HP Inc.

HP Inc. is an American technology company that designs, manufactures, and sells personal computers, printers, and related supplies and services, generating $55.3 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. The company was created in November 2015 when the original Hewlett-Packard Company split into two publicly traded entities: HP Inc., which kept the PC and printing businesses, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which took the servers, storage, and services operations. HP Inc. is one of the largest PC vendors in the world by unit volume and the dominant player in printing, a position built over decades of brand investment and distribution reach.

This is a story about a cash-flow compounder in structurally flat-to-declining end markets trying to attach itself to an adoption cycle — the AI PC — that could change the economics of the business for the better. The file turns on a single question: whether the mix uplift from AI-enabled PCs, combined with the gradual normalisation of memory costs, can restore the margin and free-cash-flow trajectory that aggressive share buybacks have been pulling forward for years.

HP trades at approximately 10-11 times trailing earnings and a free-cash-flow yield near 10%, reflecting a market that prices it as a no-growth hardware company with a secularly challenged print business. That may be right. The counterargument is that the PC is becoming strategically relevant again as AI workloads move to the edge, that an installed base of roughly 30% of commercial PCs still running Windows 10 is forcing a refresh cycle, and that the $1 billion cost-savings program provides a margin floor the market is not crediting. The answer depends on commodity prices and competitive dynamics that are not fully knowable today.