Managing Editor Stefanie Unland was interviewed by The Times for her perspective on the recent HP Inc-Samsung deal.
Stefanie Unland, Managing Editor of The Recycler
The Times article, HP’s billion-dollar deal that it hopes is a licence to print money (subscription), saw the newspaper’s Alexandra Frean interview Unland about the recent deal agreed between the OEMs, with HP Inc acquiring Samsung’s printing business for $1.05 billion (€932.8 million). Unland commented to The Times that the industry was “ripe for a shake-up”, adding that “improved technology and cloud connectivity were helping a decline in printing”.
She added that this was “a bit like iPhones are becoming, everyone has a printer and there has to be a quantum change of functionality to excite someone to buy a new one”. The rest of the article notes that the deal is one that HP Inc believes “will help it to replace copiers with a new generation of multifunction machines that print and copy”, and that it is an “attempt to reinvent the printing and copying industry”.
Unland added that the deal would “reduce HP’s dependency on Canon”, even as the two indicated that they “intended to collaborate further”, with The Times noting that “one of HP’s problems is that while it owns the intellectual property for its inkjet printers, the IP for its laser printers was bought in from Canon”, so it has made “huge profits on its inkjet printers, but a loss on each laser printer sold”.