HP Ink's UK profits tumble nearly 85% – of course Brexit to blame If there is something missing on this sunny Friday, it could well be a collective yearning among Reg readers to know how HP Ink Inc is faring in the UK. Fear not, for we have the latest financials. The PC and print arm that undocked from the mothership back in 2015 turned over £1.4bn in sales for the 12 months ended 31 October …
When the £/$ rate has gone from AFAIK, around $1.50/£1 to around $1.30/£1. That's less than 20%.
Perhaps if HP didn't gouge the users so much wrt price they'd sell more and make more money.
HP really don't have a clue these days. The only thing they seem to do is 'reduce headcount'.
A far cry from when I worked there (left in 1998).
The £/$ exchange rate isn't necessarily the best metric, when both currencies have become less-than-stable due to political 'upsets' over the last couple of years. I'd expect the USD to fall a bit more once Fart'sTrump's trade war hots up, and it becomes obvious that US vs rest-of-world might not end in favour of the US.
1. Stupidly expensive ink.
Totally agree but they are no different from Canon in that regard. Look at Kip or OCE / Seiko if you want lower running costs and can stomach the £20k plus initial cost.
2. We have some expensive HP printer/scanners at work and when monitoring NTP network traffic three devices were transmitting leap second packets.
Wow I'm going to have to test that out on Monday. We keep our office ones on a separate subnet but it would be interesting to raise a call with HP if that is the case.
we only have one HP printer at work, a large format A3 roll feed. That uses 3rd party cartridges, we remove the cartridge, fill from an ink bottle and put back. It also has a waste ink "potty" we reset the pad full when the counter gets passed the threshold.
The rest are Epson A3 printers, these have CISS fitted (and waste ink potty). the oldest printer we have is an Epson R360 A4, that one has been waste pad reset over 10 times now (that is about 1.5Million prints) and the heads are still working well.
Not one of them have had OEM ink purchased other than the cartridges they came with (and that was whilst the CISS was waiting to be fitted). We can buy 7x 250ml bottles and a pair of empty cartridges for each colour (depending on if it uses gloss optimiser or not) cheaper than a single set of OEM cartridges.
" That uses 3rd party cartridges, we remove the cartridge, fill from an ink bottle and put back."
Surprisingly, our HP AO+ roll feed printer works out about the same price to use genuine cartridges as to refill or use a CISS system.
They do rape and pillage on the smaller ones though.
3: They break if given PJL headers exceeding 1024 characters
That's despite the standard allowing 4096. HP have known about it since _at least_ 2003 and promised to fix it back then, but somehow never got around to it.
If your HP printer ever went into an odd state for no apparent reason, that's probably why.
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the profitsd dipped due to 'admin expenses' is more than likely due to the company having a profit sharing scheme if profits were over a certain %
HP then created the 'admin expenses' item so that overall profits were reduced by the payment % but still kept all the cash.
<<used to work for a company that tried that accounting trick once to avoid the profit share.... was very hard for them to make any money when the entire staff went on strike including the plant manager (who dipped out on 10K)
They could just up the price of printers and increase their durability then drop the price of ink from arse reaming to moderate fumble and people will buy the ink.
We have some SOHO HP printer at work, the IT dept decided to save money they would use compatible carts. The Print head now will not print in yellow as the cheap cart has wrecked it.
Me, I have an Epson L1800 with ink tanks, MUCH more reasonable print price and superb photo quality to boot.
Surly there are better ways to print pretty pictures, such as thermal film transfer method? For me its not so much about the cost, just the inconvenience of unpacking a fresh Cart One day, and coming back to print something (useally a B&W Document), and having to blow though 10+ pages just to clear a ink clog on one of the Printer Heads. Which in turn also blows though a metic f**kton of Ink as well.
I'll gladly admit that Laser isnt alwas the goto answer here. But, for the normiee pleb its a way more saner choice than crappy Ink Jets will ever be.
Whatever they're doing, the Dublin Inkjet Manufacturing Operation is still wetting itself at the sight of druids trying to turn lead into gold. They turn soot, iron filings and water into gold, and all with a very tiny workforce. DIMO (the other one's in Singapore) is a huge factory site with machines and a small admin side. Very sparsely crewed as the machines are large, simple and just work.I think the manufacturing costs for an inkjet cartridge are on the order of about 7p (a blurp of plastic, a very small PCB, a small amount of water, some pigment and a little cardboard box. Then you pay how much for it???
I have a colour HP Laser Printer because the ink doesn't dry up. I retired my ancient inkjet because I am away for long periods from time to time and the ink dries up.
Not long after starting to use it I was told that it was nearly out of blue. I took the "shut up and keep printing" option. Now about 6 months later it is reporting all consumables low but still printing away just fine. A set of new HP full size (not introductory with the printer) toner cartridges cost more than a new laser printer.
I'm just going to keep on printing till it really runs out of something then try 3rd party toner. If I'd paid any attention to HP I'd have spent £100s on new toner by now. Lying barstewards.
I would hate to stick up for HP as I'm no fan but use cases are different.
If it is telling you that a colour is almost out it is so you can make the decision whether to get a spare ready (no-one would replace on an 'almost out' message). However as you say you do very little printing -- but in a business a laser could be printing hundreds or even thousands of sheets a day. They would prefer to get an early warning of toner running out to ensure they have a spare than find out half way through the day and have to send the intern to PC World to try to get a new one.
Our lasers are have custom warnings that are set to 20% which would still equate to almost 8000 pages left., but we could get through that in a weekend.
... particularly when they're filed by the company which invented corporate tax avoidance. With a little help from PwC. HP Inc does have the lowest effective tax rate off all tech companies which is really saying something ...
All you're seeing is what HP Inc wants you and the UK taxman to see in a robust tax avoidance exercise. HP Invent? Well if they put as much effort into R&D as they did into tax avoidance then we'd all be a lot better off ...
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