It’s no secret that Xerox Corp (NYSE:XRX) may be considered a technology dinosaur. After all, Xerox’s main bailiwick continues to be documents and the printing of those documents. A photocopier seems almost out of place in today’s modern office. As a result, XRX hasn’t exactly been generating a ton of value for its investors. Which is why corporate raider Carl Icahn has come calling.

Uncle Carl, along with some of his activist buddies, have begun to circle XRX shares with the intent of selling it off in the near future. And while it may be good to see the document dinosaur put out to pasture, the question for investors is just who is going to do the buying?

Considering the continued jump to digital, the answer isn’t obvious. For investors, that could mean this one instance where we shouldn’t follow Icahn’s lead.

Icahn Hits XRX Back In 2015

Unfortunately for Xerox, it went right when the office went left. The company had plenty of potential to make a huge leap into the digital document space. As the firm that transformed paper printing, XRX could have easily boosted its reoccurring/fee revenues or created new software as service (SaaS) applications for digital documents. But it didn’t, and it decided to stick to its old ways.

And that’s caused a series of declining revenues and profits at Xerox. Enough quarters like that and the sharks start circling.

Carl Icahn first started circling XRX stock all the back in 2015 when he announced his interest and stake in a tweet. Right from the get-go, Icahn called XRX undervalued and pressed hard for many changes at the 100-year-old firm. That included spinning out Xerox’s business process outsourcing businesses as a sperate company dubbed Conduent Inc (NASDAQ:CNDT).

However, since letting go of CNDT at the beginning of 2017, Xerox has reported declining sales in every quarter. And while shares are up 38% since then, much of that gain- around 20%- came the very first day of the spin-off. Even including that, it’s trailed the S&P 500 by a wide margin.

With that, Icahn is back at XRX again, demanding more changes. This time, the onus is on a complete sale for the printer and copier giant, removing CEO Jeff Jacobson and dismantling a key XRX/Fujifilm joint venture.

And Icahn may just get his way. With the latest push at Xerox, he has Darwin Deason on his side. Deason is the third largest XRX stockholder and received his stake in the firm when it bought his company — Affiliated Computer Services — in 2010. Affiliated’s legacy businesses were what was spun-off into Conduent.

Together, Icahn and Deason own more than 15.7% stake in Xerox and have both expressed their frustration with the firm’s direction and outlook. With a market cap of just $8 billion, Xerox is swallow-able by a larger firm or private equity house. The question is just who would want it?

A Hard Sell At XRX

That question gets harder to answer when you look at all the problems facing Xerox. Last quarter, Xerox posted a 5% decline in overall revenues, while EPS gains were less than 2%. XRX currently features a small operating margins of only 12% as well.

These aren’t exactly booming metrics and Icahn would need to find a firm willing to take on some serious synergies to make it work. And those synergies wouldn’t do anything to fix declining revenues, just reduce costs/boost profits.

That might be difficult — especially since obvious XRX buyer HP Inc (NYSE:HPQ) recently purchased Samsung’s printer division to “help to disrupt the $55 billion A3 copier market.”

And given the jump into the digital office, printers and photocopiers are quickly becoming a dying asset anyway.

That leaves the high-tech stuff and XRX does have a rich patent portfolio. It filed nearly 1,000 U.S. patent applications last year including one that allows for the manipulation of text wearing a virtual-reality headset. Those could be a prize for some larger tech firm.

But the price tag for the firm including a buyout premium is a lot of coin to hand over. It’s unclear what these patents are really worth in terms of the future.

And it’s unclear if Icahn would be willing to sell-off Xerox piecemeal. Think Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) wants a printer business? No. But it might be forced to grab if it would want some of XRX’s patent portfolio. That’ll probably turn a lot of folks away.

In the end, the buyout of XRX may not come.

Just Take the Gains

For investors holding XRX or looking at Xerox, the real answer might be to take the gains and just walk away. Icahn and company have a lot of work to do in order to get a deal and make things right at the firm.

Fixing Xerox and getting ready it for a sale isn’t going to be a quick process if it even happens at all. The stock has continued to pop on Icahn’s involvement but is still trailing the S&P 500. That’s a good sign that the market doesn’t think the deal will net a ton of gains.

All in all, investors may want to forget about Xerox and its pending battle, there are bigger fish in the sea to catch.

As of this writing, Aaron Levitt did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.