VARs were asked during the Channel Affinity study to quantify how many deals they expect to close with certain vendors from July 1 through the end of 2008, and once again, it was HP claiming the top spot with a 39.8 percent share. The top five vendors in this category also aligned with the rankings for deals closed in the first half of the year and the average expected transaction size was more than double compared to actual deals closed in the first half of the year.
Interestingly, HP's chairman and CEO, Mark Hurd, and Cathie Lesjak, executive vice president and CFO, said during the company's fourth quarter earnings call on Nov. 25 that they are happy with the HP installed printer base for the short-term because it means selling fewer low-margin servers.
HP's Imaging and Printing group had revenue of $7.5 billion during the quarter, down 1 percent compared to last year. Lesjak said that an 8 percent drop in number of consumer printers sold and a 9 percent drop in sales of commercial sales were offset by a 9 percent rise in sales of supplies.
A healthy installed base is more important to HP than selling more printers, Lesjak said.
"They're buying the same amount of supplies, and we're not having to make that next investment in terms of placing a hardware unit that's either at a negative profit margin, or at a very low margin," she said.
