Hewlett-Packard Sees Asian Sales Growth At 30%

Bickell told reporters at a briefing the Asia-Pacific region was growing rapidly because many of the company's best and most advanced new products were being developed there.

HP's turnover in the Asia-Pacific region, which has its headquarters in Hong Kong, was about US$5 billion in 1995 out of a worldwide total of around US$31.5 billion, he said.

The company's recent growth in the region had been in excess of 30 per cent a year, he said, adding, I don't see that changing too much.

Asia-Pacific will obviously have an increasing share of HP's manufacturing base, he said. We don't seem to be able to expand our facilities rapidly enough to take care of the growth of our business.

 

Bickell, in Singapore to open the company's new Singapore $250 million (US$177 million) factory, said HP would continue to transfer products to the Asia-Pacific region.

Our growth rates in Asia-Pacific have consistently exceeded those of any other market that we have, so our view is that this will become an increasingly important and a larger and larger part of HP's overall sales, he said.

HP, which has around 60 per cent of the world ink-jet printer market and up to 65 per cent of the laser-jet market, has built a large research and development team in Singapore which is developing HP's hand-held products, such as mini-computers, mobile printers and calculators.

Increasingly we have here an R&D capability which has been given a number of worldwide charters to develop, he said.

When it comes down to these hand-held digital assistants, the responsibility for all future generations of those products will be here.

This is where the market is going. These are not products which are nearing the end of their life-cycle. These are products that basically are feeding into what we believe is going to be the exciting market of the 21st century