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Hewlett-Packard Senior Vice President of Personal Systems and Printing John Solomon Wednesday told CRN that the computer giant is getting more price aggressive and leveraging supply chain relationships to assure DRAM supply in the wake of a fire in a DRAM production facility last week in Wuxi, China.
The $120 billion computer giant last week held a two-day, all-hands-on meeting with top executives from its printer and personal systems group and HP supply chain executives to make sure it gets more than its fair share of DRAMs for its PC, printing and server portfolio.
"We cleared all our calendars for two days, and all we did was make sure that we have an unfair share of the available [DRAM] commodity and that we are working with alternative suppliers as well as the supplier [impacted by the fire] to make sure we are well situated with a common theme to grow faster than the market," said Solomon.
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The supply chain push comes with HP stepping up its bid to drive market share gains in its PC and printer product portfolio, said Solomon. "We are getting more price aggressive in terms of the price points we are playing at across the [PC and printer] portfolio," he said.
The interview with Solomon came in the midst of HP's Partner/Customer Solutions Showcase in Atlanta featuring 20,000 square feet of existing and soon-to-be-released new printer and PC products. The HP event, the first in a series of customer and partner gatherings, drew 150 partners and 100 end users.
The HP supply chain offensive came after a fire at South Korea-based SK Hynix's main DRAM production facility in Wuxi, China, last week that pushed spot market prices up 20 percent for the chips, according to market analysts at TrendForce. As a result of the fire, several memory suppliers put shipments on hold until the extent of the fire is better known, according to published reports.
SK Hynix, for its part, said it resumed operations at the fab in Wuxi, China, on Saturday, Sept. 7, after completing safety inspections. "We are continuing our inspection of utilities and equipment to restore the line that was partly damaged by the fire under the cooperation of the Chinese government," SK Hynix said in a statement supplied to CRN. "Further, we have dispatched many experts from our headquarters and established a 24 hour restoration system with partner companies."
The DRAM crisis is a great example of HP jumping on an "opportunity" to leverage its "scale, our relationships and our sense of urgency" to gain market advantage, said Solomon.
NEXT: More Operational Rigor As HP Steps Up PC, Printing Attack
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