  We investigate the compact submanifolds in Riemannian space forms of
nonnegative sectional curvature that satisfy a lower bound on the Ricci
curvature, that bound depending solely on the length of the mean curvature
vector of the immersion. While generalizing the results, we give a positive
answer to a conjecture by H. Xu and J. Gu in (2013, Geom. Funct. Anal. 23). Our
main accomplishment is the elimination of the need for the mean curvature
vector field to be parallel.
