Is it the slowing Chinese economy, a weakened yuan? Probably both, but whatever the cause, Chinese companies have been very active in acquiring American ones. 

The American printer company Lexmark is being sold to the Chinese group Apex for about $3.6 billion.

Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group, said this trend will likely carry on for years. 

“Already in Q1 of this year, there’s been more outbound Chinese investment than all of 2015,” he said. “So we’re just at the beginning of Chinese companies becoming global players through acquisition.”

An interesting wrinkle in this story is that the printer market in China is still booming. Unlike in the U.S. where Americans use electronic signatures and PDFs, all contracts and invoices still have to be printed out. So Apex, the company acquiring Lexmark, could be buying more than the Lexmark name.