cloud software that treated paper like a nuisance. Then remote work, which did not invent the decline but made it visible. The printers still ran, but the certainty around volume began to wobble.

Xerox is closing its Dundalk toner manufacturing facility at year-end and shifting some toner work to Webster, New York. That is a supply-chain signal in plain sight: print continues to contract, and OEMs will keep simplifying.

This executive briefing is written for copier dealer owners and principals. It connects the Dundalk move to the longer arc from MPS to managed IT diversification, then lays out why Office Ready Robots, through CORR™ certification, fits the dealer operating model. It includes charts, endnotes, and a 24-month projection built for planning.

Read the Executive Briefing (PDF): Here

Managed Print Services arrived as a form of discipline. It brought structure to an unmanaged fleet, put governance around supplies, and gave customers a single number to argue over. For dealers, MPS turned chaos into a contract. It did not reverse the volume trend, but it made the business more professional.

Then came Managed IT, and the shift got more personal. Dealers became responsible for networks and endpoints and security alerts that fired at 2:00 a.m. The smart ones did not treat IT as a side hustle. They built helpdesks. They hired different talent. They wrote different agreements. They started walking customer sites with a different kind of awareness, less about where the MFP sits and more about where risk hides.

Diversification was never a motivational poster. It was gravity.

The Dundalk closure sits inside that same gravitational pull. Xerox is not the first legacy brand to shrink a manufacturing footprint. It is not the last. The important detail is that this closure is about toner, the recurring piece, the part that used to feel immune. When toner production consolidates, it is an admission that even the annuity has fewer legs under it.

Dealers understand the smell of that admission. They have felt it in the last-minute bid requests, the tighter service margins, the fleet refreshes that get delayed another quarter. They have felt it in the way customers talk about paper now, as a cost center and a compliance headache, not a default.

And yet, the story is not only decline. It is also the channel’s weird advantage.

Copier dealers built field service organizations that can show up fast, diagnose hardware, swap parts, and keep a machine on contract alive in a hostile environment. They learned how to finance equipment and bundle service, and how to sell “uptime” in plain language. They learned how to operate with accountability because the meter never lies.

That skill set transfers cleanly into a category that is already moving from novelty to purchase order: Office Ready Robots.

Not humanoids roaming a sci-fi hallway. Practical robots. The kinds that move things, clean floors, deliver supplies, run repeatable routes, and take the low-status movement tasks that quietly drain labor. In many businesses, those tasks never made it into a spreadsheet because they were too small to name. A person walking a cart down a corridor does not show up as a line item until the person quits and nobody else wants the route.

Robotics companies can build machines. What they often lack is a channel that can install, support, and keep them running in the messy middle of real workplaces. Dealers already live in that messy middle. They already have the trucks. They already have the customer relationships. They already have the contracting muscle.

That is the case made in the PDF report I am releasing into the new year, written for dealer owners and principals who are tired of being told to “pivot” without being shown the mechanics. The report starts with Dundalk because it is a clean signal. Then it traces the longer arc: MPS as stabilization, Managed IT as diversification, and robotics as the next category that fits the dealer operating system.

It is a report built to be used, not admired. Charts. Endnotes. Sourced claims. A straight look at how the print business has been changing and what the next 24 months are likely to feel like if you stay exposed to page volume alone. It also lays out why CORR, the certification framework for Office Ready Robots inside The Cricket Continuum, matters to the dealer channel. Certification in this context is not a badge for a website footer. It is a way to standardize readiness, define service expectations, and make the category legible to cautious buyers.

There is a familiar pattern here. The dealer channel survived the transition from analog copiers to networked MFPs because it learned the new stack without abandoning the old discipline. It survived the first wave of MPS because it treated contracts as operational systems. It survived the move into Managed IT because it stopped pretending the customer’s network was “somebody else’s problem.”

The Dundalk closure is another prompt to take the next step with the same seriousness. The print industry will keep shrinking. It will keep simplifying. The winners will not be the ones with the best speech about “innovation.” They will be the ones who can run a new fleet category with old-school reliability, then bill for it in a way customers understand.

The toner plant is closing. The channel is not.