Good morning, everyone. I think we're gonna get started. Thank you for joining UBS today. My name is David Vogt. I'm the Enterprise Hardware and Networking Analyst here, and we're excited to have HP Inc. with us. Marie Myers, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get into the questions, the company's asked me to read their quick disclosure, so I'm gonna read it. Hopefully, I don't butcher it. So today's discussion includes forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, which are further described in HP's SEC filings, including HP Form 10-K and 10-Q. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update any such forward-looking statements. For more information, please visit HP's investor relations website at investor.hp.com. So with that out of the way, we'll get going. Marie, thank you again for joining us today.
Thank you very much, David. Pleasure to be here.
So I thought maybe we would just start at a high level by talking about each of the segments, 'cause that's where we get the most inbound questions from clients. I'm sure you do as well. And you just hosted an investor meeting a couple of weeks ago, a little bit more than a couple of weeks ago, and reported earnings. And so I think the feedback that we've been getting is, you know, feels like PCs are bottoming.
Mm-hmm.
You've talked about it. Units haven't really started to recover yet, but maybe can you kind of just remind us how the market typically operates, whether it's commercial, consumer, and kind of how—what are you looking at from a demand perspective as we move through the balance of this year into calendar 2024 to start?
Sure. Thanks very much. And so, as you just said, we just actually did earnings before Thanksgiving, so I think we capped off a solid quarter in a challenging backdrop in terms of the year, as you said. So I think you saw our revenue, you know, our margins, et cetera, you know, right in terms of targets. As we think about just the outlook and PCs, I'll sort of frame it up in terms of long-term and then near-term. Definitely from a long-term perspective, you know, we expect that our Personal Systems business will grow in line with market, and I think that the outlook out in the market today is for 2024, from mid- to single-digit.
Certainly, you know, what we see in terms of the guide and the way we put our PS guide together was that we'll see the revenue improving throughout the year. As we look at sort of coming off Q4, there was certainly some buildup with seasonal. We saw that particularly on the consumer side of the house. I would say on commercial, we're still seeing a cautious outlook that, you know, if you look at the enterprise customers, they're still, you know, being sort of very conservative in terms of their spend. So what we saw in terms of Q4 was more the holiday seasonal buildup. As we go into 2024, I do expect that we'll sort of see mid- to single-digit in terms of just the size of the PS market.
Great.
But it'll grow sequentially throughout the year.
And so your comments on PCs are interesting because I think it's consistent on the commercial side. It's consistent with other companies in different end markets that have similar types of exposure with enterprise and commercial customers. You saw it first. I think you guys were telegraphed this sort of slowdown before many companies. Can you maybe characterize the types of conversations you think are happening with customers right now? Is it just budgetary pressure into the end of the year, macro, customers really not willing to make a refresh? And does any sort of catalyst, whether it's like a Windows 11 potential refresh next year, kind of color your view about maybe next year?
Yeah, sure. And I think in terms of just what enterprise customers are thinking now, their sort of like behavior, I'd say it's very much just it's tied to the macro. There's just no doubt about it, that companies have still been going through layoffs. You've seen that out there in the market. The inflation, et cetera, in the economy. So until I think we see the macro stabilize, there's definitely going to be a caution out there with enterprise spend. But if you look, I think the flip to that is that the drivers for the PC business, particularly for the commercial side of the business, are really strong, David. I mean, I think there are... If you just look across a couple of key facts.
First of all, the installed base on Personal Systems and on PCs is much larger than it was prior to the pandemic. So I think today we're at around about 400-600 million units, so there's a lot of PCs out in the market. Secondly, they're getting aged. You know, as we did a lot of that sort of pandemic, pre-pandemic buying-
Right
We're getting right now into the four-year anniversary of a lot of those PCs. So you're going to see them age, and they're going to have to be refreshed. And then you mentioned Win 11. So typically, you know, Win 11 should be a significant driver as well of the refresh. And if you sort of think about the timing around that, end of 2025 is when we see the flip from 10 to 11. You sort of roll that forward, roll that back sorry, five quarters, you should start to see some of that, you know, emerge in the back half of 2024. And then finally, and I think you've heard Enrique talk about this, you know, we are optimistic about the impact that AI will have on the PC category itself.
I think what we've said, we see it as an early adopter sort of stage in the latter half of 2024, becoming more substantial in 2025, and then really being significant in 2026. But if you look at those drivers alone, I think that gives you confidence that the PS market will grow here over time.
Right. So maybe just on AI for a second. I know Alex talked about it at the investor meeting, where I think he framed an opportunity where maybe ASPs could be five-
Mm-hmm
10% higher, which helps the sort of compute component within your Personal Systems business grow maybe faster than historically. But just as a reminder, that's not baked into your current expectations for next year and beyond. That would be potentially additive to the numbers that you guided to last week. Is that correct?
In terms of, like, the longer term outlook? Absolutely. In terms of what's in our guide for the year, you know, in the guide that we gave at Security Analyst Meeting, we did comprehend the introduction of the AI PC in the back half of 2024. So we do have that introduction and the ASP uplift, which we said was around 5%-10%.
Uh, right
Is in the guide. But the 2025 and 2026, as you heard correctly-
Right, on the tab.
That's not in the outlook-
Right
That we described.
I know this is a challenging question, and it's more of informational from my perspective, you know, I was fortunate enough, I got to see a workstation with-
Mm-hmm
GPUs when I was out in your headquarters.
Yep. That's good.
How do you think the AI PC... You know, how do you think that shows up in the commercial environment?
Yeah.
Meaning, is it necessary to run Copilot, or is it gonna be more, you know, we want to replicate a much more robust environment? Like, is it software-driven, hardware-driven? Just maybe at a high level, anything that you can share with us, I think, because people are confused on what AI PC could mean in 2024, 2025, and 2026.
You know, first of all, thanks for coming to our Security Analyst Meeting. I think when you get a chance to see the product, it makes a tremendous difference. I think you actually had, you know, a use case with our workstation ZBook. I kind of use that as one of the better analogies of what an application of an AI PC might look like. So for those of you who are familiar, our workstation ZBook is a very high-powered performance compute. It's typically used by a lot of our data scientists. In fact, the folks on my team that do a lot of the LLM work use those ZBooks because they've got the compute power.
In terms of how to answer your question on where do we see the application of an AI PC, the one that I think Alex has spoken most about is really where we see the need for local inferencing. And so the drivers of that type of environment would be, you know, you wanna make sure you've got security, data privacy, there's cost in terms of just going out into the cloud, and then finally, speed. So we believe that, David, there is going to be, you know, use cases that are clear in terms of local edge compute-
Right
T hat will drive AI PCs. And honestly, we're at such an early stage of the inflection curve of AI that there's going to be multiple use cases that will evolve. But if you think about it in terms of the ZBook and just today, you know, a specialized sort of group of folks who are data scientists are using ZBooks. If you expand that and think about you and I, that are going to be using-
Right
AI, I mean, large language models, then you're going to need to have that extra compute power, whether it's in the CPU, the GPU, the memory, all of that together then sort of levels up what's inside the PC. And as you know, when you level up, then that also drives better ASPs as well. And GPUs, as you know, Yeah, exactly.
Expensive.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
So, along those lines, you know, maybe as we transition over a multi-year period from traditional compute to more AI-enabled compute, you know, let me start today. Pricing has actually been a little bit more resilient than I would have expected on-
Yep
O n PCs. Why do you think that is today, and how do you think, I know you just gave guidance for next year, and kind of reiterated your margin targets for next year, and there's some puts and takes in there from components.
Yeah.
You know, why do you think that is from a behavioral perspective at this point in the cycle, where multiple years past COVID, is it just consumers and commercial customers wanna have that re-replicated environment that they have in the office? Is that still kind of the driver where feature set's important, screen-
Yeah
A ll the bells and whistles are relevant at this point still?
So I think a couple of things to sort of bear in mind. First of all, you know, the amount of commercial in our mix has increased. If you like, you look over the last three quarters, we've taken share on commercial, and so. And if you look inside commercial, inside the category, there is a sort of a bifurcation of categories inside commercial itself. What's important is the feature set. To your point, today, when you use compute, you need a better quality experience. So either you need better cameras, right? So then there's AI built into that camera, plus you need better audio. You need, you know, more compute power if you're a data scientist. So all of those drivers have helped to, I think, create a more richer configuration inside the PC itself.
So certainly that is a one of the drivers of what we've seen in terms of just what's been able to sort of support the pricing that we've seen. The other pieces you know really well in terms of just the channel has certainly started to normalize. So that's out there. But as we think about the category and looking forward to our margins and why we've said we believe we'll be solidly in the range in 2024, it's a combination of moving up the stack in terms of the mix. And moreover, David, also remember, we just bought Poly-
Right, a little while ago.
A little while ago as well. So, you know, we've added into our mix a broader portfolio. So today we've got the PC category. We've added in a hybrid that includes all of our peripherals. Don't forget gaming, that's another-
Right
R eally important, and, you know, there's going to be AI impact on gaming as well. So all of that together gives, you know, me personally, a lot of confidence in the margins and also supporting the sort of the rates that we guide to.
So, is that, you know, we get that question a lot, so.
Yeah
W ithin the PSG segment, now you have a much bigger gaming business-
Correct
A much bigger Polycom-related-
Yep
P eripheral business. So does that give you confidence why that 6%-7% range is structurally the right range versus prior to COVID, you know, PS margins were, you know, several hundred basis points lower? Is that kind of the underpinning of how you're thinking about the next, call it, three, four, five years, and why margins can stay in that range?
Yeah, I mean, that's honestly why I think in SAM, when we talked about what's the outlook and what gives us confidence in the, the PS range. By the way, we didn't raise the PS range. We held the PS range.
I'm sorry, but from many, many years ago.
From many, many years ago.
From many years ago.
You're correct.
My bad.
But in terms of what's helping, you know, give that confidence is absolutely the quality of the hybrid portfolio that we acquired with Poly and the gaming. And then obviously, we've got rooms as well. I don't think we hit on just, you know, the rooms and the video and audio that we bought with the rooms with Poly. We see that as another significant opportunity. Clearly, it's a... You know, we've been impacted by the macro here. We talked about just the whole enterprise spend atmosphere. There's a lot more caution in IT departments, but the needs, for example, even like today, I mean, in terms of the audiovisual and connectivity and employee productivity, haven't gone away.
Right.
In fact, those hybrid secular trends, I think we can all say quite confidently, they're here to stay, David. So I think our portfolio is incredibly unique and is very different from many of our sort of traditional PC competitors.
Got it. So when I just pull it all together, so if I think about the PSG business, you know, historically was primarily heavy compute.
Exactly.
Now we're compute, peripherals-
Correct.
M ore gaming, more centric-
Yep.
More rooms, meetings that are faster growing-
Yep.
Categories over the next three years.
Double-digit margins.
Structurally, better margins.
Exactly.
And so you have a-
Double-digit growth.
Right. So the HP of five years ago-
Is not the HP today.
Looks different-
Yeah
V ersus the HP for the next five years.
I think we said it, we said it, SAM, that our, you know, expectation is that these growth categories, and by the way, we have them both in Personal Systems, and we have growth categories in our print business. We expect them to be, you know, double digit growers, to be a substantial part of our revenue going forward. And moreover, it's not just the size and the sort of, you know, the volume in terms of revenue, but also, David, what's different is we're building in subscription. So we'll have a richer mix of software services in that business model going forward.
Got it.
Subscription. So there's a big shift inside the sort of product strategy to software services and subscription, and then also lifting up in terms of the higher profit margin businesses as well.
Got it. All right, I'm gonna... This is not a hard question, but I'm gonna ask it. It's gonna be tough to answer. So we get a lot of questions on components.
Right.
You've been very clear that you'd made strategic purchases.
Yep.
You know, depressed NAND prices, DRAM prices have been a huge tailwind for the industry and other markets. How are you thinking about that part of the business? You know, I know you don't disclose how much components you've taken in that are on your balance sheet, but just maybe help frame effectively what 2024, 2025 kind of is in your thought process or in terms of your long-term planning forecast, without getting into specific numbers-
Absolutely
Since I know you don't give it, but just kind of how you're thinking about it.
So first of all, I'd start out by saying, I think it's, you know, very clear that there's going to be headwinds in commodities. You know, we sort of hit the peak, right, in terms of commodity pricing, and we've seen the inflection point, particularly on memory-
Right
CPUs, et cetera. So going into 2024, what we've calibrated into the guide, that we are definitely going to have headwinds on commodities. I think I've been really transparent in our earnings calls that we have made strategic buys. We do that when we believe it makes economic sense, and then you've seen some of those benefits flow through as well.
Right.
Obviously, we'll continue to do that. If it makes economic and prudent sense, financial sense, absolutely, David, we'll continue to do strategic buys.
Is there—Given the supply chain constraints that we went through, I mean, have you thought about maybe how much component inventory you're willing to hold versus maybe prior to COVID? Has that changed philosophically? Right, you're willing to, where it makes strategic sense-
Mm-hmm
T o hold more today than maybe you might have five years ago. Has that changed, or do you think the cycle is back to normal, where, you know, just-in-time inventory matters, cash flow conversion matters more for you, and inventory, you know, is obviously a use of cash, and maybe it doesn't necessarily make sense to hold more inventory?
A couple things. First of all, I think the supply chain constraint environment. We're past that, thankfully, so-
Right
I think that's good. And secondly, you would see just in terms of our inventory management, you've sort of seen a natural decline, right, in terms of the level of owned inventory that we've held. In fact, our last quarter, we hit probably one of the biggest lows in the last two years-
Right
About $6.8 billion. So we expect that going forward. You know, those levels will continue to come down. To your point, over the last couple of years, given the state of commodities, you know, both in terms of just supply constraints and in pricing, we took advantage of strategic buys. And I think going forward, we want to maintain that flexibility, but it's got to make economic and financial sense.
Right.
Otherwise, we're just simply not going to do it.
Got it. Okay, so maybe if we can pivot to print.
That's good. We have a print business as well.
Yeah, you have a very big-
Gotta remind people sometimes.
V ery big print, very big print business.
Yep.
You know, at the analyst meeting, I think Tuan talked about opportunities to drive margin, to drive cash flow. You've done a really good job. You had recently taken, not at the analyst meeting-
Mm-hmm
B ut had taken your margin range higher in that segment from 16%-18% to 16%-19%.
Correct.
You've been operating toward the upper end.
Yep.
Can you maybe walk through some of the initiatives from a cost reduction perspective or maybe a margin-focused cash flow, cash flow-focused strategy that's enabled you to kind of maintain strong margins in light of sort of the economic challenges that the business has faced over the last couple of years?
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I'm just really proud to say that we were able to raise the range on our print margins, and you've seen us operating above those ranges throughout a lot of the last year. So I think that's a testament to a combination of both. It's both strategy and execution. I think on the strategy side, you've seen us over the pandemic, really start to make bold moves in shifting the model. And by that, what I mean, we've, you know, we've moved to more profit up front, so we've got HP+ , Big Tanks.
Right.
We're shipping more than 60% of our business today in that model. Similarly, what we saw through the pandemic is also we got great growth in our Instant Ink model, which is back to what I said earlier about a subscription model. We've added in new services like instant paper. So once again, you know, those are very sticky, you know, more annuity type, sort of businesses as well. So that's part of the model shift that's gone on. Second to that, in terms of just execution, as we recently announced at a security analyst meeting, we upped our program, our Future Ready transformation to $1.6 billion over three years. Part of the confidence to do that was really what we saw the opportunity in our print cost structure, particularly in our consumer and home business.
So we expect to continue to drive significant transformation in that business in terms of platform reduction. All of that, you know, is really underpinning the rates that you've seen us deliver, and frankly, gave us the confidence to continue to do so going forward. I would sort of preface that by saying, as we look into 2024, we do expect to be back solidly in the range-
Right
F or print margins. There are headwinds out there that we do, just like on the Personal Systems business, commodities, maybe one quarter or so will wait, but then the commodity headwinds that you see in Personal Systems will also come into the print business.
Right.
So that'll put some deflationary pressure. Plus, you know, I and we've been very consistent with our guide on supplies. We do expect supplies continue to be still low- to mid-single-digit declines, and you saw that in our last year as well. So, you know, that'll be another headwind as well, just to bear in mind. But I think we've demonstrated that we've shifted the model. We've been focused on, you know, our strategy, and we've also been focused on supplies, frankly, on growing share and pricing very effectively. All of that has played into the results that we've seen from a margin perspective.
So you brought up supplies. So I think a lot of investors were supply surprised by the-
Yeah
Last quarter's performance and your commitment to that low to mid-single digit decline in supplies, in light of maybe some of the commercial hardware and consumer hardware challenges that the industry has faced. Can you kind of talk through... I know it's hard to model supplies on a quarter-by-quarter basis, so maybe on an annual basis, you know, you mentioned share gains, and pricing discipline. Is there anything else that maybe you can share with us that's been helping sort of maintain that glide path effectively on supplies in light of the hardware headwinds that we've been facing?
Yeah. First of all, I'll comment that, you know, on commercial hardware particularly, you know, it is our ambition to gain back share. And so I think Enrique made that very clear in the last earnings announcements-
Right
That, you know, we are going to gain share back in commercial. So let me just start out there with that comment. On supplies, you've got to look at it over the long term. I think sometimes when we get into these quarter-to-quarter comps, you know, it's not a good way to look at the long term.
Right.
And frankly, the last quarter, if you go back a year prior to that, we had a pretty easy compare quarter, you know, from a year-on-year perspective. So if you look at the annual guide on supplies, I think we've been consistent.
Right.
We said low to mid-single. We ended up at, I think, a 1.3 decline in terms of constant currency, so it's right inside that range. We don't expect to change that. I think what's different, sort of post-pandemic to pre-pandemic, is our ability to manage pricing and also, you know, the share that we've gained. We've got a lot of telemetry in that business, to be honest with you, David, that we didn't have many years ago. Today, we get a lot of telemetry from our printers, so we can sort of-
Right
See what's happening in terms of usage patterns much more clearly, and that helps us to, you know, understand how to model those numbers going forward. Plus, you know, I think we've been very disciplined around our pricing as well, and you saw that most recently in the last quarter in our results on supplies.
Does the subscription model kind of migration help on supplies, right? So whether it's Instant Ink, printer in a box, effectively, that gets shipped-
Yeah
To a consumer, more people... I think, I think you have referenced certain cohorts aren't very far along in terms of-
Yeah
Subscription services on the ink side. Does that help the supply sort of trajectory over the longer term? Is that fair to say?
Yeah, no, we absolutely see when you move a customer, say, from that pure transactional model to the model you just described, whether it's Instant Ink plus adding on that paper, we sort of see a 20% uplift on the lifetime value of that customer, because you're locking that person, you know-
Right
C ommitting to a longer term relationship and, you know, more annuity stream in terms of, predictability. So absolutely, we see that uplift that I mentioned, and that's, that's clearly part of our business model shift as well.
Got it. And then, you know, we had a loosely defined competitor here yesterday.
Mm-hmm.
You know, obviously, the yen has been hurting portions of the market, the week, the weekend. It's been hurting pricing on hardware.
Mm-hmm.
How are you thinking about that as that's contemplated in your outlook for next year? Is it based on sort of a more stable U.S. dollar/yen sort of climate, or have you taken precautionary steps in case maybe the yen impact becomes slightly worse going forward?
Yeah. First of all, I think we all know the yen has hit, you know, pretty much all-time historic-
Lows
Lows right now. We've seen that quite clearly in the consumer pricing that we've had in the market. I would say that going forward, a couple things to bear in mind, consumer has probably stabilized.
Okay.
If you look sequentially in the last couple of quarters, we've seen consumer sort of ebb out as the yen has probably also deteriorated a little bit, somewhat stabilized-
Right
A t a new low. I would say on commercial, there's still potentially an opportunity for more normalization of pricing. The outlook that we've put together for next year, it's comprehended in the guide.
Okay.
So I want to leave you with that assurance. What I would say in terms of just capacity and how we're thinking about it, you know, that's frankly why we enlarged our Future Ready plan, and we took it to $1.6 billion, because we knew that we'd have to do some further structural cost adjustments, which is exactly what we've comprehended, and we're doing that. So that gives us some capacity to manage some of those headwinds there into next year.
Are those incremental Future Ready plan contemplated cost savings targeted more at the printing side? Have you kinda ... I don't know if, I don't think I've heard you talk about where those might be targeted, or is it more on the PSG side, or is it just broadly defined, you know, across the entire portfolio?
First of all, it's a combination of, you know, initiatives that we have that are both operational, some of them are digital, and-
Right
A nd then we've got a whole category of portfolio optimization.
Right.
The portfolio piece actually covers both businesses-
Got it
B oth Personal Systems and print. When we first put the plan together, what we had really comprehended was really the Personal Systems piece, because we had seen SKU proliferation, as you can imagine-
Right, challenging
Throughout the pandemic. Yeah, you were just trying to meet customer demand, meet customers where they were at, so you were frantically putting out new SKUs. As we sort of matured through the first year of the program, and then obviously with the combination of the yen pressure, we saw a similar opportunity on the print side.
On the print side, okay.
So that's why I was saying that confidence that we gave in terms of the outlook, really a piece of that was driven by print. So it was always in the baseline. We did have the restructuring of some of our print businesses in the original guide that we gave. But as we saw the opportunities sort of unfold, particularly in consumer, we decided to increase the Future Ready.
That incremental cost savings-
Not all of it is print, by the way.
Right, right. So, so that incremental cost savings, though, to your point, is supportive of margins in-
Correct
F iscal 2024.
Yeah.
Is supportive of sort of your bridge, your EPS bridge that you've given, where the base business on an operating profit dollars should grow in 2024.
Exactly. But also, the other thing to bear in mind with print, just like our Personal Systems business, where we talked about the impact of core and growth.
Right.
There are growth businesses inside print as well, that also give us, you know, the confidence around the margins as well. So I don't wanna leave you without having that thought in mind.
Yeah.
And then we also expect-
That's fair. That's helpful.
We also expect office to improve. We expect our industrial business to improve in 2024 as well. So all of that, you know, just bear that in mind as you think through.
Got it.
Okay.
Not to get nitty-gritty on print, but, you know, when you look at the new product introductions that you've talked about, is there anything that you think is near term, more commercial ready in terms of something that you're excited about within the print business? I know there is, like, a whole slew of, you know-
Office
O ffice equipment, this was construction equipment, which I thought was-
Yeah
Kind of interesting.
Site Print. Yeah, that was awesome.
The Site Print was pretty interesting.
Yeah. You picked out one that was fascinating. That's the one I'm really excited about.
So maybe, maybe we'll touch on that. So, you know, that seems like a pretty large TAM that seems-
Yeah
Undressed at this point.
Exactly.
Is... Are those products generally available right now? I know there were conversations with customers.
Through distribution.
Through distribution.
So we just launched, and I think it's a great example of innovation, where we're using both print capability, but we're hitting a whole new market segment. So really, it helps with industrial design. We just launched it. You saw it at our analyst day when you came into town, and we've seen the product take off, and I think it's really exciting. It's basically a robot that helps to sort of map out sites, and it's using a combination of the technology we have in our print portfolio to really sort of disrupt that market segment. And I think there's other opportunities out there, but that's one I'm really excited about.
Yeah.
'Cause I think it's relevant, it's digital, and it's really, you know, breaking and using a capability in a market that we haven't really addressed in the past, David. So great example, and we'll do more of that in the future.
Got it. So since you're the CFO, I wanna come back to cash flow allocation.
Yeah, we can't have a call without talking about cash.
Right. So over the last couple of years, there's been a pretty consistent strategy where-
Yeah
The company's been targeting leverage ratios and then viewing excess cash flow or free cash flow.
Yeah
Being deployed to shareholders in the form of buybacks, dividends, and in the case of a strategic M&A, where it makes sense.
Mm-hmm
in the case of Polycom. So as we kind of come out of this most recent fiscal year, leverage is manageable, sub-2 turns of gross-
Mm-hmm
if I'm not mistaken. And so you've committed to returning, I think, in 2024-
Hundred percent
100% of the cash flow.
Correct.
You know, in the past, just out of curiosity, there was this desire when the stock might have been trading cheaper, to maybe spend a little bit more than 100%-
Mm-hmm
For the free cash flow. If I just think back during COVID.
2022, yeah.
Right, in 2022. Exactly. So is that off the table longer term, or is it just opportunistic? As long as you're below the threshold and you feel confident in the growth trajectory, or should we think about the long-term strategy as... Now, I think, I think Enrique said, like, at least he has said, I think repeatedly, at least 100%.
Mm-hmm.
How should investors kind of interpret that statement from Enrique?
What I said in SAM was, we would return 100%.
Right.
So-
For this year, I think it was clear it's 100%.
Yeah, so in 2024, we're, I think we're committed to 100%. So maybe I'll just go back a bit. We talked about 2022, we didn't talk about 2023. So in 2023, as you know, we did tip our 2x.
Yes.
So we were out of the market, plus we had MNPI in Q4, so that also precluded us from being in the market. So the way you should think about 2024 is 100% of free cash flow. You know, it, our intention is to get into the market in Q1 and to be active throughout the year, and so that, that's very much-
Right, and then remind them, the guide is $3.1 billion-$3.6 billion.
You got it.
Fully loaded with restructuring-
Correct.
A nd the dividends consumes about $1 billion-
Exactly
R oughly.
Yeah.
So that leaves you-
Yeah
Slightly north of $2 billion for buybacks.
And as I said, at the Security Analyst Meeting, nothing's changed. You know, our intention outside of the MNPI we had in Q4, you know, we want to be active in the market in Q1 and remain active in, you know, throughout the rest of the fiscal year 2024.
Got it.
I think our intention is very much aligned with returning 100% of Free Cash Flow, unless better ROI opportunities arise, as you pointed out, with an example like Poly.
Is there any seasonality in cash flow that would be severe enough? I know there is seasonality-
Mm-hmm
Q uarter- to- quarter, but in terms of managing that sort of program during the year, should investors think about it being sort of ratable on a quarterly basis? Or is it really reflective of the actual cash flow generation within a given quarter, where you can be more aggressive and in maybe certain quarters, maybe less aggressive, just from a timing perspective?
Yeah, now, look, our cash flow does have seasonality. Obviously, you just saw in our last Q4 results-
Right
T he sort of cash flow that we generated in Q4, $1.93 cash flow. So definitely, you know, the cash linearity and seasonality is important to take into account. I did say in the most recent earnings announcement that actually we do expect Q1 to have impact in terms of just our stock comp. You know, it is the time of the year where we pay out our annual bonus.
Right.
We actually accrue the bonus in the prior year because we're an October 31 year-end, and then we pay out that bonus in Q1. Obviously, take that into account as you're thinking through cash flow modeling. And then if you look, like I said, at our Q4 seasonality. So, we—I think our seasonality on cash flow is pretty standard, David.
Got it.
So that should give you a good sign.
Got it.
It's a way to think about it.
So in the interest of time, we're running out of time.
Oh, yeah.
I want to give you an opportunity to maybe touch on anything that we didn't speak about that you think maybe is relevant, or main, or maybe misunderstood from either the report last week or your SAM a month ago or so. Anything kind of out there that, you know, in your conversations, that you think maybe the investment community is maybe missing at this point?
Now, first of all, thank you for the opportunity, David, and thank you, everybody, for being here. I just want to reiterate two things as we close out. First of all, I think that clearly we delivered a very solid quarter, and we reiterated our guide for 2024. And I think most importantly, as you think about the long term for HP, it's really the big shift that I think you hit on earlier, what the kind of company we are today versus the pandemic. We have made intentional, deliberate efforts to grow our growth businesses, and we have those both in the print business and in the Personal Systems business.
As we said at the Security Analyst Meeting, we expect those businesses to grow significantly over the course of the next three years and to contribute more than, you know, 15% of our revenue of the company, which I think is going to be $15 billion, sorry. And then moreover, is just the shift in terms of the type of revenue. You know, we do expect to have a much larger contribution of software services and subscription-like models, and we expect those to be 30% actually, of those growth businesses. And I think that is potentially, you know, the real opportunity there we're going to unlock for HP. And then finally, I would just add that in terms of Personal Systems, the hybrid trends, the secular trends that we've spoken about over the last couple of years are here to stay.
And then moreover, we do see, you know, an opportunity as AI becomes clearly a driver of Personal Systems going forward as well. But thank you very much, David.
Great.
I appreciate the chance to be here.
Great. Thanks, Marie. Thanks, everyone, for joining, and we'll talk soon.
Thank you.
Have a great day.