HP Inc waves bye to EMEA president with 'immediate effect' HP Inc has bid farewell to EMEA president Nick Lazaridis amid the collapse of the supplies business - historically the company's cash cow. The departure follows the swift resignation of CEO Dion Weisler for personal reasons a few weeks ago, which our contacts close to the organisation insist was not related to the performance …
Printers are commodity now, so people are more likely to go for a cheaper option when they need to refill an empty ink cartridge - less than £15 for three or more full sets of compatible cartridges from Amazon, or £60-odd for one full set of genuine inks. And if printer costs less than £50 to replace where's the incentive to buy genuine ink?
Yeah, great job HP. Fire someone because your products are (A) too expensive, and (B) generally shit.
Amen to that. We used to be exclusively HP at the office, but it was simply uneconomical to keep the old printers running, and the more recent laserjet models fall apart if you sneeze at them. At this point, we've mostly gone to Kyocera - they are much better built, plus the replacement parts and the original toners are reasonably priced. The printers themselves are in fact more expensive than the hp models with the similar specs - but for a printer the up-front cost is an almost-negligible part of the TCO anyway.
Sadly, it's far too late for HP now and anyone who could have made a difference left well over 15 years ago.
The last 'innovative' product they brought out was the Touchpad but they completely fucked that up by trying to compete directly against the iPad which was already established and very much sought after. If they'd pitched it at a third of the price as a loss leader it would have sold well and IMHO been a success. But scrapping it after less than six weeks on sale, instead of rethinking their strategy and significantly lowering the price to see if sales picked up and market share and the ecosystem for it established itself, that was just insane.
Agreed about the Touchpad. It was a good device, marketed poorly. They couldn't sell it at iPad prices but they sold out quickly in the firesafe they had to get rid of the stock. A price in the middle might have worked and if that price meant seeking at a loss for a while then so be it - it could have built market share.
I remember the execs at the time saying things like 'it won't be number one, it will be number one plus' and 'it's a marathon not a sprint'.
A missed opportunity - shame.
HP INC = ink. Ink goes in their (large format I deal with) printers and toner I believe comes under the same company.
Firstly there is nothing that bad about their large format printers apart from the cost of genuine ink cartridges. They are comparable to the only other real supplier in their market Canon. They charge a massive premium for the badge and void print head and machine warranties if you do not use their supplies. Maybe they need to reduce this pricing?
I used to see HP small format A4 machines everywhere but recently it has declined. They couldn't compete with the copier industry Canon, Ricoh, KM etc and bought the Samsung copier arm that is not great (it's absolute crap).
It should have been obvious to them that printing was becoming a commodity product and that they couldn't keep milking (the ink) at this rate.
It may be interesting to know that the last HP course I completed was regarding spotting 'counterfeit, illegal' l supplies.
From their Q3 report (linked at the bottom of the article - https://investor.hp.com/news/press-release-details/2019/HP-Inc-Reports-Fiscal-2019-Third-Quarter-Results/default.aspx), HP Inc's printer business looks like fr the comparative 9 month periods in 2018 and 2019 is:
Printing July 31, 2019 July 31, 2018 Y/Y change
Supplies 9,762 10,190 (4)%
Commercial Hardware 3,429 3,311 4 %
Consumer Hardware 1,893 2,004 (6)%
Looking back on HP's 2018/2017 results and all areas were growing - however I'm not sure clone supplies are the root of HP's troubles.
I disagree with your comments around printing becoming a commodity product - it has been a commodity product for 10+ years with the last real boom (digital photography) coming and going with the move to smart phones. Overall global revenue for the printing and supplies market has been flat or down for the last 7+ years with market share changes being the real driver for revenue flucuations.
Regarding market share in the enterprise environment, it is largely a managed service now - it is rare for companies to choose a printer, they choose a supply contract based on volume and cost and a vendor provides the printers/supplies etc which has hurt HP's market share as the market has moved from the IT spending model (which HP did well in - buy servers/PC's/laptops/network kit/printers from one vendor) to the copier spending model based on cost and volume. Because overall market growth is effectively stagnant, I suspect HP's purchase of Samsung was about acquiring customers, not products.
HP is right, OEM don't need to spend money on R&D. Problem for HP is there isn't much innovation coming from them either. I don't know what else there is left to develop in domestic or commercial imaging systems.
HP have tried a subscription model in domestic market and while it might work for commercial users the reality is most people I have spoken to aren't interested in it and people are generally printing less.
I've tried HP, Epson and Canon; cheap ones; and expensive ones; and the thing they have in common is that they are all dog turd. I hate with a passion having to print anything. The wife and children feel my wrath when they dare ask me. It boils my piss; paper jams, spewing out empty pages and kicking off that there is no paper when there clearly is, printing half a document, refusing to print black text as it has run out of magenta ink, moaning that the ink is non genuine, running out of ink even though I only replaced it the other week and I have barely used it since, nagging that the size of the paper is wrong as its A4 and not letter, whining that the type of the paper is wrong as it's glossy and not premium glossy. If printers were people they would be nasty and useless.
Couldn't agree more. Last "genuine" ink I bought was appallingly bad; loads of gaps, wouldn't print some colours. Bought some generic stuff off Mamzon and it works much better. I still get the "you are not using genuine HP ink" message, to which my response is "You're damned straight I'm not, you thieving %#@£s!".
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