Inkjet Wholesale News aims to provide updates on the latest significant occurrences in the field of printing. Whether it’s the launch of a new technology or volatility of market prices, we’ll be here to give you the lowdown on what happened, when it happened, and what it means!
HP Inc. Reveals Hopes of Capturing the Graphics Packaging Industry
Last week, we mentioned how HP Enterprises is planning to offload a good chunk of its work force in order to improve its profits. The plan, according to Meg Whitman, CEO, is to downsize their workforce by up to 30,000 employees. Before that, the company had already removed about 55,000 employees over a period of three to four years. The downsizing effort would amount to HP Enterprise’s workforce being reduced by 10 percent.
The announcement was made at a pre – split event held specifically by the company. During the same event, it was revealed that HP Inc., the other organisation to be created after the split, has hopes of improving its profit margins on the back of potential improvements within the sector of graphics printing for the packaging industry.
During the special briefing, HP Inc.’s new head of Printing Division, Enrique Lores, revealed that he sees similarity between the digital packaging industry of now and the digital labels industry of earlier. He said that the manner in which HP captured the digital labelling industry is how HP Inc. sees itself handling the digital packaging industry.
In other words, HP Inc. is going to bring similar “value propositions” to the digital packaging industry that was brought to the digital labelling industry by HP. Currently, HP has a stranglehold on the global digital labelling market. As per the company’s estimates, about 60 percent of the printers being used in the digital labelling market right now are manufactured by HP.
One of the reasons why HP Inc. plans to focus on the digital packaging market could be its size. The size of the digital packaging market is about $10 billion. HP Inc.’s process of capturing the digital packaging market is already underway in the form of new printer models being released. HP Inc. has already introduced the HP Indigo 20000 and the HP Indigo 30000 printer models. In fact, the 20000 will be showcased by the company at the Labelexpo to be held in Brussels, Belgium.
One of the more interesting aspects of the special briefing came from Dion Weisler who will be the CEO of the new company to be formed. His focus was on the field of graphics industry, which he said was valued at a massive $35 billion. More critically, the graphics industry, as per Weisler, represents 80 percent of all pages printed which amounts to an amazing 20 trillion pages every year.
The above figures being cited by the CEO become even more important when HP Inc.’s business plan is considered. Weisler commented that HP Inc.’s business model will focus primarily on suppliers. Weisler also specified that the graphics industry is in the middle of an upgrade from analogue printing to digital printing. This switch is being driven by the efforts of the company as well.
The graphics printing industry is one that is highly ink intensive which is why HP Inc.’s business model fits it so well. Weisler himself specified that they “love” the devices used in the graphics industry because they use “barrels of ink” as opposed to “tiny cartridges”.
While our last news update explained that HP Enterprise will be offloading anything between 25,000 and 30,000 employees, it didn’t mention anything about HP Inc. that is because HP Inc.’s CFO, Cathie Lesjak, revealed at this special briefing that the company will be cutting only 3,300 in a period of three years with 1,200 employees being let go in the first year itself. HP Inc.’s total workforce stands at 50,000 with a total turnover of about $54.6 billion.
Lesjak said things similar to Whitman as well with regard to the split allowing a chance for restructuring. According to Lesjak, the separation has allowed HP Inc. to clean their “entire cost structure” and improve “design processes”, reduce “material costs”, and “freight and logistics” to “identify significant additional savings”.
Lesjak also firmly put acquisition into HP Inc.’s overall business strategy saying that they will make acquisitions that would be “complementary” to their existing portfolio.
Study Reveals That Future Printers May Lose Their Jobs to Robots
A recent study carried out as a part of the BBC Intelligent Machines series has revealed that printers in the future may not be human at all since they will be replaced by robots. The report titled ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Automation’, was carried out as a part of the special features and programmes of Intelligent Machines series.
The study was conducted at the Martin School of Oxford University by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne. The study was a derivation or spinoff of another such study conducted in the US earlier.
The study focused on 366 job profiles with the aim of identifying how likely automation was to result in lost jobs. From the perspective of the printing industry, the study revealed that the most under risk jobs within the sector is that of print finishing and bindery operatives.
The probability of this job being taken over by robots was 95 percent which put it in the 31st position amongst all the 366 jobs with the first being the most likely.
Simply printers or printing machine assistants were also revealed to be in the top 100 positions with a high probability of about 83 percent which is pegged at “quite likely”. This high probability percentage puts printers’ or printing machine assistants’ job at 77th position in the top 100. Another printing industry job covered in the study was that of pre – press technicians. However, pre – press technicians were not as endangered as other jobs mentioned above. The study showed that the chances of pre – press technicians losing their jobs to robots were almost even at 57 percent. The job profile of pre – press technicians stood at the 161st spot in the list.
The logic behind the study was sound as well. The idea was that jobs that require empathy and creativity were the least likely to suffer from technological automation. On the other hand, jobs that only require physical movement or less complex decision-making would be most susceptible.
Technological advancement and automation has already caused many 20th century jobs to become unavailable to humans. Jobs like typesetters and film planners were abundant in the 20th century but are not available to people today.
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