Yeah, there is a lot of risk. So they could instead just not rent out last gen PCs at exorbitant prices. They could, say, donate that inventory to a children’s hospital and write off the value.
Writing off a loss or donation doesn’t give you anywhere near the full value of that product, much less any profit. Why would a for-profit company essentially give away a sizeable chunk of their inventory for no actual monetary benefit?
You absolutely can write off the full value of the product as a charitable donation, and I said nothing of profit. Of course they wouldn’t financially profit, but they would be getting rid of inventory they are sitting on and spending money storing, and obviously wanted to offload.
And as for why, are you serious? Good PR is not valueless. Can you imagine the stark difference in headlines between “NZXT launches program with rates worse than an illegal loan”, versus “NZXT supplies gaming computers to children’s hospital” or even "NZXT new major sponsor of [insert huge eSports league] "?
Writing off the full value allows you to deduct that value on your taxes. The actual money you save on your taxes is the value deducted multiplied by your tax rate. For NZXT this will likely be well south of 20%.
They would be better off just selling the inventory at discounts that will actually move it but won’t because it would cannibalize their new hardware sales. Overall they are just deeply mismanaged and chose to do something horribly immoral to try to get out of it.
