Rajiv Srivastava, VP and GM of Printing and Personal Systems (PPS), says digital, printing and PC markets will continue to flourish.
In an interview with Channel World India, Srivastava said that HP believes “there is enough and more headroom for PCs (laptops and desktops) in India across metros and also non-metros. I am extremely bullish on digital India for the next two to three years”.
The “next level of growth” for technology will be smart cities, he continued, whose numbers will go up to “maybe 40 or 50”. He quoted statistics that show HP enjoys 26 percent of the PC market and 55 percent of the printer market, which is a “good leadership position for us and our PPS channels”.
When asked about the upcoming HP split, which The Recycler discovered last week will take place in November 2015, he confirmed that HP may inflict some “slicing and dicing” and work more closely with PC and printer channels.
“Right now there is [a] lot of churn taking place because of the shift in technology, as the market moves to cloud, mobility, and analytics […] partners who used to sell servers, storage or datacentre components suddenly realised that cloud plays a much bigger role.
“You don’t necessarily need datacentre products but enterprises need services. We are making sure that our partners embrace this new reality and change accordingly.”
The senior official said that the PPS division is in a process of incorporating new partners while consolidating existing ones. “Some are well entrenched in big accounts, and their appetite is not as intense as we would have liked”, he said. Nonetheless, he said there is traction on “skilling and training to make them capable to interact with customers in this new schema of transformation of the tech landscape”.
The smartphone and tablet markets are another sector he commented on. HP is yet to formulate a smartphone strategy for India, while it has implemented a “full-fledged tablet strategy” since 2014. He stated that the OEM has “an extremely strong play in the tablet market in India across multiple OSes (Android and Windows). We have a strong application portfolio of ISVs to help us guide sales and do commercial application-driven selling”.
He hopes to capitalize on the commercial market’s enterprise mobility segment, which is “heating up now”. He went on to cite IDC’s latest mobile tracker report for Q4/2014, which places HP at number five in the rankings, with a nine percent share in tablets. This comes within six months of HP’s entry into the market, while the number one vendor has only 15 percent.
Finally came the question of printing sales, and whether MPS will eventually dominate India. Srivastava affirmed that “the home printer market will be mainly driven by project or research-oriented work through the education vertical. And that segment will continue to buy printers”. However, the enterprise segment is dominating sales “from a services perspective”.
He said that HP has geared up its MPS strategy and predicted that “digitisation will be the next opportunity for printer companies and channels” as enterprises become paperless.
Furthermore, he anticipated that “large corporates will become MPS-dominated, pay-per-use, and print-per-use. The companies managing large amount of records would opt for digitisation. And HP is present across all three segments: home, MPS, and digitisation”.