Competition with tablets like the IPad and having to deal with Bangalore Bob when it breaks have sent customers fleeing.
Posted on 08/23/2012 8:59:45 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Hewlett Packard (HPQ) reported its worst quarterly loss in its 73-year history Wednesday.
The PC-maker suffered an $8.9 billion loss in its fiscal third-quarter, or $4.49 a share. The hit to HP's bottom line was due in large part to an $8 billion write-off of its 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS)
Excluding one-time charges, HP earned $2 billion in the quarter, down from $2.3 billion a year-ago amid a 5 percent drop in overall revenues to $29.7 billion.
The company's major PC business slowed in the quarter as sales dropped 10 percent from the previous year. Printer and notebook sales were down 23 percent and 12 percent, respectively.
HP's stock was down nearly 7 percent in early trading Thursday to $17.92.
While HP undergoes a major restructuring to offset declining PC sales and fend off growing competition from Asian PC makers, the company's newly minted CEO Meg Whitman remains "confident" HP can maneuver through its difficulties.
"We are still in the early stage of the turnaround. There will be challenges ahead that could create some variability in performance," Whitman said on the earnings conference call. "But I'm confident in our ability to work through them and get to where we want to be."
Whitman may be confident but her admission HP is in the "early stage" of its turnaround is spooking investors, who recall IBM's major difficulties in trying to restructure its business in the early 1990s.
Whitman sought to downplay such comparisons in an interview with The NY Times, but it's still likely to be very grim at HP for quite some time, as The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task and Henry Blodget discuss in the accompanying video.
HP plans to cut 27,000 jobs, or 8 percent of its total labor force, by 2014. By year end,
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
She almost single-handedly destroyed eBay, and they think she can save HP?
I bought an HP laptop years ago, never again.
PCs are commodities.
Competition with tablets like the IPad and having to deal with Bangalore Bob when it breaks have sent customers fleeing.
Exactly. I had two HP laptops both died from what my viewpoint were pre-mature deaths. One of them was the DV series that had a fundamental design flaw that melted the motherboard.
That’s exactly what happened to mine.
Consumer PCs are, and more consumers are buying smartphones. Whitman sounds like she's going to waste company resources going after a bigger share of a declining market.
When I was in college, they were the gold standard for measuring equipment.
Dell is also taking a beating ....
The iPad revolutionized the market, and some of the newer Android tablets are giving it some stiff competition. A great deal of what Laptops are used for, simply can be done “better” on a tablet.
Plus, we have the other little factoid to consider. Decades ago, hardware technology jumped forward at a pace that made it necessary to upgrade your PC every couple of years. Lately, for the past ~8 yrs or so; the rate of improvement in the hardware area has been lackluster - you can get by with a 2006 era desktop/laptop just fine today.
You are correct. HP decided that the brand recognition on printers was worth more than the brand recognition on scientific equipment.
Now, the Scientific Equipment sector is branded as Agilent.
Dunno who the best is now; I don't care about printers at work anymore. Only thing that I look for is that something comes out when I hit "print".
Interesting. I have a one year old HP Pavillion and it’s been giving excellent service. Much better than my previous PCs, a Sony and a Gateway. Of course since I use it for the Web, word processing, video downloads I haven’t extended its capabilities, but I’m quite satisfied.
Carly Fiorina killed HP, Whitman is trying to revive a dead body.
One of the places I work has a presence at an extremely large data center - >350K ft^2.
Six years ago, 98% of stuff in the data center was running on Dell equipment. I was just back there this past spring and walked around the DC. I'd guess that maybe a little over 1/2 was Dell. HP made the most inroads, with Cisco UCS gear a close 3rd.
I was strongly considering buying some Dell stock a couple of years ago. Glad that I didn't. Although, their gear is great, I've used it for 12 years or more. And their support - enterprise-level support - is still in America.
Okay, even in the old days, HP laptops were flaky (Remember the popout mouse?)
The Vectra series had been a good one. The mini-computers and workstations had a good reputation. Now? Their SANs stink, their servers are a poor value, and their networking gear is too expensive for what it does. The HP name COULD have been a star in the large scale enterprise. They are now eating IBM’s dust.
HP AND Dell’s largest money-makers are servers. They make a lot of money on printer ink and toner, but at $2,000 per entry-level business-class server, they’re making plenty of cash outside of retail/consumer-level tech.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner...
All HW is ridiculously mrked up.
There's not much negotiating on 1's and 2's of servers. But when you're talking $250-500K (or more) worth, there's plenty of wiggle room. 10-30%, depending on the time of month, time of the quarter, whether they need to hit numbers, and so on.
And I doubt they're losing money at some of the prices I've gotten. They're just not making as much.
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