What have been some of your key achievements in Portugal?

JOSÉ CORREIA In recent years, HP Portugal has had a positive performance. In 2018, we saw double-digit growth, repeating what we did in 2017. After the split of the company in 2015, we entered an intense innovation phase. Due to the separation, the company became much more focused on the core business, which allowed it to invest in more innovation. That has resulted in products that are well accepted by our customers, increasing our leadership position over the past two years. Considering that Portugal is passing through a positive economic cycle, the overall IT business, in particular the PC and printer business, are seeing considerable growth, and HP is taking advantage of that to the best of its abilities.

JOSÉ ESFOLA We got established here in 1965, and there have been many changes in terms of the way we operate and do business. We transitioned from the copy world to that of digital transformation. We are generally known as an innovative company and are ahead of other companies in the way we do business and interact with customers and partners. We have 120 employees at Xerox Portugal. We also have another entity here, a service center that serves more than 18 countries and has over 250 employees. The business we manage around services and hardware is worth close to EUR60 million. On top of our managed print services and graphic arts offers, we do digitization services and develop software and applications for banks and other institutions. We are heavily involved in the digital transformation.

What makes the Portuguese market unique?

JC In some ways, Portugal is unique, and being a small market gives us certain advantages. Moreover, everything happens faster here than in other mature markets. In the 1990s, Portugal proved itself as an early adopter of technology, and since Portugal’s two biggest cities represent the majority of the population, we can put strong infrastructure in place that allows us to have one of the most advanced telecommunications networks in the world. All this has given us and other companies the chance to see Portugal as a profitable and manageable country in which to introduce new technology. We can easily manage certain aspects of the business here, simply because it is a smaller and homogeneous market. Our comparative performance is correlated with what you see globally. Remarkably, in 2018 HP was able to increase its market leadership for the overall PC business in Portugal, achieving the position of market leader for consumer business for the first time, something we had achieved long ago in the professional segment. Though we expect the PC consumer business to decrease by around 15% in 2018, our projected growth is more than 20% in this business segment. We are taking great advantage of our technology and position in the market, allowing us to lead in five of the six categories we operate in Portugal.

JE In Portugal, we are the market leader in our field—managed print services. Recent data from IDC shows that in color multifunction devices, we have around 40% of market share. We represent a solid operation in Portugal, moving from a direct business to an indirect model with less cost and a better service for our customers. We have exported a great deal of knowledge of this to other Xerox operations. In general, we have customers in every industry, and roughly 70% of our business is with SMEs. People think we only service major companies, but we work extensively with SMEs, which is why we have a huge market share. We do this through indirect channels. We may not have customers in every business area, but every company in the country uses something from Xerox.