Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the top-selling company in Silicon Valley, today will unveil a new lineup of printers, an ambitious Web-printing strategy, and a $300 million marketing campaign to sell it all.
The goal is to spur growth in a unit that delivers a huge chunk of the company’s profit.
HP’s printing group does more than $25 billion in annual sales, and has successfully fended off challenges from the likes of Dell (DELL), Canon (CAJ) and Lexmark (LXK). But when a business gets that large, it gets more difficult to grow quarter after quarter, and year after year – at this point, if the printing unit were to add $1 billion in sales for a year, that would be just 4 percent growth. In the most recent quarter, revenue grew 8 percent over the year before.
To keep things going, HP is launching a number of initiatives, including:
New printers for home and office that feature touch-sensitive screens and better performance.
A marketing campaign conceived by Goodby Silversein & Partners that aims to get consumers and business owners to create and print more ambitious projects, with guidance from the likes of pop star Gwen Stefani.
HP is also teaming up with Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) to make it easier for people to print content from the companies’ online properties and from other sites on the Web.