HP wages war on traditional copier market

HP launches range of A3 printers to take on traditional copier market

HP Inc has launched its range of A3 printers as it looks to disrupt the global copier market.

The vendor first announced the products last September, shortly after acquiring Samsung's printing business for $1.05bn.

HP Inc has now officially launched the printers in more than 80 countries as it looks to steal market share in the traditional copier market - a market in which it has not had a presence until now.

Speaking at HP's Innovation Summit in London, Nick Lazaridis, EMEA president at HP, said: "[The A3 range] is about disrupting a very traditional copier market in the office which offers us an available market even larger than the core print market that we [currently] address. We haven't addressed any of this market up until today."

HP claims the range offers the most secure printers available on the market, adding that there is a lack of awareness globally of the threat caused by unsecured printers on the network.

David Ryan, general manager of HP's EMEA printing business, said: "A printer is effectively a computing device that scans, copies, sends commands and is active on a network.

"If we're going to focus on network security, servers, PCs and mobile devices, the time is now to focus on printer security given the damage these devices can do.

"While you hear more messaging in the printer industry around security, a lot of that emphasis [concerns] the document and the data, but very little is about what needs to be done to protect the device."

Battling the copier resellers

Howard Hall, managing director at HP partner DTP Group, said the A3 range will give HP partners the ammunition to take on traditional copier resellers for market share.

"There is a lack of innovation in the sector because you've typically got IT-orientated managed print providers, such as ourselves, and then you've got the typical copier-centric partners who are all about selling the device and making money on the click charge.

"It's never an easy sell because you have such a large army of copier resellers out there, but it certainly gives us the tools and the platform we need to be very competitive. Typically when you're fighting in a losing war you'll focus on price and we haven't always been as competitive as we need to be on price, but we now have the technology we need, the security, but also the pricing is right as well.

"Our view is that these devices are effectively now a PC that prints, copies and scans. You can install applications on them so we've done some really cool work around automating people's workflow for some major corporations; so as well as the sector being really big, the opportunities are really big beyond the device."