HP bares printing innovations for SMEs

To get more customers from the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market in the Philippines, Hewlett-Packard’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) is wisely introducing new printing innovations that address the SMEs’ constant concern on how to do things more efficiently at less cost.

In his first visit to the country as head of HP IPG for the Asia-Pacific and Japan, Christopher Morgan identified SMEs as an important growth market that could benefit from HP’s existing and upcoming printing solutions designed to increase efficiency while cutting down printing costs.

“I expect the Philippines in the long term to remain a growth market for us because of the strength of the SMEs here which will need a lot of printing as they grow… SMEs want to look big without spending like the big companies do. We have the breadth of printing solutions for their every need,” Morgan said.

One of HP’s most recent printing innovations is its Print 2.0 strategy, which makes it easier for people to pull and print from the Web exactly just the content they need. The technology behind Print 2.0 automatically leaves out many of the unnecessary components from a webpage such as ad bars and banners and footers, so that only the relevant text or images are properly printed with no waste.

HP, according to Morgan, also has printing solutions suitable for in-house marketing so that SMEs can do their own high-quality printing of brochures, presentations and other collaterals, which they would traditionally outsource to commercial printers.

“Our in-house marketing printing solutions help SMEs print just the right volume and edit their collaterals anytime to make them timely… they would only go to service bureaus for very specialized printing requirements,” Morgan said. “We are also rolling out design template tools to help SMEs design their own collaterals.”

In addition, Morgan pointed to the HP Officejet Pro line as an example of an inkjet solution for SMEs that delivers robust printing at a low price point. One particular model, the 7380, which sells for P14,000, has a print cost-per-page of only P2.50.

Meanwhile, HP is also proactively educating users on many ways they can carve their printing costs and be environment-friendly in the process. Duplex or back-to-back printing is being practiced in more companies today, said Morgan, although it’s the movement from analog to digital that will have an even greater impact on minimizing print waste while improving the distribution of content.

“Digitization supports the more efficient distribution of timely content and users can decide to print only what’s needed, when they’re needed,” Morgan stressed.

He underlined, too, that aside from SMEs, large enterprises are also now looking at their total expenditures for printing, scanning, copying and faxing because the “cost of doing these annually is much higher than companies realize. When we put all together it would be a significant investment.”

A huge part of that investment goes to ink supplies and, here, Morgan said he wants consumers to make better and educated evaluation based on facts.

“In terms of yield, HP original cartridges have higher yield compared to ink refills. On average, we have 2.4x more yield than ink refills that actually print less number of pages and at poorer quality. So, the fact is, consumers don’t save money by buying cheap ink refills,” he explained.

To encourage consumers to buy original supplies, HP Philippines continues with its long-running Original Rewards Program that asks members to register online their original purchases to earn points that could later be exchanged for goods. Another ongoing strategy is to sell multi-packs that are ideal for users with high-volume printing requirements.

HP executives, meanwhile, said they will soon launch a (print in) color campaign for local SMEs, something which they have already started in some parts of the region. They also hinted on making available special “skins” for printers to give the humble and hardworking hardware some personalized touch.