HP (viaCNews) seems to have completed its exit from Russia, as required by the sanctions imposed by the United States in response to Ukraine’s invasion. Recently, HP shut down its Russian website, which usually contains drivers and a hub for receiving the support needed in the Russian language. HP also removed Russia from its Country/ Region list and all landing pages.
When trying to visit HP Russia’s website, it redirects it to its Kazakhstan page, as Russian is one of the spoken languages in the region. While it does allow you to download drivers for notebooks, printers, and other hardware, HP in Kazakhstan does not have online support.
HP also removed its website from Belarus and halted its sales, as HP announced earlier. Like Russia, the HP landing page for Belarus redirects to Kazakhstan. HP Enterprise stopped its operations in Russia and Belarus in 2022. For HP, sales in Russia and Belarus amount to $1 billion.
The Russian news site that reported this indicated that HP did not inform its users or send notifications to its users, asMicrosoft did. However, HP Inc.’s decision to exit Russia and Belarus was set in motion in March 2022. As a result, it has already stopped exporting new products.
During this time, HP’s nationwide sales plunged, eventually being overtaken by other companies, such as a Chinese-based printer company called Pantum. The company now enjoys 53% of Russia’s printer market, which had 16% before 2022. Interestingly, Epson enjoys an increase of 22.1% and still has its Russia landing page active for now. That may change as Epson also suspended its exports to Russia and Belarus in 2022.
Despite sanctions imposed by the U.S., there are alternatives for hardware and software to take over, even if the parallel import thrives. While some have roadblocks that set its transition tolocally made optionstrickier, Russia and China have been working on alternatives for operating systems and other hardware. Where it couldn’t, it resorts to purchasingfrom different countries.
Withdrawal of certain companies paves the way for domestic manufacturers to thrive. Though sanctions are supposed to implement consequences, Russia and China seem to manage with currently available or newly developed solutions to take their place.
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Roshan Ashraf Shaikh has been in the Indian PC hardware community since the early 2000s and has been building PCs, contributing to many Indian tech forums, & blogs. He operated Hardware BBQ for 11 years and wrote news for eTeknix & TweakTown before joining Tom’s Hardware team. Besides tech, he is interested in fighting games, movies, anime, and mechanical watches.
