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Corner Office

HP Inc. CEO Dion Weisler banks on 3-D printing

Kai Ryssdal May 17, 2016
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Dion Weisler speaks at the 2015 International CES at The Venetian Las Vegas on January 6, 2015 in Las Vegas.   Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Corner Office

HP Inc. CEO Dion Weisler banks on 3-D printing

Kai Ryssdal May 17, 2016
Dion Weisler speaks at the 2015 International CES at The Venetian Las Vegas on January 6, 2015 in Las Vegas.   Ethan Miller/Getty Images
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Dion Weisler rapidly ascended to CEO of HP Inc. in just three years. Weisler has a solid background in PCs, holding positions at Acer and Lenovo before moving to HP in 2012 to head its Asia Pacific and Japan Printing and Personal Systems. When the company known as “HP” was split into two publicly traded companies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc., he was propelled to the top. A large proponent of technological innovation, Weisler is confident that his company will lead innovation in the digital sector despite a decline in the sales of PCs.

On his plans for the future of HP Inc.: 

We’re really excited about the work we’re doing across our core products…. But we’re incredibly excited about the categories we’re creating, and 3-D printing is an incredible part of that. It’s part of a complement of an entire suite of products, but we think that it has the opportunity to tap into a $12 trillion manufacturing industry, and that is pretty exciting. 

Weisler talks about the economic implications of 3-D printing:

We think it actually democratizes manufacturing. Manufacturing today typically happens in faraway places, and that costs a lot of inventory, warehousing costs, costs of capital all are all tied up, and this enables you to move manufacturing much closer to where your customers are. So, companies like Nike, like BMW, like Johnson & Johnson are working with us as close technology partners and figuring out how they can build innovative products where complexity is essentially free … and bring breakthrough products to market. 

On the longevity of PCs in the market: 

Both PCs and printing are mature categories, but there’s still a $415 billion market. I don’t think PCs are every gonna go away, people are still gonna have to interact with their digital worlds. But we’re going to create new categories. Immersive computing, different ways in which you interact with your PCs, take things from the physical world, take them into the digital world, change and manipulate them, and then with 3-D printing take them back out to the physical world.   

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