HP Inc.

HP Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: HPQ; S&P 500 component
Industry	Computer hardware, printing
Founded	1 November 2015 by separation from Hewlett-Packard; predecessor founded 1 January 1939
Founder	Bill Hewlett and David Packard (predecessor)
Headquarters	Palo Alto, California, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Enrique Lores (president and chief executive), Karen Parkhill (chief financial officer)
Products	Personal computers, workstations, printers, printing supplies, displays, three-dimensional printing systems, peripherals
Revenue	Approximately US$53.6 billion (fiscal 2024)
Employees	Approximately 58,000
Website	hp.com

HP Inc. is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It develops and sells personal computers, printers and related supplies and services, and is among the largest manufacturers of both categories in the world. It was created on 1 November 2015 when Hewlett-Packard, the company founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939, separated into two independent businesses, with HP Inc. retaining the personal systems and printing operations and the original HP name and logo, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise taking the servers, storage, networking and services businesses.

The company's two businesses have different economics. Personal systems, comprising notebooks, desktops and workstations, produce roughly two thirds of revenue at operating margins in the region of five to seven per cent, in a market that is mature, cyclical and fiercely competitive. Printing produces the remaining third at margins several times higher, because the great majority of its profit comes not from printers but from the ink and toner cartridges sold subsequently, a business model that is the single most important fact about the company and the source of most of the controversy surrounding it.

History

The Hewlett-Packard inheritance

The predecessor company was founded on 1 January 1939 in a garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto by Bill Hewlett and David Packard, two Stanford graduates working with US$538 of capital and encouragement from their professor Frederick Terman. Their first product was the HP200A audio oscillator, of which Walt Disney bought eight for the production of Fantasia. The order in which their names appeared on the company was settled by a coin toss.

The garage is designated a California historical landmark and is described on its plaque as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, a claim that is contestable in detail and reasonable in substance: Hewlett-Packard was the first technology company of significance in the area, its practices were copied by those that followed, and a large number of subsequent firms were founded by people who had worked there.

Those practices, which came to be called the HP Way, included management by objective rather than instruction, open-plan offices without doors, profit sharing extended to all employees, catastrophic health insurance, flexible hours and a stated commitment to avoiding redundancies through reduced hours in downturns rather than dismissals. The approach was codified in a set of corporate objectives written in 1957 and was among the most influential statements of management philosophy of the twentieth century.

The company grew from instruments into calculators, producing the HP-35 in 1972, the first scientific pocket calculator, which rendered the slide rule obsolete within a few years, and the HP-12C financial calculator of 1981, which remains in production and in use by financial professionals more than forty years later. It entered computing in the 1960s, produced the HP-3000 minicomputer and, from 1984, the LaserJet, which established laser printing as the office standard and became one of the most successful product lines in the history of computing.

The company acquired Compaq in 2002 for approximately US$25 billion in a transaction opposed publicly by Walter Hewlett, the founder's son, and approved by a narrow shareholder vote. It made Hewlett-Packard the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world and is generally assessed as having been necessary but value-destroying, in that the combined company's share of a low-margin market did not compensate for the cost.

The decade that followed was marked by boardroom instability. Carly Fiorina, chief executive from 1999, was dismissed in 2005. Her successor Mark Hurd resigned in 2010 over an expenses matter arising from a relationship with a contractor. Léo Apotheker lasted eleven months, during which he announced the intention to sell or spin off the personal computer business and acquired the British software company Autonomy for US$11.1 billion, a transaction written down by US$8.8 billion the following year amid allegations of accounting fraud that produced more than a decade of litigation in London and the conviction of Autonomy's chief executive Mike Lynch in the United States in 2018 and his acquittal in 2024. Meg Whitman became chief executive in 2011, reversed the decision on the personal computer business, and announced in October 2014 that the company would separate into two.

HP Inc. since 2015

The separation took effect on 1 November 2015. Dion Weisler, who had run the printing and personal systems group, became chief executive of HP Inc., and Enrique Lores, a Spanish engineer who had joined the company as an intern in 1989, succeeded him in November 2019.

The strategic problem the new company faced was that both of its markets were mature. Personal computer shipments had peaked in 2011 and declined thereafter as tablets and telephones absorbed casual computing, and printing volumes were falling as documents ceased to be printed. Its response has been to concentrate on the more profitable segments of each: commercial rather than consumer personal computers, gaming systems under the OMEN brand, premium notebooks, and managed print services sold to businesses.

In 2016 the company acquired Samsung's printer business for US$1.05 billion, obtaining a substantial patent portfolio and the technology for the A3 copier market in which it had not previously competed. In 2019 it made an unsolicited approach to Xerox, which responded with a hostile offer for HP, more than three times its size, financed with debt; HP rejected it as undervaluing the company and the approach was abandoned in March 2020 amid the pandemic.

In 2021 HP acquired Plantronics and Polycom, trading as Poly, for US$3.3 billion, entering the market for headsets and conference room equipment on the judgement that hybrid working would sustain demand for them. The acquisition has performed below expectation as office equipment purchasing weakened.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced the most abrupt change in the company's recent history. Demand for personal computers rose sharply in 2020 and 2021 as households and employers equipped people to work and study at home, and fell as sharply in 2022 and 2023 as that demand was satisfied and as the machines bought during the surge did not need replacing. HP announced the reduction of up to 6,000 positions in November 2022 and a further 2,000 in February 2025.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a stake of approximately 11 per cent in April 2022, an unusual investment in a technology company by an investor who had historically avoided the sector, which it subsequently sold down.

The company has positioned the personal computer refresh cycle associated with the end of support for Windows 10 in October 2025, and the arrival of machines with dedicated neural processing units marketed as AI PCs, as the basis for a return to growth, a proposition the market has received cautiously given the number of times comparable catalysts have been announced.

Business

Personal Systems

Personal Systems comprises notebooks, desktops, workstations, displays and accessories, sold to consumers, to businesses and to public sector and education buyers. HP competes with Lenovo, which is generally the largest manufacturer by units, Dell, Apple, Acer and Asus, and the four largest vendors together hold roughly three quarters of the market.

The economics are those of an assembler. Processors come from Intel, AMD and, increasingly, Qualcomm, operating systems from Microsoft, displays, memory and storage from a small number of Asian suppliers, and the manufacturers compete on design, distribution, service and brand within a cost structure they do not control. Margins are consequently thin and the business is exposed to component price movements, to currency and to the timing of corporate replacement cycles.

HP's response has been to concentrate on the segments where differentiation is possible: commercial machines sold with management and security features that information technology departments value, the Elite and EliteBook ranges; workstations for engineering and creative work; gaming under OMEN; and premium consumer notebooks. It has also invested in security features implemented in firmware, including Sure Start, which restores a corrupted BIOS automatically, a genuine technical differentiator in a market where most attributes are common to every vendor.

Printing

Printing comprises hardware, supplies and services across consumer, office and industrial graphics printing, the last through the Indigo and PageWide presses used in commercial print production, and three-dimensional printing through the Multi Jet Fusion and Metal Jet systems.

The business operates on the razor and blades principle: printers are sold at little or no margin and the profit is made on the cartridges. Supplies typically produce well over half of the segment's revenue and a considerably larger share of its profit, and the strategy requires that customers continue to buy HP cartridges rather than third-party or refilled alternatives.

HP has defended that position by legal and technical means, and the resulting disputes are the company's principal source of public criticism.

Dynamic security is firmware in HP printers that verifies a chip on the cartridge and refuses to operate with cartridges that do not carry an authorised chip. Updates delivered in 2016 and on several subsequent occasions disabled third-party cartridges that had previously worked, in some cases some time after installation. The practice produced regulatory action and class actions in the United States, Europe and Australia; HP paid €10 million in Italy in 2020, settled actions in California and elsewhere, and was required by several authorities to disclose the restriction before purchase. The company's position is that the measure protects customers from counterfeit supplies and protects its intellectual property; the objection is that a device the customer owns is altered after sale to remove a capability it had.

Instant Ink is a subscription under which customers pay monthly according to the number of pages printed rather than buying cartridges, with the printer ordering replacements automatically. It has been commercially successful and has attracted complaint because cartridges supplied under it cease to function if the subscription lapses, even where ink remains, and because pages are counted rather than ink consumed.

All-In Plan, introduced in 2024, extends the model to the printer itself, which is supplied under subscription and must be returned if the subscription ends. Enrique Lores's remark in an interview that the company's long-term objective was to make printing a subscription and that a customer who did not buy supplies was a bad investment was widely circulated and became the standard citation in criticism of the business.

The underlying commercial reality is that the supplies model has subsidised printer prices for three decades, so that a device costing far more to manufacture than its retail price is recovered over its life, and that abandoning it would require printers to be sold at prices customers have not been asked to pay since the 1980s.

Three-dimensional printing

HP entered additive manufacturing in 2016 with Multi Jet Fusion, a powder-based process considerably faster than the extrusion methods that dominated the field, and subsequently Metal Jet for metal parts. The business is directed at production rather than prototyping, and has been slower to develop than the company anticipated, in common with the industry as a whole, which experienced a speculative period around 2013 followed by a prolonged correction.

Products

Personal computers

HP's notebook ranges are divided by market. EliteBook and Elite serve commercial buyers, with manageability, security firmware and long support lifecycles. ZBook covers mobile workstations for engineering and media work, and Z desktops the equivalent fixed machines. ProBook serves small business. Spectre and Envy are premium consumer notebooks, Pavilion mainstream ones, and OMEN and Victus gaming machines. Chromebook models serve education, where the low administrative cost of ChromeOS has given Google's platform a large share of American school computing. Dragonfly denotes very light commercial notebooks.

The company also sells displays, docking stations, conferencing hardware under Poly, and, through the acquisition of Humane's assets in 2025, has an artificial intelligence research group working on devices beyond the personal computer.

Printers

LaserJet, introduced in 1984, established the office laser printer and remains the company's principal commercial line. DeskJet and ENVY cover consumer inkjet, OfficeJet small business, and PageWide uses a fixed print head spanning the page rather than a moving carriage, permitting much higher speeds. Latex and DesignJet serve large-format and signage printing, and Indigo digital presses serve commercial printing, where HP is the leading supplier of digital production equipment and where its position is considerably stronger than in consumer printing. Scitex covers industrial printing.

Competition

In personal computers HP competes principally with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Acer and Asus. Lenovo has generally led on units since acquiring IBM's personal computer business in 2005, Dell is stronger in large enterprise accounts and HP in small and medium businesses and in retail, and Apple takes a disproportionate share of the profit in the industry from a minority of the units.

In printing HP is the largest supplier worldwide, competing with Canon, Epson, Brother, Ricoh, Xerox and Konica Minolta. Epson's EcoTank and Canon's MegaTank ranges, which use refillable reservoirs rather than cartridges and are sold at higher prices with much cheaper ink, represent a direct attack on the supplies model and have taken substantial share in markets where consumers buy on total cost, including much of Asia and Latin America. HP introduced its own Smart Tank range in response, an acknowledgement that the cartridge arrangement cannot be defended everywhere.

The third-party and remanufactured cartridge industry is a competitor of a different kind, supplying compatible supplies at a fraction of HP's prices and being the target of the dynamic security measures described above. Its existence is the practical constraint on how much the printing business can earn, and the company's legal and technical efforts to limit it are consequently continuous.

Corporate affairs

Leadership and governance

Enrique Lores has been president and chief executive since November 2019. He joined the company as an engineering intern in Spain in 1989 and held positions across printing, services and strategy, and his tenure has been characterised by cost reduction, by the pursuit of higher-margin segments and by the acquisitions of Poly and of Humane's assets, the last acquired in 2025 for US$116 million after that company's wearable device failed commercially.

The board has been notable for its role in resisting the Xerox approach and for the presence, for a period, of a Berkshire Hathaway holding.

Employees and locations

The company employs approximately 58,000 people, a figure reduced substantially through successive restructuring programmes. Its headquarters are in Palo Alto, and it operates significant sites in Houston, Boise in Idaho, which is the centre of its inkjet development, Vancouver in Washington, Corvallis in Oregon, Barcelona, which houses the large-format and industrial printing business inherited from the acquisition of a Spanish operation in 1985, Singapore, Bangalore and Guadalajara. Manufacturing is largely outsourced to contract manufacturers in Asia and Mexico, and the company has moved production of goods for the American market away from China in response to tariffs.

Sustainability

HP has consistently ranked among the better-assessed technology companies on environmental reporting. It has committed to net zero emissions across its value chain by 2040, uses recycled and ocean-bound plastic in its products, operates take-back and cartridge recycling programmes, and publishes supplier audits. It has also been among the companies pressed to make devices repairable, and the repairability of notebooks and the availability of parts has improved under regulatory pressure in the European Union and in several American states.

The cartridge business complicates the position. The company's own environmental reporting notes the material consumed by supplies, and the incompatibility measures that prevent refilling increase waste, a tension the company addresses through recycling programmes rather than by permitting reuse.

Criticism

Beyond the supplies disputes, the company has attracted criticism over the reduction of warranty terms and of build quality in consumer products relative to its commercial ranges; over the quantity of preinstalled software on consumer machines, a practice common across the industry and financed by the software vendors; over customer service outsourcing; and over the general decline of the HP Way, the employment practices for which the predecessor company was admired and which successive rounds of redundancy have made difficult to reconcile with the stated culture.

It has also been the subject of comparison with the company it once was. Hewlett-Packard in the 1970s was among the most admired employers in the United States and a research organisation that produced instruments, calculators, printers and computers of genuine originality; HP Inc. is a well-run assembler of components in two mature markets. The transition is not unique to this company, and it describes accurately what happens to hardware businesses when the value in their products migrates to the semiconductors and software inside them.