HP CEO explains Apogee acquisition
October 25, 2018
Dion Weisler, President and CEO of HP Inc
The OEM’s top man has explained how the recent purchase of the British print services dealer was “a defensive measure.”
HP’s £380 million ($490.4 million/€430 million) acquisition of the company was given official confirmation to proceed from the European Commission’s regulators this week, and the OEM is hoping the deal will give it an opportunity to “disrupt the $55 billion (€48.2 billion) A3 copier market and build on its printing strategy.”
The Register reports that the company’s CEO, Dion Weisler, told an audience of IT resellers, managed service providers, and other attendees at the Canalys Channels Forum that the acquisition was an attempt to head off rival companies.
“If we don’t acquire them, one of our competitors will,” explained Weisler, who also talked up the benefits of the purchase to HP’s market share.
“When we got into [the A3 contractual market] we had less than 5 percent market share. It’s important that we get to scale quickly. I don’t think you are relevant in a business unless you have 10 percent market share.”
“This business operates very differently in the contractual world to how the transactional business operated in the past,” he continued. “It is important for us to understand it intimately.”
Weisler further explained how A3 devices and the wider copier market sign contracts for three, five or seven years. “We would be yielding that machine in field population for a very long time. So, as a defensive move, we acquired Apogee to help us learn and grow and to accelerate our sales there more quickly.”
Apogee will receive the same terms and conditions as other third-party HP sellers, and will operate with its own independent Board of Directors, as opposed to incoming HP staff.
“I understand that people [in the channel] may be concerned in the room that we are in this business,” Weisler concluded, adding: “We still do 87 percent [business] through the channel and you should expect that we don’t change that composition largely at all.”
Categories : City News
Tags : Acquisitions Apogee Business HP
