HP Inc. (HPQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to the UBS Tech Conference. I'm David Vogt. I'm the IT hardware analyst here at UBS. And we're excited to have with us HP Inc. today. And from the company, we have got Karen Parkhill, Chief Financial Officer. We're going to talk for 30 minutes about the business, about what just happened with earnings. And so Karen, thank you again for joining us today.

Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be here.

So I think many people that are listening and they are in the room understand the HP story at a high level. But maybe just to kind of drill down a little bit into earnings last week. I know you guys just reported. Maybe we can touch on kind of what you're seeing, what you did see from a demand perspective, what you're seeing from a cost perspective, and we can dig into the details there. Maybe just start at a high level of just most recent quarter and how we're thinking about the near-term outlook.

Yes, sure. And I'd love to just give a highlight of our quarter, too. So we just finished our fiscal year this past quarter. So it was our fourth quarter. And I would say amidst a bit of a volatile environment this past fiscal year, we finished the year really strong. We had 4% growth at the total company level, 8% growth within our Personal Systems. That was driven by strength in office and consumer premium. And I'd say while the print market remains soft, we delivered within what we expected with print. In our key growth areas, we saw strong double-digit growth. Within AI PCs, we now have roughly 30% of our shipments or over 30% of our shipments are AI PCs. And we delivered free cash flow right where we expected at $2.9 billion and returned $1.9 billion to shareholders. And I would say, importantly, we also announced our 10th consecutive annual dividend increase. And that just, I think, reflects the confidence that we, management and our Board has in our future. And then we closed out our Future Ready program, which is a 3-year cost savings program where we delivered $2.2 billion in gross annualized run rate savings. That was higher than we had initially committed. We had initially committed $1.4 billion. And we only spent a little bit more in restructuring. So our savings to restructuring, our charges ratio was better than we had initially committed to. And so then as we look ahead, we did give guidance for the next fiscal year. I would say because of the timing of our fiscal year, we were the first company in our sector to guide for this next 4 quarters. And as we look ahead, we do see some headwinds from the increased -- recently increased cost of memory. And so we prudently included that in our guide. We expect that to -- if prices remain high to impact us in the back half of our fiscal year, not as much in the first 2 quarters, which, again, I think is why you see us being slightly different than others. We said that we expect the cost of memory to impact us about $0.30 in the back half. That's about a 90 bps impact to our PS margins. And we said we're being prudent in putting it in there. And so if we can do better, we will. We also announced because we see a great opportunity ahead to put AI even more into our company to boost productivity, to drive further product innovation and to improve customer experience and satisfaction. And so we announced that we've got line of sight to another roughly $1 billion in growth annualized run rate savings over the next 3 years. We're going to continue to build on that program and announce more at our Investor Day this coming spring. But we wanted to give investors what we had line of sight to right now. We expect roughly $300 million of that this fiscal year, and that should also help us offset some of the memory cost headwinds.

Lot to dig in there. I want to start, though, before getting into the details around fiscal '26. Maybe just rewinding the clock for fiscal '25 because on PCs, you've done a phenomenal job navigating tariffs, the potential headwinds that were imposed -- still imposed in some regard, the Win 11 replacement cycle, Win 10 replacement cycle. You've taken decent market share in commercial PC over the last 2, 3, 4 quarters. How are you thinking about sort of the market opportunity as we go into fiscal '26, given those dynamics that you just laid out, obviously, headwinds from component costs where 2/3 of the way through the replacement cycle, I guess, is kind of our view. I don't know if you feel differently. How are we thinking about kind of the shape of the demand curve for PCs, not just in fiscal '26, but maybe longer term, given the consideration that AI PCs are north of 30% of your shipments and what that means for the business?

Yes. So we see continued growth ahead. On the Win 11 refresh cycle, we anticipate that we've got about 40% left to go. We would say from that perspective, a lot of the large enterprises have already switched, particularly in North America, but we see more to go from our SMB customers and across EMEA and Asia Pacific. So we'll be driving that. We expect that to continue through this FY '26 fiscal year. With AI PCs, we see continued uptake. We expect to have our penetration of AI PCs be roughly 40% to 50% this fiscal year and by the time we reach FY '28 to be greater than 70% of our shipments. So we expect that to continue to help us.

Does the shift AI PC help with pricing next year? Because obviously, it's a better performing machine, better processor NPU. Does that help alleviate some of maybe the pricing dynamics in the market? It gives you maybe more umbrella, if I...

Yes, you're absolutely right, David. Yes, it's a richer configuration, and it does garner higher prices, and we have seen those higher prices already and expect that to continue.

So when I think about -- if I think about '26, so AI PC, high-end corporate, despite some of these higher issues with DRAM and NAND seem to be not manageable, but at least you have a road map to address some of these challenges. I mean is it safe to say that the low-end consumer market or maybe some of the low-end devices is where really the most problematic part of the market is for next year? And if that's the case, when we think about those customers, they're less likely to upgrade to Win 11, I would think. So does that give a little bit more runway into maybe fiscal '27 and beyond because they're not going to upgrade this year because of maybe higher prices?

Yes, it could. Time will tell. We'll see. I would say some of the computers that are -- the PCs that are out there are over 4 years old and can't run with Win 11. So you'll just need a refresh from that perspective. I would say the consumer end, the lower end of the consumer is a little bit more price sensitive. So maybe there's some softness there, but we're seeing strength across the Board in other places.

And you laid out that $0.30 impact from higher DRAM, NAND, and that's a net effect of raising prices to offset potentially inclusive of what that means for demand maybe in the back half. So if I think about kind of the shape of your fiscal '26, I know you don't give quarter-to-quarter guide generically, but it sounds like you -- at least the way we're modeling it and thinking about it, margins are going to be better in the first half in PSG. Second half, maybe below sort of the target range. But for the full year, I think you might have said this on the call, sort of for the full year, still within the target range, maybe at the low end. Is that how investors should think about it?

That's absolutely correct.

So when we exit fiscal '26 because I'm trying to think long term about this, we still have tariff costs running through this P&L. You have obviously, the higher DRAM and NAND costs. At spot prices, it would feel like '27 becomes a better margin profile for PSG holistically. I know that's multiyear, but with the restructuring costs and the cost savings that you alluded to, I mean, is that a reasonable way to frame kind of the longer-term opportunity that this is sort of a shorter term, not to call the memory cycle short term, but what you're doing to adjust for the higher prices should maybe be alleviated and you've lapped a lot of the higher tariff costs. I doubt there's more tariff costs coming through, but just maybe how do we think about that long term?

Yes. No, it's a great way to think about it. So from a tariff perspective, we absorbed roughly $500 million of tariff -- increased tariff and tariff-related costs last fiscal year because it wasn't a full fiscal year, we're absorbing about $700 million this fiscal year. And then as we think about memory costs, we think about that being a temporary headwind. And so yes, we intend to continue to drive margin improvement as we move through the longer term.

And then when you think about PCs and the rest of the ecosystem on peripherals, like how are they affected by higher memory? I would imagine it's just really an attached solution in many regards. So people buy new docking stations, mice, keyboard, everything. Is it just simply a linear relationship to units from a PC perspective? It's not like they're carrying a lot of DRAM and a lot of these peripherals. So is that just how we think about that part of your business just so people can square?

Yes. The memory really impact PCs, not peripherals, not printing. It's really an impact on PCs. And as we think about the memory cost headwinds, we've got -- first of all, this isn't our first Rodeo. We've had these headwinds before we are well honed in how we deal with them. We've got long-term relationships with our suppliers, long-term agreements. We've got excellent relationships with them. We're also qualifying new suppliers right now. And we've got a strong balance sheet should we need it for more inventory. We'll also intend to use our vendors and our vendor managed programs on inventory, too. We're going to be focused on our broad array of product offerings and reconfiguring solutions to optimize the memory situation for our customers. We're also driving greater transformation savings to help offset. And then, of course, as needed, we'll focus on price.

You brought up an interesting point. So when you talk about long-term supply agreements, obviously, there's a lot of, I think, market handwringing from the investment community around, quite frankly, the availability of supply. So when you look at your relationships, you've been doing this for a very long time, HP is not a flash in the pan. How long can you reasonably execute agreements out into the future in this type of environment? Is it multiple quarters? Is it a year? Like is there any sort of rule of thumb that we can use to kind of think about how your supply agreements might work?

Yes. No, our agreements are 1 to 2 years in nature.

Even in this difficult environment?

Yes. And we'll focus on maintaining those long-term agreements, obviously. And we're qualifying new suppliers, too. And so we're dealing with the situation exactly how we've dealt with it in the past. And we've got our playbook.

And then on specifications, how are you thinking about what customer response would look like to, let's say, a normal device that they would buy last year for USD 1,500 now obviously has a higher price point. Is it just as simple as, hey, look, we're going to just spend the same dollars on a PC, maybe it has lower specifications. It's been de-spec to some degree? Or do you think depending on the use case when we were talking about this last night, customers really have dedicated use cases for each discrete group within their organization. And so they're a little bit less likely to maybe trade down, if you will, to a more de-spec device?

You know I'd say customers are -- the demand is going to be there. And so we're going to work to configure appropriately for our customers on what they need and price for what they're getting.

Got it. How does AI PCs applications benefit demand? Is it people just buying devices for the future expectation of AI? I guess this is like this is -- I know this is -- it's a difficult question. I'd love to get your perspective from your seat, though, because in our seat at UBS, we have Copilot. I can tell you we don't use it because it's not particularly great. It's more of the Win 11 refresh cycle that drove our upgrades. But are you seeing use cases from your customer lens where like, hey, this new device running, this new processor that HP has launched is the reason why we can make this particular application work for us and make us more productive or creative or whatever the case may be.

Yes. And I think that's what's really exciting because there's more and more coming every day for AI use cases at the edge. Microsoft just recently announced that they're enabling Windows to use AI PCs to drive more and more functionality at the edge. So writing capabilities, voice dictation within Windows. There are security companies, McAfee and CrowdStrike that are doing more and more detection and prevention at the edge with the AI PCs. Zoom is doing more and more every day. And I think what's really exciting is we are purposely working with hundreds and a growing number of ISVs out there that are developing more and more applications that can be used on AI PCs at the edge. So I think that's what's exciting because there's so much more to come.

Yes. No, I'm looking forward to it. We just haven't had a particular use case to really play with it other than the usual third-party apps right now. So we're excited about it. Maybe just one more on PCs. When I think about the portfolio that you have today, you've done a really good job with AI PC. You've taken a lot of market share. You've done deals in the past. You brought in Polycom. How do we think about what the portfolio needs going forward longer term? Like how do you think about the next 3 to 5 years within PCs given Enrique has been front and center, I think, maybe a thought leader on sort of where AI PCs are going for the last couple of years. Like what's the next point of attach or what's the next vision for the PSG market for you?

Yes. Then I think that's what's really exciting because, number one, AI PCs are really exciting for the future. But beyond that, we're working on what we call the future of work, which is making it easier for employees to get work done and using the Poly acquisition that we bought, the -- to enable real-time connection no matter where you are, home, office, et cetera, and make it just a lot easier. We're creating a workforce experience platform. And we're going to be doing more and more of that where we're going to, from a financial perspective, drive more and more recurring revenue across HP. And that's a keen focus for us for our future to add more recurring revenue to make us a little bit more stable, more predictable, higher margin. So I think it's an exciting future.

Alright that's a good segue into recurring revenue print. Over a long-term lens, the company has moved away from more transactional relationships to more recurring revenue. It's been, I think, a very solid success story over the last couple of years. Obviously, the macro environment today is a little bit choppy, and that's -- whether that's headwinds from economic weakness in regions, currency translation is creating a little bit of a competitive dynamic issue. How are we thinking about the trajectory of some of the key underlying drivers of the print business? So like let's start with supply. So I think you've been pretty clear about how supplies is in -- it's a great margin business, but it's largely in secular decline. There are pockets of it like industrial print that are growing faster. How do we think about sort of the shape of that growth curve over the next couple of years?

Yes. So in print, I would say, first of all, there are great pockets of growth. Our key growth areas are doing really well in print. You talked about industrial print. It's been growing for its ninth consecutive quarter now. It's now $1.8 billion in revenue. Our 3D printing business is growing. And as we think about that subscription business, the recurring revenue, our all-in offering for print is growing really strongly right now. And so we're up to more than 1 million subscribers. So very strong at this stage. The office market and the consumer market remain a bit soft. And we're focused on continuing to gain share. In office, we see the usage of our printers being very stable despite the fact that right now, companies are choosing to prioritize other investments over refreshing their print suite, but we think that's temporary, too. In the consumer space, you're right, the Big Tank printers are growing. And I'd say we are focused on doubling down in that area right now with increased product offering with greater marketing and just the muscle of HP behind it. And so Big Tank is a real focus for us in the future. As we look at print right now, we do expect the market to continue to decline, but we expect to gain share, and we've increased prices in supplies, for example, that will help us grow or decline less than the market.

When you think about supplies from a supply chain perspective, obviously, tariffs earlier this year were an impact on print as well, currency rates. How do you think about the long-term impact of price, as you just mentioned, versus maybe supply chain, commodity inflation in print? I mean, obviously, print doesn't use a lot of DRAM and NAND, but obviously, there's other chemical compositions that go into supply. Is that -- is basically the point of price increases to offset effectively some degradation in utilization as well as rising raw material costs? Like how do we think about kind of the different vectors in print, maybe separate from DRAM and NAND?

Yes, definitely separate from DRAM. And I would say our basket of commodities for print is relatively stable. So the increased cost that we've had in print has mainly been tariffs. And yes, we've been purposely pricing as we need to for that. We had two price increases last year. One was right after the initial impact for tariffs and one was after the August increase in tariffs. And so we'll see that full year impact of the increased pricing helping us. And we've got our typical annual increases, too.

And so what is this -- okay, so what does that mean for hardware consumption? I mean, historically, hardware consumption generally led supplies. So maybe let me flip it around. What does it mean for -- so where are we given that you're more recurring? Like how dependent is supplies on hardware sales going forward versus where we were 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years ago? Less dependent, I would imagine, given the recurring nature of a lot of the initiatives that you've taken?

Yes. In terms of our portfolio mix, we're less dependent. Supplies in general is based on the installed base.

Right.

And so it is impacted there. But yes, as we have more and more growing subscriptions and more and more recurring revenue, that clearly helps.

Minutia question. So obviously, your print business has a lot of foreign competitors. How should investors think about the dynamic in that marketplace, particularly given what is something a little bit out of your control, like foreign exchange rates with the yen, notably the yen, has an impact on their ability to price aggressively. How do you think about that competitively? What's the response that HP has historically taken? How are you thinking about it as we kind of move forward into your next fiscal year?

Yes, yes. So our Japanese competitors have had a decent benefit with the yen for a while now. As we look forward, we don't expect anything to change much with the yen. But we have been very focused just amidst that environment of maintaining pricing discipline and placing profitable long-term units in print, and that's not going to change.

Okay. All right. So since we have the CFO, I have to ask some financial questions.

Sure.

So we get asked often, when I think about your fiscal '26 outlook, you've taken into consideration supply chain DRAM, NAND, it's like a $0.30 EPS headwind. You've also guided free cash flow to, I believe, $2.8 billion to $3 billion of free cash flow, but that includes cash outlays for restructuring charges. So you're getting -- it feels like you're getting a little bit of a tailwind from working capital, which is very important to the model. How should investors think about across like a longer-term cycle, your cash flow conversion vis-a-vis your net income generation? And obviously, maybe we strip out restructuring for a second because obviously, that's depressing it. But as long as the PC market is growing, is the expectation that you should have a positive cash conversion cycle and free cash flow should grow with net income, but at a spread above net income effectively?

Yes. So we recognize that free cash flow is really important, obviously, for us and our shareholders, and we're going to be definitely focused on growing that at least in line with earnings. And with the positive cycle that we have with the negative conversion for our PC business, hopefully faster. That's going to be the key focus.

And what's -- I know Antonio, Enrique, PC executives we've talked to print executives, they want money to invest, but you've been really good about paying a dividend, buying stock. How do you envision sort of the capital allocation priorities in '26, '27, '28, any change or still more of the same?

Yes. No, I love our capital allocation framework because it's very clear, and it's going to stay. We focus on returning 100% of our free cash flow to our shareholders over time as long as our leverage -- our gross leverage ratio remains under 2x and there aren't better ROI opportunities.

If I look at your new guide -- your initial guide for this fiscal year, based on our math, I don't think you've commented on this. We think your leverage is still below 2 turns of gross based on our forecast for EBIT and EBITDA. So would that suggest you're comfortable with sort of that cash flow usage profile in '26 at this point despite all of the commodity dynamics and other tariff-related headwinds that you're facing? Is that a fair assumption for next year?

Yes, we are. Our gross leverage ratio right now is a little bit above 2x. But we have purposely earmarked some cash on our balance sheet to pay down a debt maturity that we've got this summer that has really enabled us to repurchase more stock and still remain true to what we said with the rating agencies around how we will treat our balance sheet because we like our current credit rating.

And I got this question earlier, and it came through on the tablet. I know you've done select deals. You've done Humane, you've done Poly. Anything that kind of jumps out at you from a market exposure perspective that maybe investors should think about where it's a nice technological feature or add-on effectively in either of the verticals that you compete in right now?

Yes. I would say for M&A, we're going to be disciplined. And we'll -- for any deal that we might do or could do, it will need to be firmly in line with our strategy. It will need to be a good ROI use of our cash flow, obviously, in line with our framework. And recurring revenue is a key theme for us right now.

So the follow-up, which I was holding was, is future M&A, whatever that might look like, directly compared to the repurchase of your stock, meaning so when you look at every decision, is it versus what is the ROI that HP gets from retiring its own shares? Or is it incrementally different, meaning you could go over your 2 turns of leverage -- gross leverage target for something strategically critical to what you're trying to accomplish? I know you're targeted and selective, but...

Never say never. I would say, particularly where our stock is right now, we like repurchasing because a great ROI.

Like Poly is a good example, right?

Yes. Poly is a great example. And some -- there are M&A that temporarily, you can go above your leverage ratio as long as you're focused on paying it back within a short -- getting it back in line in short order.

Yes. So what I'd like to do at the very end of these conversations is ask you, what do you think the market is missing with regards to the HP story, right? You've had obviously, a challenging macro headwind, but you've taken market share. You've done a really good job from an execution perspective, taking a significant amount of cost out of the business. There's incremental costs, as you laid out earlier, coming out of the business. And despite tariffs, despite NAND, free cash flow is going to be very robust next year. So what do you think the market is maybe misjudging you or maybe doesn't quite comprehend with regards to the HP story?

Yes. I would say we are focused on delivering what we say we're going to do. And I think you've seen us do that. We're going to continue to do that. And as we look ahead, we continue to have growth from not just the Win 11 refresh, but the AI PCs and the more premium mix of our portfolio. As we look at print, we're focused on continuing to operate really well in the environment that we're in there. You've seen us operate at the highest margins that we -- amidst our competitors across that business. That should continue. And we're going to, again, be focused on doubling down on Big Tank placement upfront, that profit upfront to help in the growth area there and help with the margins. And then as we look ahead, we're going to be driving more and more of that recurring revenue. So I do think that the future of HP is despite the macro environment and the headwinds out there that we know how to operate and deal in, the future is really bright.

I have one final question I want to sneak in that came in. Obviously, you just mentioned, I think it was a response to your statement that you really like your stock here. And you said you set aside some capital to retire debt that's coming due in June. Why not go above the 2 turns of leverage? I mean, is that just because of the cyclicality of the timing of your cash flows in terms of quarter-to-quarter. Obviously, it's hard to predict from outside or looking in? Or is there anything structural about the 2 turns of leverage outside of M&A that keeps you at that level?

We like the 2 turns because we like the credit rating that we've got right now. And as we look ahead, we're going to continue to do the right thing and repurchase stock to return to our shareholders, but we're also going to be mindful of watching the memory equation and making sure that we're doing everything prudently. So we'll see.

All right. I think we're out of time. Karen, thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, for attending.

Thank you.