Xerox Corp. President Ursula Burns will become the first Black woman to head a Fortune 500 company, replacing Anne Mulcahy as chief executive officer, effective July 1, according to a statement released yesterday by the company.

Burns, who has been with Xerox, No. 35 on The 2009 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity^® list, since 1980, started with the firm as a summer intern focusing on mechanical engineering. She was named president of the company in 2007 and has been instrumental in helping to revive the company's financial health after shares plummeted 80 percent in 2000.

Burns' promotion to CEO will make her the first Black woman to head a Fortune 500 company. She will also join the list of four other Black CEOs and 15 other women CEOs of a Fortune 500 company.

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"For the better part of the past decade, she has been at my side helping to turn Xerox around," Mulcahy said yesterday at the company's meeting in Norwalk, Conn. Mulcahy, with the help of Burns, slashed more than 20,000 jobs and did away with unprofitable business lines.

Analysts don't expect a jolting shift in power between Burns and Mulcahy. According to some, the two have been slowly transitioning for as long as two years.

"As the two executives have been working as a leadership team since April 2007, we expect this transition to be seamless; they effectively had a two-year transition period," Cross of Cross Research analyst Shannon Cross said in a statement. "Burns has already been running corporate strategy, global accounts, IT and human resources. From what I understand, Anne is still going to be around full time, handling customer relations and strategy."

While the transition of power may be smooth, Burns undoubtedly is inheriting the $18-billion company's hard financial times. Xerox, feeling the crimp of the economy, has experienced a slowdown in customers purchasing printers and supplies. According to Bloomberg, the company cut its 2009 profit outlook nearly in half.

"She's certainly taking over at a difficult time," Michael Holt, Chicago-based analyst at Morningstar, told Bloomberg. "The challenge will be to try to find demand when most companies are looking at ways to cut their costs on things like printing."

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