COVID-19 Is Taking an Oversized Toll on HP and Xerox (and It's Going to Get Worse)

Although the advent of the personal computer and corporate networking a couple of decades ago was supposed to usher in the era of a paperless office, that didn't actually happen at the time. Indeed, those tools (and ever-cheaper printers) seemingly gave employees and consumers an unprecedented capacity to print pages, which they increasingly used all the way through 2012. Printing icons like Hewlett-Packard -- you know it better as HP (NYSE: HPQ) -- and Xerox (NYSE: XRX) rode that wave to printing riches.

In 2012 though, personal habits finally caught up with technologies that negated the need for physical copies of documents. The world's number of printed pages started to decline then and is expected to continue shrinking into the indefinite future.

The coronavirus contagion that's kept millions of workers at home for weeks likely accelerated the downtrend of the world's need for printed pages. While technology market research outfit International Data Corp. (IDC) expects a slight rebound in printer usage next year before the decline is rekindled in 2022, that temporary optimism may underestimate just how well workers have retrained themselves to work without using a printer.

Source Fool.com