HP Inc. (NYSE:HPQ) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Enrique Lores: I think there are two big positive trends that I think is worth to highlight. Today, the installed base is significantly higher than what it was before. And therefore, at some point, these PCs need to be refreshed. So this gives us a positive tailwind for the business. Second, from a revenue perspective, as I said before, the way PCs are used today, the applications that are being used for drive better mix require better configurations. And when we put both of them together, this gives us the opportunity of them to be bigger. Additional to that, we see the adjacencies around PCs like the hybrid opportunity in video conferencing systems, cameras that are €“ and we believe the hybrid work is here to stay. That’s another incremental opportunity versus what we saw in 2019. And the shift to services, whether it’s contractual services for businesses or subscriptions for consumers also gives us an opportunity of growing the business and growing the TAM.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thank you.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Jim Suva with Citigroup.

James Suva: Thank you. And congratulations on the results and outlook. It’s very impressive considered the macro outlook. Question, Enrique, I’m €“ me and my family are a subscription on Instant Ink, and we love it. Your comments about shifting to subscriptions. Was that for all options of your various projects? Or was it you actually think the future sales actually strategically as you think everyone will probably be doing subscriptions only? The reason why I ask is I just think there might be kind of the view of potentially both of them helping out. But I just kind of wanted to see, I mean you said subscriptions for everything, how far down you’re kind of thinking about for every single transaction sale? Or is it more of options based upon your clientele?

Enrique Lores: It will be more options depending on the clientele. We know that there are customers that will be willing to buy subscriptions and others that prefer not to. And of course, we will be offering both. But since you are a customer already of Instant Ink, let me do a small commercial, you should enroll now to the paper program because now you can get not only ink, but you can get only paper, which is an addition to the program. And over time, you will be able to buy the next printer and other type of services from us. So this is part of the road map that we have of expanding the portfolio of subscriptions that we had in the past and that’s now is starting to become real.

James Suva: Well, Enrique, you never know, you can keep an eye on my account. And then a question for Marie. Can you talk about your capital allocation plans? Because now Poly is integrated, it’s a full-year into your books. How should we be thinking about stock buyback, debt levels, investment, cash levels, where you feel comfortable in uses of capital? Thank you.

Marie Myers: Yes, no worries. Good afternoon, Jim. I’d say nothing’s changed. We continue to remain the same capital allocation approach that we’ve used for the last sort of three years or so. But I would say one point, which I think you hit on there, which is that we are very focused on keeping our gross leverage under two. And you would have seen in the quarter that we actually bought back already a 100 million shares. So consistent with maintaining our leverage ratio, we don’t anticipate buying back shares in Q2, but we do expect that we’ll have room for share repurchases in the back half of the year. So I’d just like to kind of close and say, look, we’re committed to staying within our target leverage range. For us, maintaining a strong balance sheet and an investment-grade credit rating is just critical to our business, Jim. I don’t know, Enrique, if you have anything you want to add.