After Hewlett Packard split into two companies, Dion Weisler, the president and CEO of the newly formed HP Inc., crystallized his computer and printing company’s ultimate goals.

Printing alone sounded stale, but 3-D printing presented much larger opportunities in mass production, personalization and new-age manufacturing, Weisler told CNBC on Friday.

“This is why we got into the production side of 3-D printing. We weren’t terribly interested in home-based printing,” the CEO told “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview. “We see this not as the $5 billion market it is today. We really want to disrupt a $12 trillion manufacturing industry.”

Early on, HP Inc. launched 3-D printing technology for polymers, a material found in many plastics.

“We said we’d get into that business when we could disrupt it with speed, quality and cost, and we have that today,” Weisler said.

The CEO said the rise of 3-D printing seemed to be following Moore’s Law, an observation made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Moore’s theory suggested that as computers and devices get smaller over time, their processors would get smaller and exponentially more efficient.

Weisler argued that, much like in Moore’s Law, 3-D printing will increasingly allow for both products and key manufacturing components like gears to be produced more cheaply and efficiently as time goes on.

HP Inc. is partnered with companies like Johnson & Johnson and Nike for the purpose of exploring the plethora of possibilities tied to 3-D printing, Weisler told Cramer.

“It’s a question of matching the right material science with the technology and finding exactly those kinds of very specific applications,” the CEO said, adding that HP Inc. has built one such application with Johnson & Johnson, the massive medical and pharmaceutical supplier.

During back surgery, surgeons sometimes use spinal spacers meant to match the size of the patient’s spine. They often choose a few spacers from bags of 150 that most closely match.

Weisler said that 3-D printing and HP Inc.’s multi-jet fusion technology helps surgeons create perfectly sized spinal spacers coated with nano-crystals, which make them safe for insertion into human bodies.

“Just imagine the patient outcomes when you can do that, let alone the waste of having to throw out 140 of these things when you’ve selected just one of them,” the CEO said.

As HP Inc. builds out its ecosystem, which has now grown to 65 channel partners in over 170 countries, Weisler told Cramer that the revived company is just getting started.

“We’re selling real products, real technology, an incredible ecosystem of partners and real revenue,” Weisler said. “I guess this would make any venture capitalist ecstatic with what we’ve done in such a short period of time.”

The CEO continued: “We’re going to find ways to not only democratize manufacturing in a way that hasn’t happened since the assembly line was created more than 100 years ago, but it’s going to enable designers to design anywhere in the world, anything they can kind of imagine, and a manufacturer to be a manufacturer anywhere in the world,” he said.

Source: Tech CNBC
HP Inc. CEO: We got into 3-D printing to get ahead of the inevitable manufacturing disruption