Hewlett-Packard is reportedly about to announce plans to merge its printer division with its PC division, in a move it hopes will cut costs, and improve designs and efficiency.
Under the plan, long time HP executive vice president Vyomesh “VJ” Joshi, head of the Imaging and Printing Group, or IPG, will retire and the printer group will be merged into the Personal Systems Group, which makes the PCs.
The move is said to be part of a cost-cutting and simplification process laid out in more general terms by CEO Meg Whitman in HP’s last quaterly earnings conference call on Febuary 22.
The PC-making unit, if you recall, is the unit that the previous CEO, Léo Apotheker, had been planning to spin off as a separate company before he was let go by the HP board of directors.
Whitman has since discarded the plan, arguing that the PC business gives HP needed scale to negotiate with suppliers. Todd Bradley, once the CEO of Palm, currently runs the Personal Systems Group, and will be the executive in charge of the merged divisions.
According to Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D, who originally broke the story:
The combined business operation will give Bradley responsibility for what is easily the biggest group inside HP. Together, IPG and PSG accounted for $65 billion in sales in 2011, or more than 51 percent of HP’s overall sales. Combined profits were $6.3 billion. At that size, the combined group will be substantially larger than HP’s services group, at $35 billion in 2011 sales, and its Enterprise, Servers, Storage and Networking Group, which recorded $22 billion in sales.
