Printing will never go away

Vyomesh Joshi took over the reins of HP's Imaging and Printing Group five years ago. Since introducing HP's first inkjet and laserjet printers in 1984, the Group has maintained HP's position as the industry leader by selling over 364 million units.

Gulf News: How is the imaging and printing industry doing these days? Is the industry still growing in the digital age?
Joshi: If you think about the Imaging and Printing Group in 2001, we earned $19 billion in revenue. Last year, we grew it to $28.5 billion. So it's still a very big growth engine for HP. We've been growing four to six per cent every year, and our objective is to maintain that growth in the next 10 years...

Just to give you some simple numbers, there are 50 trillion pages printed every year. That number will go up to 53 trillion. The main reason is the information explosion. The web, the content explosion, is really taking off.

What are the major areas of growth for your division?
The key growth opportunity is emerging geography, like the Middle East... Forty per cent of our Middle East business is in imaging and printing, so that's still a big part of it.

The second thing is it's growing rapidly, so our growth was 24 per cent. So if you think about emerging geographies like the Middle East, Russia, China, and India, [they] are a tremendous opportunity because the PC growth is going on [and] will continue.

The second part of the growth will depend on the segment. In the consumer segment, printing from the web will still be a big opportunity for us.

Why is paper doing so well?
The reason for that, I really believe, is that paper is still the cheapest storage. Paper is still easy to handle. I can flip through and read and make notes. People will view a lot of stuff, there is no question about that, but as I said: 50 trillion [pages printed].

So printing isn't dead?
Things going digital will change the way we print, but printing will never go away.

What are the biggest challenges in this region for HP?
I think clearly what we need to do is two key things. The first thing is making sure we build the right infrastructure because infrastructure is what it is all about.

When your region is growing so rapidly and it's a big region - it's not a region you can cover easily - so building that coverage model is very, very important.

We also need to make sure we take care of our talent and we hire the best talent and train them and make sure they contribute to HP's success. Infrastructure and talent go hand and hand.