HP CEO on multi-year partnership with Ferrari

We are joined now by HPCEO Enrique Loras from Miami. Enrique, welcome. Good to see you. Good morning, Sarah, and thank you for having me here. I mean, forget the Fed, forget the jobs report. This is the biggest deal. You are taking the title sponsorship spot on Team Ferrari. Why? Well, you know that one of the most important assets that we have in the company is the HP brand and we have been watching the growth and momentum that Formula One has had, The connection that we have with technology, the number of followers and what they have in the world and we thought it was an attractive area for us to invest. And when the opportunity to partner with Ferrari came, we thought it was the perfect combination given the focus both companies have an engineering, the common values that they have and we are really pleased with the impact that we think this is going to have in our brand. And how does it work. I haven’t seen any numbers. I don’t know if you’re willing to share the cost of what a multi year title sponsorship is, but what, what, how much and how and how does it work, what do you get? Well we we don’t disclose the details of the contract, but you can see these partnership impact in two different areas. One is what I mentioned about the impact in the brand, the visibility this is going to create. As we have discussed before, we have a strong ambition to grow in the premium categories, which this will definitely help us there. We have a strong growth objective in gaming categories with young generations. This is going to help us there and also in many growing countries. Ferrari has a strong brand that we are going to be able to leverage. On the other side, you know how technology, how relevant technologies in Formula One and we see a lot of opportunities to use our computing technologies, our communication technologies to improve the performance of the cars, make the team more competitive and to leverage that into our core businesses. Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask because you know as this documentary that we did last year lays out inside track which you can find on Peacock, there’s the plug. It’s it’s about so much more than sticking your name on a car and and the branding it. It really is about using technology working with partners like yours as a testing ground. So, So what will you be involved in? Because I know Ferrari has other tech partners including Palantir and others too. Yeah, think about for example, during the race cars have more than 2000 sensors capturing data real time and they have all this information store. And if you think about what we are going to be able to do with Aipcs and the power of bringing AI to the edge, we see a lot of opportunities to combine both. I was meeting with some of the engineers from Ferrari last night and we started to brainstorm on the possibilities. This is going to make, this is going to bring and there are really, really incredible opportunities to help, to improve the performance of the team. In fact, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have a team of HP engineers join the Ferrari engineers during the races learning, understanding better what problems they have and see how can we help them with all their portfolio of technologies that we have. Enrique, it’s interesting. I mean you could have chosen any, any kind of sport to to dive into marketing partnerships. But I wonder when you think about the overlap between HP and F1, is it about geography, Is it about age group? Is it about income levels? What, what? What’s the magic between the two I think is, is everything you said before, Formula One is a global sport, is the fastest growing global sport. And as you know, we are a global company. It’s a sport where technology makes a difference and clearly we can contribute to the evolution of the sport. And finally, if we talk about the segments where we want to grow premium categories, gaming and younger generations, emerging countries, they have a very strong presence. They are growing in those areas. So clearly there was a very strong match between the two companies.