'Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription' says HP CEO gunning for 2024's Worst Person of the Year award

It was only the other day we reported how HP has been slapped with a lawsuit in response to measures that disable its printers when fitted with a third-party ink cartridge. Now the company's CEO, Enrique Lores, says HP wants to «make printing a subscription.» Nice. Not.

It's well known that printers are routinely sold at a loss, with the real revenues made from selling replacement ink cartridges. The move to a subscription model, as reported by Ars Technica, is just another attempt at maximising that profit stream.

«This is something we announced a few years ago that our goal was to reduce the number of what we call unprofitable customers. Because every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We're investing in that customer, and if this customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment,» Lores says, turning «selling at a loss» into a neat «investment» euphemism.

HP's CFO Marie Myers has also expanded on the subscription approach, noting that the company's existing cartridge subscription service, known as Instant Ink, can deliver a «20% uplift on the value of that customer because you're locking that person» in.

In 2023, HP made over $3 billion in profits from its printer business. So, a 20% uplift implies many hundreds of millions of dollars in added profits.

Needless to say, forcing printer users over to a subscription model would likely require that the machines rejected third party cartridges to make any sense. So, it's easy to see how HP's Dynamic Security feature, which rejects non-HP cartridges when implemented, is laying the ground work for a subscription model.

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Moreover, any court decision pertaining to existing printers, which are purchased by consumers, probably won't apply to printers that may be