HP earnings show continued struggle; profit falls 6%, sales 2%
Hewlett-Packard Co.’s latest earnings report shows that despite three years of efforts to turn its business around, the venerable tech giant still has a lot more work ahead.
Chief Executive Meg Whitman has decided to split the pioneering Silicon Valley company in two. But she has said it would take a year to disengage the sluggish printer-and-PC division from units that sell commercial tech hardware, software and services, where Whitman believes there are more opportunities for growth. Meanwhile, the company reported Tuesday that its sales fell 2% in the most recent three-month period, marking its 12th revenue decline in the last 13 quarters.
Profit was down 6% from a year earlier. For the August-October fiscal quarter, HP reported net income of $1.3 billion, or 70 cents a share, on revenue of $28.4 billion. That fell short of the expectations of analysts polled by FactSet, who predicted earnings of 80 cents a share on revenue of $28.7 billion.
And there was little comfort in a new forecast issued Tuesday by the market research firm IDC. Although the firm says PC sales should level out in the next few years, “no significant growth” is expected. The only “good” news is that the global PC market won’t shrink as much this year. IDC now expects the decline to be 2.7% rather than 3.7%, as forecast earlier.
PC sales have suffered as consumers increasingly have turned to smartphones and other mobile devices. Yet they are the biggest single part of HP’s business, accounting for more than 30% of the company’s nearly $112 billion in annual revenue.
Whitman has vowed to expand that by taking PC sales away from competitors. In the most recent quarter, HP said, its PC business was the only business that grew. But the poor outlook for the PC industry as a whole is part of what led to her decision to split the company, despite vowing earlier not to do so.
Wall Street analysts have cautiously endorsed Whitman’s argument that the company’s commercial tech businesses can grow faster if they’re not held back by the printer and PC businesses. Restructuring the company may be a key to HP’s future success, said FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives, but he added that returning the company to the kind of growth it enjoyed in the past is still “an Everest-like challenge.”
Investors have gradually warmed to the idea. Although HP’s stock fell more than 12% in the week after Whitman announced the plan, shares have since returned to above $38, where they had been in August. HP stock closed Tuesday at $37.63, up 13 cents, but fell in late trading after the earnings announcement.
