HP Inc. (NYSE:HPQ) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Marie Myers : So just on the revenue per PS, we do expect it to be down mid-single digits sequentially. And obviously, that’s driven by all the conditions we’ve talked about earlier today. And as you know, we normally don’t guide revenue, but we do expect that normal seasonality won’t apply in ’23. So we’ll see some improvements in the overall revenue trajectory in the back half. But overall, we do expect to see PS revenue down here in Q1.

Enrique Lores : And the situation is different on the print side, especially on the Commercial side, we continue to have some shortages as we were expecting. So backlog for Commercial print remains elevated and we expect to clearly during the first half of 2023.

Toni Sacconaghi: Okay. I still don’t feel like we have a pretty good sense of what your range of outcomes is for revenue growth for 2023. But — maybe you can address that. But just following up with the second question, you said Supplies would be back to your traditional model of down kind of low to mid-single digits. But you pointed to minus 10% growth in the first half. So that means you’re expecting Supplies to grow in the second half. That’s pretty well the simple math. And why did we have this big perturbation from model the last couple of quarters and maybe the next couple of quarters. Is this just channel inventory correction? Or why do we have a sudden reset off of model that is minus 3% to minus 5% and minus 10% and then it kind of bounces back.

Enrique Lores : Sure. So as I explained in the last call, the changes in the performance in the supply business is really driven by a slowdown of Consumer demand. We started to see this at the end of Q3. And as we were expecting, we have continued to see that in Q4, and we project that this will continue. Of course, as demand gets adjusted, there is an inventory adjustment, but this is not the reason why we are seeing — the impact in supply is really driven by adjustments in user demand. . For the full year, as we said last quarter and we continue to say, we expect the business to go back to our original guide. And this means that the second half will have stronger performance than the first half. I think as we look at quarter growth as one of the key metrics, I think it’s important to realizing that adjustments done in previous quarter have a lot of impact on growth.

So we don’t think it’s the best way to measure the health of the business because anything that happened a quarter ago will have an impact on what is the next quarter. But again, the big impact is driven by a slowdown on Consumer demand. And I think it’s also important to highlight that our channel inventory is in a very good position today. I mentioned last quarter that it was slightly above where we wanted it to be. We are now totally within the position where we like to be.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo.

Aaron Rakers: Yes. I’ve got two as well. Just going back to kind of Toni’s questions a little bit. I guess on the context of the revenue side, just correct me if I’m wrong, the 10% number with regard to PCs being down, that’s a unit number. So as we see ASP pressure come into play, would the assumption be that revenue declines more? And then also, on the revenue context, I think there was a comment thrown out there about 3% with regard to print. I’m curious, was that 3% sequential down in this quarter? Or was that kind of the commentary for the full year? I was just confused by that comment around 3% decline in Print. And I got a follow-up.