HP chief executive Enrique Lores has shared industry trends affecting the company, and how it is dealing with the challenges following COVID-19 while creating opportunities for partners.
Speaking at the Amplify Partner Conference in Chicago, Lores said that HP has a “realistic optimism,” following a downturn in the global market.
“We are realistic because we know that we are facing a tough environment."
"Many of our key markets are not growing, and we don't expect them to grow in the near future,” Lores said.
“We’ve faced significant supply chain issues.”
“But at the same time, we remain very optimistic about the future of the company.. and it's important not to lose perspective,” he added.
“If we expand our focus and look at where this fits in the trajectory that the company has had in the last few years in 2022 to 2023, we may not grow."
"But if we look at what has happened since 2017, we clearly show a clear growth trajectory," Lores said.
He also commented that “after a market slowdown, there is always a market recovery, and we want to make sure our partners are ready for that.”
“We have a large customer base that we can renew, but also new customers that are going to be adaptive, adopting our technologies, our PCs, our features, our services, and also the new categories that we are going to be creating.”
The age of AI
Lores acknowledged that artificial intelligence (AI) is permeating the current evolution of technology, with an increasing number of organisations incorporating it into their systems following the launch of Microsoft backed OpenAI's ChatGPT.
“During the next year, this is going to accelerate, which means very exciting opportunities for us to grow, including creating new product categories,” Lores said.
“We see the opportunity that it is going to bring to improve the experiences that we provide for customers, to do corrective maintenance, to create better experiences – a tremendous opportunity to improve the productivity of the company."
He said that many of HP’s printers and laptops already use AI within their systems, and will continue to in the future.
Increasing hybrid work
Lores stated that a large focus of the Amplify conference was the trend of hybrid work, where he believed that the “flexibility of being able to work from at home and in the office is here to stay.”
Following HP’s recent acquisitions of Poly, Teradici and HyperX into its portfolio, the company aims to better enable efficient and uninterrupted hybrid work through the use of high-quality peripherals.
“As a company this is a tremendous opportunity for us because this means more products are going to develop for new experiences” leading to “new categories of bigger projects and the opportunity for us to expand in totally new areas.”
HP estimates that there are currently 90 million meeting rooms around the world, whereby only 10 per cent have video conferencing capability.
Lores said that these systems cost US$3000-$5000 per system, highlighting this as a “multi-billion opportunity” for HP and its partners.
Resilience and future-ready
HP’s CEO also shared that the pandemic meant businesses learnt the importance of resilience and being “future-ready.”
“As cost is the major driver of our supply chain, when situation gets difficult, it needs to be balanced with resilience,” Lores said.
“This is what we're doing; redesigning our factories and layout to make sure that we can build more resilient equipment.”
He said that HP sees many changes driven by globalisation, politics and climate change, and how it's important for businesses to be ready to adapt to change in the future.
Government mistrust and company trust
Lores commented that the final major trend HP is seeing is the “mistrust of the government.”
He said this has meant people “trust companies and corporations more than they do their own government,” and how this is an opportunity for HP and its partners.
“Companies that will be able to build a reputation for being trustworthy are going to be the companies that will be winning, and this is clearly the case for HP,” he said.
What these trends mean for HP and partners
Lores said that these four trends that are going to be "critical to HP going forward.”
During the conference, HP announced more than 150 new products and services, aiming to take these trends into account.
“A fundamental part of modernising our work is the acceleration of our journey to offer a stronger value proposition to our customers by expanding the portfolio of services that we offer.”
Lores said he believed “the most exciting part is the opportunity with offering hybrid systems and enabling our customers to work efficiently,” referring to the new adjacencies that will result from HP’s acquisitions.
HP has also made sustainability a company focus, following the launch of its Amplify Impact program in 2021.
“We estimate every year how much business we win because of our sustainability practices. Three years ago, our estimation was that we have grown more than a billion dollars,” Lores said.
“Last year, the estimation was that we have grown more than US$3 billion dollars."
"So that multiplied by three in a year, and we are going to continue to see that growth”
During the conference, HP also announced the bolstering of its Amplify partner program, and new changes to its security solution HP Wolf Connect.
Amelia Norris attended the HP Amplify Partner Conference as a guest of HP.
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