Is That’s a deliberate choice? Perhaps… but clearly it is imposed on PC OEMs by high component prices. HP said it is “prioritizing profitable growth and edge AI-driven demand rather than chasing a low margin share.” Karen Parkhill, the CFO, tied revenue growth to “a richer mix of higher value categories,” not volume recovery.
For ITADs, two things are stacking on top of each other. First, the Windows 11 refresh cycle — about 70% complete, per HP — has been driving enterprise displacement volume into ITAD channels since 2024. That wave is tapering now. Second, separately, HP is structurally deprioritizing entry-level units going forward, so the next refresh cycle won’t replace that volume at the same scale. One is a cyclical falloff, the other is permanent, and they’re happening at the same time.
The entry-level segment has always been the bulk-retirement pipeline — think of school laptops, call-center desktops, budget SMB fleets that retire by the pallet and get processed at high volume. As that tier shrinks, so does that intake. Not this quarter — structurally, as fleets turn over.
Here’s the warning: AI-capable PCs won’t reach end-of-life volume until fiscal 2028 at the earliest. Nothing is scheduled to backfill the gap. That leaves an 18-to-24 month window where the fleet retirement pipeline looks nothing like what most operators built capacity around. If your labor, logistics, and processing lines are sized for high-unit-count commodity intake, expect a cold winter — that means volume will run below what you’re staffed for, and as you know, fixed costs don’t scale down as fast as the units do.
The devices that do, come through that window, skew premium: AI-capable, NPU-equipped, workstation-class. Different memory architectures, they require different sanitization protocols, there is certainly more resale value at stake if grading is off. Commodity-tier, high-throughput volume shrinks as a share of the business. What’s left demands more careful handling per unit, not less. And so perhaps you should consider shifting from volume-processing to higher-touch, higher-value handling?