Czech fund of František Bostl challenges Xerox on finance unit

Prague-based investment fund Starteepo, owned by Czech entrepreneur František Bostl, has shifted from quietly holding shares to openly pressuring the management of Xerox, the legendary American technology company. The fund owns more than 7% of Xerox stock and is demanding that it disclose the financial performance of its credit division, hire bankers, and consider selling it.

Between November 2025 and May 2026, Starteepo bought up 6.6 million Xerox shares for nearly 300 million crowns, and today it owns 9.5 million shares — 7.23% of the company. Alongside the American giants Vanguard and BlackRock, Bostl's fund is now one of the three largest shareholders in the legendary computer and printer maker.

Starteepo used to behave like an ordinary shareholder hoping for the stock to rise. Now the fund has turned into an activist investor — using its stake as leverage on management. That kind of approach is common in the US, but for a Czech fund it is a bold, new move, distantly reminiscent of Pale Fire Capital's bet on reviving Groupon.

Bostl's main complaint concerns the accounting. Xerox Financial Services (XFS), the division that works like a leasing company — financing customers' printer purchases and earning interest — has stopped being reported as a separate line since early 2025. It used to be possible to see exactly how much revenue the division generated; now it has been merged into the general “print and other” segment, leaving only financing revenue visible — $126 million (about 2.5 billion crowns) last year. Data on fees and service revenue, which brought in another $188 million in 2024, is no longer available.

By Starteepo's calculations, XFS's contract portfolio will reach $1.34 billion by the end of the year, and based on how comparable leasing divisions at other companies have been sold, the division itself could be worth around $1.4 billion — roughly 29 billion crowns. For comparison, the whole of Xerox was valued at less than 9 billion crowns on the stock market in early September, even though its shares have nearly doubled since spring.

It is worth noting that all these figures are the fund's own estimates, not official Xerox data, and Bostl has a direct interest in the stock rising, since he himself holds a large stake. In Czechia he is known as the man who has taken a number of local companies public on the Prague Stock Exchange, including luxury-goods manufacturers.