NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Xerox Corp. chairman Anne Mulcahy will retire in May, stepping down after more than 30 years at the world's largest maker of high-speed colour printers.

Mulcahy, 57, will leave May 20, the date of the annual shareholders' meeting, Norwalk, Connecticut-based Xerox said today in a statement. Ursula Burns, who assumed Mulcahy's duties as chief executive officer on July 1, will take on both roles.

Mulcahy became CEO in 2001, charged with reversing repeated quarters of sales declines. She was named chairman the following year and helped keep the company afloat by exiting unprofitable businesses and cutting at least 20,000 jobs. Burns, 51, whose succession to CEO marked the first woman-to-woman transition in the Fortune 500, was with Mulcahy through most of her tenure, joining the company in 1980 and becoming president in 2007. Xerox was unchanged at $9.73 at 10:20 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares had climbed 15 percent this year before today.

In 2000, Xerox shares plunged 80 percent as former CEO Richard Thoman led the company to exhaust its $7 billion line of credit. Mulcahy took over, stopped making personal copiers and started focusing on laser printers and colour printing. The moves, along with Mulcahy's cost-cutting, helped increase sales, and she reinstated the company's quarterly dividend in 2007, after it was discontinued in 2001.