HP Innovation Journal Issue 11: Winter 2018 | Page 48

INTEGRATING SAMSUNG’S
PRINTING CAPABILITIES
INTO THE HP FAMILY
Martin Stier, Global Head of Human
Resources for the Printing Business, HP
Jeffrey Lee, Business Planning Manager
of OPS Development, HP
FORWARD BY MARTIN STIER
Almost two years ago, we announced our agreement
to acquire Samsung’s printing business, convinced this
deal would enable HP to gain the talent, technology and
experience we needed to enter aggressively into the $55
billion total A3 copier market.
everyone at HP feels that we are stronger together and that
this acquisition will be a catalyst for HP to continue leading
and disrupting the office printing market.
With this incredibly strategic investment, HP welcomed
some of the brightest engineers and business professionals
with decades of experience at Samsung Electronics, one of
the most prestigious global companies in Korea. The HP
family also gained hundreds of top research and development
(R&D) engineering experts in printing labs in Japan, U.S.,
China, Russia, and India. Their R&D breadth and the depth
are highly regarded as industry leading across a number
of key strategic disciplines such as, advanced research on
engines, electrophotography, toner technology, cloud and
firmware architects, software development kits, server and
cloud solutions, mobile apps, coding, and OEM product
development, to name a few.
After a lot of work planning the integration, we onboarded
the new employees on November 1, 2017, and they recently
celebrated their one-year anniversary with HP. As our CEO,
Dion Weisler, always reminds us, you either stay humble or
you will be humbled. We planned the integration with this,
in mind. We knew how hard it was, especially for the Korean
team, to be separated from the Samsung Corporation, so
we invested heavily in understanding their history, culture,
operating model, and innovation process. We were amazed
by many of their capabilities, including speed in innovating,
developing technology and bringing it to market, and we
wanted to nurture and learn from them.
Someone who knows this firsthand is my colleague, Jeffrey
Lee. As a Korean-American and a former Samsung employee,
he has experiences and insight that provide a valuable
perspective on our recent acquisition. I’m thrilled that he’s
sharing his story with you today. As we look into the future,
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HP Innovation Journal Issue 11
STORY AS TOLD BY JEFFREY LEE
As a 1.5 generation Korean-American who migrated to Los
Angeles in 1988, I still vividly remember the day my family
received and unpacked the container full of household items
we brought from Korea. So that my siblings and I could learn
English as quickly as possible, we had our TV on all of the
time. That evening I realized a baseball game was on, and
there it came—a walk-off home run by Kirk Gibson of the Los
Angeles Dodgers in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game
One of the World Series. That single home run turned me into
a lifelong, avid baseball fan.
Years later I received my mathematics degree in the San
Francisco Bay Area, worked for a commercial bank in the
Los Angeles area for a few years, and got my MBA in the
Washington, D.C., area before I was hired at HP in Sunnyvale,
California. After my 13-year career in various functions and
disciplines at HP, I was recruited by the Samsung Printing