HP Q3 revenue falls to $25.3B, down 8.1% YoY on slumping PC sales, lower demand for services
Jack Clark / Bloomberg Business :
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's Q3 drop to $25.3B is an early entry in a pattern the rest of the coverage keeps confirming: the top line swinging on PC demand while services soften alongside. Half a year later, desktop units were down 13% and notebooks 8% in the same quarter-over-quarter rhythm, showing the slide wasn't a one-quarter blip.
The same shape recurs at the other end of the arc — by late 2022 HP was forecasting a 10% PC-sales drop for the coming fiscal year after Personal Systems fell 13%, and through 2023 the Personal Systems segment kept falling harder than Printing in every quarterly print, including the August miss when revenue dropped 10% and the stock shed 10%+. This 2015 report is the template those later quarters keep re-running.
First-order effects
- HP's quarter shrinks on two fronts at once — PC sales slump and lower services demand — so neither of its two big revenue engines offsets the other.
Second-order effects
- With hardware demand falling, the pressure shifts to whatever segment holds up better; in the later prints in this coverage, Printing consistently declines less (down 3–7%) than Personal Systems (down 8–29%), making it the de facto stabilizer.
Third-order effects
- Across 2015, 2016, and 2022–23, HP's revenue tracks the device replacement cycle rather than any single product decision — a structure where every PC-demand downturn lands directly on the income statement.
The trend: HP's decade of quarterly reports shows PC-led revenue swings repeating across cycles, keeping the company's top line hostage to device replacement timing.