HP will continue to scale up efforts to make and distribute more PCs here in the US as well as in other countries as it transforms its production and distribution from a global model to a more localized model, said HP’s president and CEO Enrique Lores.
Lores made that admission in his opening address at the HP Amplify Conference in Nashville this week, highlighting the important changes taking place in the company around its supply chain.
But what does all that mean for average consumers, like you and me and Joe Shmoe down the street who wants to buy the latest Omen gaming PC? Are we poised to win from such an arrangement? Or lose out badly from geopolitical pressures and rising tariffs? When the HP executive team weighed in, the answer was twofold.
Firstly, the changes will bring more predictability in HP’s stock movement in that “there will be more of the right kind of stock where we want it, when we want it,” said Ernest Nicolas, chief enterprise operations officer at HP. He backed this claim up with data to show how the company had bettered its own supply chain predictability score from just 50 percent in 2023 up to 93 percent this year.
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The second improvement Nicolas highlighted was the speed with which HP can build, move, and deliver customer orders. This is likely to mean you’ll be able to get your products a lot sooner than was possible previously. Again, Nicolas presented data to prove it and said:
“In previous years we weren’t so focused on the customer experience. We’ve designed our supply chain to be much more customer centric. We built applications to track and monitor the customer orders. So, all the way through our shipments we can drill down by market, location, we can look at a certain SKU, all the things we couldn’t do before.”
As well as readying its internal processes, HP has made big strides to set up the infrastructure it needs to operate its new supply chain. In the last two years, it has expanded its US operations and also opened operations in what it considers to be the key growing markets of Mexico, Thailand, and Indonesia. A new facility in Saudi Arabia was also just announced.
As to fears over tariffs, Lores had this to say: “We don’t know how tariffs are going to change and what the different implications will be for different countries. But we have a much more flexible supply chain than in previous years and it’s that flexibility that we will use to minimize the impact of tariffs. He said further, “We’ll also be looking at opportunities to reduce costs and eventually we’ll be looking at price, so those are the three things we’ll be looking at (and in that order).”
Disclosure: PCWorld accepted travel and accommodation to the HP Amplify Conference in order to view and try out HP products that were being released and not physically available in the author’s location.