Are Ink Sales Still an Economic Barometer? We don’t think so…
While ink sales have started to rebound at HP, we have to question if something CEO Meg Whitman said in 2012 still holds. Back then Whitman shared ink sales served as a back of the envelope economic indicator with the though being the busier companies are, the more ink they consume. Our thinking today is the indicative value in today’s increasingly Connected Society is likely far less given the rise of cloud services, collaborative software and services as well as devices like the iPad and apps such as GoodNotes that allow people to execute, markup or annotate digital documents.
Printing supplies make up about one-quarter of HP’s revenue, but they are estimated to account for a majority of the company’s operating profit. It was a surprising bit of good news, then, that HP’s printing supply revenue grew by 2% year over year in its fiscal second quarter reported Wednesday. That was the first such growth the segment has seen in four years. HP’s share price jumped 4% after-hours Wednesday following the results.
Source: HP’s Ink Starts Flowing Again — Heard on the Street | Fox Business
