HP May Sell Units Not Meeting Targets
HP could dump its PC and printer businesses if they're not meeting goals.
Bloomberg has zeroed in on a comment made by Hewlett-Packard within its December 27 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the filing, the company plans to "evaluate the potential disposition of assets and businesses that may no longer help us meet our objectives." In other words, units of HP that aren't meeting targets could be dumped.
In the "Risk Factors" section of its regulatory filing, HP said that any disposal of an asset or business would have possible setbacks. "When we decide to sell, we may encounter difficulty in finding buyers or alternative exit strategies on acceptable terms in a timely manner, which could delay the achievement of our strategic objectives," the company said.
HP CEO Meg Whitman has been working to steer the company back in the right direction after five straight quarters of declining sales and "years of botched deals, management tumult and strategic missteps". The $8.8 billion writedown of Autonomy Corp. back in November also hasn't helped propel the company forward, pushing it into considering the sale of specific branches to bring value back to its stock.
"[The Company] may dispose of a business at a price or on terms that are less desirable than we had anticipated," HP said in the filing. "The impact of the divestiture on our revenue growth may be larger than projected."
The first arm supposedly on the chopping block is HP's Printing and Personal Systems Group. This was formed in March 2012 by combining the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) and its Personal Systems Group (PSG). Headed by Todd Bradley, the executive vice president of PSG since 2005, this merging of two units was expected to drive profitable growth.
But according to Bloomberg, the company's PC business earned $35.7 billion in sales in fiscal 2012, or 29-percent of HP's overall sales. The printer business only earned $24.5 billion during fiscal 2012, or 20-percent of the company's total sales. Even more, HP shares declined a whopping 45-percent in 2012 although they gained 4.2-percent to $14.25 at yesterday’s close in New York.
Also in the December 27 filing, HP said that the U.S. Justice Department had opened an investigation into Autonomy. HP said that the software company misrepresented its overall performance before HP's acquisition in 2011.
I'm just glad my LaserJet is from the pre-DRM era. Poke a hole in the cartridge side, fill with toner, good for another ~1500 pages, rinse and repeat until the drum wears out or the heating wire breaks.
I'm just glad my LaserJet is from the pre-DRM era. Poke a hole in the cartridge side, fill with toner, good for another ~1500 pages, rinse and repeat until the drum wears out or the heating wire breaks.
Agreed, the ink cartridges for replacing all the colour and black in my HP B210 is more than what I bought the printer for, which came with the ink cartridges already included. Now a days, I just buy a new printer from HP rather than spending more money on the Ink Cartridges alone.
Q: How much would it cost to fill a car with an empty 20 gallon gas tank to full with HP color ink?
A: ~$8,000,000
No one even came close out of 50 ppl...I think someone did say a million though lol.
There's your problem... switch companies and stop buying from HP. As long as we keep supporting their 'disposable' printer system, they'll keep doing it. Problem is there aren't a whole lot 'better' out there... Canon, Epson, etc. perhaps...
Most of the major brands are DRM-infested or at least were at some point. I know for sure Epson was among the first since my first (and only) color printer was a DRM-infested Epson over 10 years ago. Thankfully, there was a "jailbreak" for it that disabled counters checks on the printer and allowed resetting counters on cartridges. Unfortunately, due to using it somewhat sparingly, it didn't take very long for the head to clog and render the whole printer useless.
Your problem is that your buying ink. Inkjets across the board are notoriously expensive. Because, you guessed it, ink jet printing. Set some money on the side and go out and buy a decent printer, instead of one you saw on sale in a Staples ad for $100.
The only way you'll get a decent printing/copying costs setup is through a toner based systems.
ebay.com: search hp w/e ink. buy cartridges for 3$ from china.
to be honest though, not sure if this works with HP cartridges. Do it with an older epson, which is pathetic because the ~2$ cartridge on ebay actually prints MORE pages than the official $30 cartridge... Also do the same with a brother printer (LC79 cartridge, 12$ for 2 blacks and a set of colors on ebay, 140 for the equivalent genuine cartridges). they all last just as long
The biggest benefit from going laser: toner is dry, practically infinite shelf life under reasonable storage conditions, so you always get close to 100% toner use, regardless of whether you spend the cartridge over a month or over multiple years.
With inkjets, you end up wasting half the cartridge on head cleaning if you don't use it often enough to prevent clotting... so it gets expensive regardless of whether you print a little or a lot. The stupid Epson printer I had systematically head-cleaned on power-up and again before printing if it was idle for more than 10 or so minutes.
The most insulting thing about some inkjet printers is that some models even have a cleaning tank overflow beep/LED code... you'd need to dump the integral wet content of multiple fresh cartridge to fill that tank. I have a hard time believing some people may scrap that much ink so fast (fast enough that the tank does not have time to dry) before giving up on the printer.
Okay, sometimes it's the low-end laptop, but what gives you the incentive to get a high-end one?
I just use a CISS, $17 for 100ml of all 6 colors (equivalent to 12 cartridges of each color or about $890 worth) for my printer and it works perfectly.
So these two groups produce 49% of HP's sales, to the tune of over 60 billion dollars, with no mention of them costing HP any money, yet they are the ones being considered for elimination?
Am I missing something, or is this as stupid as it seems?
I think it's from the HP era of decent printers long before the "disposable" business model of today.
At $50 for 20ml, it comes out to $189,000 for 20 gallons. Even if it were 10ml per cartridge, it's still under 400k for 20 gallons. I'm not sure where 8 million comes from.
$50 x 50 = $2500 per liter. 3.79 liters in a gallon = 75.8 liters in 20 gallons = $189,500
Now that's not saying ink isn't one of THE most expensive substances... but it's not $8 million either.