Exclusive: In a Major Restructuring, Hewlett-Packard to Combine Printer and PC Groups
Hewlett-Packard will announce a sweeping reorganization today that will move its Imaging and Printing Group, once the jewel in the IT giant's crown, under its PC-making Personal Systems Group, sources familiar with the matter tell AllThingsD.
Context & Ripple Effects
This move has been on the table before. Back in 2009, analysts noted that an HP merger of PCs and printing would fundamentally shift executive power between the two camps (executive power would shift), and the idea was shelved rather than executed. What changed since then: Léo Apotheker's abrupt departure, his pricey severance, the $10.3 billion Autonomy acquisition, and the decision to keep the PC division after last year's spin-off threat — all leaving new leadership free to redraw the org chart.
First-order effects
- Imaging and Printing Group — long described as the jewel of HP's portfolio — loses standalone status and now reports into Personal Systems Group, concentrating authority over HP's two biggest hardware franchises in one chain of command.
- The restructuring lands on top of a battered year for HP: the TouchPad's failure as an iPad rival and the Autonomy purchase mean this consolidation is happening from a position of retrenchment, not strength.
Second-order effects
- The 2009 analysis anticipated where power lands when these groups combine — whichever executive runs the merged hardware organization controls both HP's cash-generative printing business and its high-volume PC operation, reshaping internal resource allocation.
- Pairing printing's steady margins with the thinner-margin PC business gives the combined group a single P&L story to defend to investors, raising the bar for how HP justifies future hardware investments like the printer launches it has planned.
Third-order effects
- If mature hardware businesses keep consolidating under fewer leaders to cut cost structures, HP is drifting toward a model where device categories matter less than scale — a trajectory that points toward further portfolio surgery whose direction remains unresolved.
- The breadth of pickup — New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Guardian and trade press all carried the sourcing on day one — signals how closely investors now read any HP org-chart change as a proxy for strategy under its new leadership.
The trend: HP is consolidating its consumer hardware empires under one roof as PC and printing mature, trading divisional autonomy for cost discipline.