COVER STORY
It’s been more than three years since 33-year company veteran Enrique Lores ascended to become HP Inc.’s president and CEO. After fending o a failed takeover bid from Xerox in 2020, Lores is now focused on his original mandate as HP’s new leader: building and executing a growth plan for the company. But while Lores had to make some di icult decisions last fall with a restructuring plan in the face of declining demand, he remains resolved in HP’s commitment to channel partners, which drive most of the company’s revenue, and creating new opportunities for them.
“We design our products, our services to be sold by the channel. We design our business model for the channel to make money with us. We design our processes for us to be e icient and to help our partners be e icient, so it’s really at the core of how we think about the company,” Lores said. What follows are edited excerpts from a recent interview with Lores. Why should channel partners work with HP over its competitors?
job.And that flexibility brings a lot of value both to the com- pany and to the employees.And by having employees that are really happy with the way they can work and that can combine their personal life and professional life, I think it’s a win-win for both sides.That’s how we think about it. From a business perspective, that’s a trend that really helps us going forward because this means more products per per- son, additional services, opportunity to innovate on how our customers collaborate. Partners have clearly a lot of opportu- nity to innovate and to create new businesses. Why are you optimistic about the future for HP and its partners? For multiple reasons. One is, if I look at the multiple oppor- tunities that we have to grow and where the world is going, I see that where the world is going really reinforces … the strategies and the plans that we have. We have talked about hybrid [work] and how hybrid is going to be working.We also have a big business in gaming, which is another business that is going to be growing.We see the need for sustainability and the fact that customers will be willing to buy more and more from companies that are doing the right things. So clearly lots of opportunities to grow. Second is, even in this difficult period of time, even if the headline is ‘crisis’ or whatever, underlying that there are always opportunities.And if you look for the opportunities, you’ll find them.And I think being optimistic helps you to really identify those opportunities and go after them. And then third: I don’t know if the crisis is going to finish in six months or in a year, but one of the advantages of having gray hair is that I know that the crisis is going to be over.And what is really important is that we ... and our partners invest now to get our companies [positioned] in the strongest possible way for whenever the recovery will happen.And I think staying optimistic, making those investments, understanding that times could be tough now but there are going to be better times and they will be soon, and being ready for that is super important.
I think first of all it’s because of our long-term commitment to [the] channel. Different from other companies, we have stayed the course. Since I joined the company more than 30 years ago, we have been a channel company.We haven’t moved from that.And that, I think, should have a lot of value for partners because what this means is that we design our products, our services to be sold by the channel. We design our business model for the channel to make money with us. We design our processes for us to be efficient and to help our partners be efficient, so it’s really at the core of how we think about the company, at the core of how we design the strategy of the company, and this should be really important for partners.And as important as that, because we have an ambition to grow, it’s not only that we want to do it with a partner but as a company, we want to grow.We want to offer and create technologies that will help our customers in the new hybrid way of working.And by doing that, we are going to be offering great opportunities for our partners to do business with us. While many businesses are now pushing for employees to work in the o ice more, there is some pushback from those who prefer to work from home. How resilient is HP’s overall business when it comes to this ebb and flow of hybrid work? We firmly believe that a way of working in the future is going to be hybrid.And that means spending some time in the office and spending some time at home.Working from home to do things that you are going to be doing by yourself. Spending time in the office to collaborate, to partner, to design things together, to discuss difficult problems, to ideate.With it, both things are important. And within that, every job requires a different combination of both. The way we think about that is really that hybrid work means flexibility.And this flexibility is defined by the type of
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