A hot potato: You can add the print industry to the growing list of economies the hybrid work model is supposedly destroying with employees’ help. HP’s boss laments the sad state of affairs and proposes a subscription-based future as a possible alternative to the looming print apocalypse.
While talking to investors during Bernstein’s 40th Annual Strategic Decision Conference a few days ago, HP CEO Enrique Lores said that the number of pages being printed at home, in the office, or in SOHO environments is lower than it was before the pandemic. Users are now printing 20 percent fewer pages, which poses a significant challenge to HP’s printing business.
The number of printed pages has “clearly” gone down, Lores said, and the main culprit is apparently the hybrid work phenomenon. Fewer people are roaming offices every day, and the number of pages coming out of (HP) printers has gone down accordingly.
Paper must be considered as a “proxy” signal, Lores said, because what happens with pages eventually happens with devices. HP’s estimations before the pandemic were about a 20 percent reduction of printing-related activities, and the current numbers are more or less in line with the company’s predictions.
During the pandemic years, people were seemingly busy printing way more pages than they were before. After this temporary spike, the number of printed pages started to decline again. It’s nothing unexpected, but one of HP’s main businesses is still about selling printers and related, costly supplies to customers and enterprise organizations.
Previously published research by IDC stated that 450 billion fewer pages were being printed in both home and office environments in 2020. This 19 percent decline simply accelerated a long-term trend, and the growing popularity of hybrid work is now poised to deliver the final blow to the once-flourishing industry.
HP also noticed that while the number of printed pages and hardware sales are declining, customers are using their printing devices for longer periods of time. The company is still “trying to quantify” this trend, Lores said, while it is working to extract more value from its most loyal (or tolerating) customers.
HP is the company mostly known for forcing users to purchase its proprietary cartridges over cheap third-party alternatives, with angry customers fighting back with a class action. The corporation recently launched an “all-in-one” subscription offer to provide printers and ink cartridges for a monthly fee, and Lores said that the overall number of subscribers is now amounting to more than 13 million customers.
