'HP is good for India, but India is great for HP': Ipsita Dasgupta, MD of HP India, on AI, the computer market in the country and more

Q: Where does India stand for HP overall? Last year, HP’s market share in India was 31.5%. What is the target for this year or two years down the line?

A: I can’t speak about the market share. [But] I am happy to say that we’re the market leaders and that we are India’s beloved brand as I like to put it. I say this very often: ‘HP is good for India, but India is great for HP.’ What I mean by that is the way India is innovating, it is the future workforce and consumer base of the world. The way India is expanding in things like SMB and entrepreneurship and new business models, it’s inspiring for HP to think about growth markets like India to drive what the future of HP’s business should look like. And as a company that has always played across all of India—from working with jobbers on printing solutions to ensure that [their] daily livelihood is met, and that we provide the right customer support and services all the way to very high-end gaming devices or enterprise PC devices—we play across the entire spectrum. That makes India extremely important. As you probably know, four days after I joined the company (Dasgupta joined HP on October 30, 2023), the global board of HP arrived in India to have their first-ever board meeting outside of the US, which is an indication to you... for an entire board to spend five days in this market just absorbing and understanding the potential of this market. So, there is no question that India is great for HP and very important to HP.

Q: How does your earlier work experience inform your strategy at HP?

A: I have been across six companies now, across multiple industries, ranging from media to consumer electronics to manufacturing. The value of someone like me coming into an industry, like the PC industry, is the ability to think a little bit about things that we’re not already thinking about, models that we’re not already thinking about. But also, to just be able to come into such a successful, huge platform that’s been built and think about how we can behave almost as a start-up and think about opportunities in the market that we can create.

If you think about PC penetration in India today, it’s sub-20%. And yet when you think about the PC, it is really the core sort of device on which you can generate work or create work and learn. So, if I were to use an example to say, if you walked into a room, and you saw three children sitting on three different types of devices, one of them on a PC, one of them with a tablet, one with a phone, which one would you believe is studying and which one would you believe is entertaining themselves? If you were to walk into a conference room [and saw people with] those three devices, which one would you believe is working and which one would you believe is checking their social media likes? And so, if you just think about it naturally, when you think about the PC, it is the most valuable way to contribute and make an impact. In the country, which is today growing at the rate at which it’s growing, where the expectations [are] of becoming the fourth largest economy in the world, we need much more than sub-20% penetration.

So how do we think about that? We need to think about that from an affordability perspective, accessibility perspective and a value proposition perspective. How do we think about consumer end-use cases, very similar to the ones that I just described to you? How do we get a PC into the hands of every child, get a PC into every household? Think about the way people work, live, and play in the future, or even today—whether it’s hybrid work, whether it is becoming more productive to deliver more—and we’re thinking about that from an AI-enhanced PC perspective or an AI PC perspective. Let’s ask the questions so that we go further than we already are today.

Q: What is HP’s vision around AI?

A: We see a lot of AI today and we’ve been seeing a lot of AI for maybe the past couple of years. But as we get further along, it’s becoming very real. When I think about it from a PC perspective, to me, it’s incredibly powerful because you suddenly have a companion. That companion can help you deliver more and deliver better. Just the ability to make work more productive and allow it to be more fun, [and] take away the mundane tasks is really sort of the way I think about the way the AI PC can create value for people.

Q: PC sales had been declining in recent years, till they rebounded in the first quarter of 2024. Where do you see the demand coming from for the next wave of growth?

A: There’s still a lot of room to play in the value that the PC provides. I’ll just use the example of education… we think about how many mothers across socio-economic strata we can connect with on the value proposition of their child getting the best access to learning possible. How do we make that affordable? How do we make that accessible? How do we get those messages out? That’s a key part of it.

But let’s just talk about gaming for a second… there are 300 million gamers in India already. Still, only a single-digit percentage of gamers is on PCs. However, if you look at the way gaming is moving—as a country we’re getting into e-sports and gaming competitions—we are using gaming as a way to generate income. Automatically you move towards the PC when you think about gaming in those ways.

If you look at the trends, there is nothing that indicates that the need for the PC is not going to continue to grow. There will be ups and downs and there will also be periods where segments don’t necessarily [grow].

Q: HP now sells refurbished laptops in India. How successful has this been?

A: India was the first place where we launched it, and it’s been very successful for us. It stems from two philosophies or two values that we have, [and] that I hold very dearly and are part of the reasons why I joined HP. The first one is the idea of sustainability, and the importance of us creating an environment and earth that we want to leave intact to the next generations. So, nothing better than a refurbishment programme to drive that circularity and that sustainability. The second one is the idea of increasing accessibility and affordability—being able to get PCs in the hands of more women, more freelancers, more first-time PC users.

Q: HP manufactures select stock-keeping units (SKUs) of desktops and Chromebooks in India and is participating in PLI 2.0. Could you shed some light on your manufacturing plans?

A: We are very excited about the fact that government is taking the initiative to do something like a PLI scheme across sectors and the sort of development of the manufacturing industry in India. The growth in manufacturing across sectors and the growth of job opportunities is fantastic to see. We applied for and got approval for PLI last year. So, it’s very much part of our plans to expand our manufacturing to do more in India through the PLI scheme.

Q: Can you share some numbers? Would the manufacturing be focussed on India consumption or are you planning to export from India?

A: Right now, I can’t share any numbers, but the goal is to focus on India consumption.

Q: Beyond hardware, what are the primary focus areas for HP going forward?

A: For us, it’s the ability to take our products, our solutions, and our services to people to learn better. So, focus on education, [and] help SMBs and entrepreneurs be more efficient and productive in the way that they run their businesses, and in the way that they expand. And on the way enterprise and government are able to be at the leading edge of technology to drive growth.

Some of that involves thinking about services that we can provide that will help. Some of it is about the actual product that we deliver. But more than thinking about it from a hardware-plus perspective, we’re thinking about it from a customer use-case perspective, to say what are the best ways in which what we make will be valuable in helping drive some of these things. [We want to] drive education in our country to a level where very talented people—we have 2.2 million STEM graduates that come out of India a year—[have access to computers].

Their access to technology is not strong enough if we have a sub-20% penetration of PCs. We can’t have computer science graduates who haven’t spent more than two hours a week on a computer. So, the ability to be able to [help] genuine use cases and the ability to run both pilots and eventually business models that create that accessibility and affordability is the way I think we’re thinking about it more. Which is, how do we place these products—our printers or PC—and then the services that surround those into these areas of activation in the country. 

@nidhisingal