A HP printer is on display at a training workshop for mom entrepreneurs in Makati. Benise Balaoing, ABS-CBN News
MANILA — The Philippines remains one of Southeast Asia's leading markets for inkjet printers, computer giant HP said Wednesday.
On the sidelines of a training workshop for mom-entrepreneurs in Makati, HP Philippines category manager for home printing Trish Alonzo-Manabat said the home printing segment still contributes significantly to HP's business in the Philippines.
"It's still very much alive," she told ABS-CBN News. "When we talk about printing, despite the trend in AI, the digital trend, paperless trend, we still see the Philippine market in terms of inkjet printers being one of the leading markets in Southeast Asia, so that we're behind--I believe we're at par with Thailand and Indonesia in terms of that size," she said.
Manabat said printers are still being used in the academe and in office spaces.
"It's really seen in small offices, in education space, in the academic, in the hospitals. If you walk into a doctor's clinic, you actually see our cartridge-based printers...still used by the doctors to print out yung reseta, medyo digital na rin sila," she said.
"When you walk into a big hospital, you look at their billing. You see our office printing solutions printers there naman, our laser jet printers used for printing out receipts," she noted.
"Even the government agencies, actually, that's still our consistent customer base," added HP Philippines managing director Ida Ong-Co.
Manabat also noted that HP has embedded artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into its printers.
She noted that AI allows optimized print formatting, which prompts the printer to print only the relevant contents of a web page instead of an entire web page.
"For example, you print out a recipe. Okay. And when you print out a recipe, kasama yung search bar, kasama yung images sa gilid, kasama yung ads, kasama yung space. So instead of like one-page recipe printout, lumalabas three pages, right? Minsan yung last page kalahati lang, maraming space," she said.
"So if you print out, you copy-paste the link, print it out using your Windows 11 device...what the HP app will do on your laptop is just look at the page and just get out the recipe, content of that. So from three pages, na madaming space, madaming ink wastage down to one, focus on what you really want to print."
"So it's really more of getting the content that you intended to printSo no wastage on paper, no wastage on ink," she explained.
The executive noted that the AI-enabled printers are now out in retail stores.
[Just] because the trend moves to AI doesn't mean HP's printers are left behind. We're trying to move with the trend," Manabat said.