It’s stupid.
No one bats 1000.
Looks like Scott McNealy at Sun did a worse job than Carly did at HP.
Well some of us wrote the training manuals for our outsourced replacements so a stock chart really doesn’t change my opinion at all
I run my own entertainment business and no, I won’t vote for her. HP is just a small percentage of my dislike for her...
It seems you don’t know how to read a chart.
One trick pony. What has Carly achieved since HP?
HP shows the greatest value increase after Fiorina is ousted. Is that the point to be clarified?
Even if it is true?
Even if she is pro-abort job, pro-DREAM act, pro-homosexual “civil union” marriage, pro-homosexuals serving in the military?
She was fired from HP via unanimous vote.
If she were so good, that wouldn’t have been.
let’s see the chart shows hp up but underperforming dell after she takes over and spins off agilent (starts dismantling the legacy hp), then it tracks the down market through ‘02 then it underperforms the market after she forces a merger with compaq until she’s forced out with the stock tanking.
but, after she’s forced out the stock roars up and outperforms the market.
humm. i don’t think the chart says what you think it does.
Are you being sarcastic? Because the chart shows the exact opposite of your thesis.
Around the time she was forced out, HP was doing worse than both IBM and Dell. Immediately after she left however, HP began rising, and wound up outperforming both IBM and Dell. In fact, after Carly left, HP was the most improved company on your chart... AFTER Fiorina.
Sun is not relevant because they weren't in retail PC hardware the way the others were.
BTW, I run two LLCs, so I'm not one of those you're tired of.
Actually Perdogg, it appears the stock cratered in 2002. Two to two and a half years later, and it hadn’t recovered very well. Two years after she left, things were turning around nicely.
That isn’t indicative of her looking real good there.
Do you disagree?
You’re incorrect friend
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina repeatedly has said “we doubled the size of the company” and “took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent,” while she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Both statistics pertain to revenue, but Fiorina uses different time frames to boost her record. She also neglects to mention that the increase in revenue came after HP acquired Compaq and was accompanied by a decrease in net earnings.
Fiorina has given these statistics, and others, in response to questions about her firing from the technology company. She was CEO of HP from July 1999 through February 2005, when she was ousted from the company. She told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” on May 10: “And what people fail to comment on is the fact that we doubled the size of the company, we took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent, we tripled the rate of innovations to 11 patents a day.”
She rattled off similar points to Yahoo! News’ Katie Couric on May 4, saying: “We doubled the company to almost $90 billion. We took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent. … We quadrupled the cash flow.” And those same claims are on Fiorina’s campaign website.
‘Doubled’ Revenue
Fiorina’s major move as head of HP was the acquisition of Compaq in May 2002. It was controversial — opposed by Walter Hewlett (the son of founder Bill Hewlett), who unsuccessfully contested the close shareholder vote for the merger in a lawsuit. But the merger certainly caused an increase in revenue, as the company known for printers moved into the personal computer market.
For the claim that revenue “doubled” to “almost $90 billion,” Fiorina compares the fiscal 1999 revenue of $42.4 billion with the fiscal 2005 revenue of $86.7 billion. HP’s fiscal year ends Oct. 31, so 1999 would include a little more than three months of Fiorina’s tenure, which began July 19 that year. She left the company on Feb. 9, 2005, so that fiscal year includes about three months with Fiorina at the helm. (The figures come from the company’s annual 10-K filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)
Fiscal 2004 may be a better point of comparison, since Fiorina was with HP for the full year. Revenue that year was $80 billion. That’s still close to a doubling since 1999.
The merger was a significant reason for the jump in revenue. In 2001, HP’s revenue was $45.2 billion and Compaq’s was $33.6 billion. In 2003, the first full fiscal year for the combined companies, HP’s revenue totaled $73 billion.
HP revenue growth chart, FactCheck.org
And revenue statistics alone don’t tell the whole story. Net earnings, or income, didn’t see the same kind of boost as revenue. In fact, if we look at the same fiscal years as the Fiorina campaign, net earnings dropped, from $3.1 billion in 1999 to $2.4 billion in 2005.
The company didn’t see a significant spike in earnings until 2006, when they hit $6.2 billion.
We asked Kartik Hosanagar, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, about using financial indicators to evaluate Fiorina’s performance. He said that normally the reduction in earnings (along with layoffs that occurred after the merger and a drop in stock valuation) “would by itself be enough to say that it was an unsuccessful stint. However, she was HP’s CEO during an overall tough period in the tech industry. Most companies laid off workers and lost stock market valuation.”
When we asked Fiorina’s campaign about the reduction in earnings that came with the growth in revenue during her tenure, we were referred to a spokeswoman for her super PAC, who noted that Fiorina led the company during an economic recession. “Carly Fiorina made the tough decisions that were necessary to reform the company, and HP and its shareholders reaped the rewards of those decisions after she left,” said Leslie Shedd, press secretary for Carly for America.
Conflicting Revenue Claims
Fiorina’s “doubled” the company claim is often followed by the claim that “we took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent.” That, too, is a reference to revenue, but it isn’t calculated by comparing 1999 to 2005. Instead, her super PAC says the statistic compares the second quarter of 1999 to all of 2005.
If we use the same parameters as Fiorina’s “doubled” claim, revenue growth went from 7.5 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent in 2005. But 2005’s revenue growth was only 6 percent on a constant currency basis, which is an adjustment due to foreign currency fluctuations. (In 1999, there wasn’t a significant currency impact.)
In a document that criticizes the Washington Post‘s FactChecker, Glenn Kessler, for taking issue with these same claims, the Carly for America super PAC says, “When dealing with complex information like SEC reports for $90 billion companies, you could cherry-pick different data sets to get the answers you want.” We couldn’t agree more. But it’s Fiorina, not Kessler, who’s doing the cherry-picking.
The PAC argues that the second quarter of 1999, the last full quarter before Fiorina joined the company, is the only fair starting point. But it uses an apples-to-oranges comparison by looking at the growth rate for six months ending April 30, 1999, (over that same period from 1998), and comparing that to the full year for 2005.
If Fiorina uses the full year for 1999, the increase in revenue growth doesn’t look as impressive, as we just showed. And actually, revenue growth decreased after HP adjusts the 2005 numbers for currency fluctuations.
Comparing the growth rate in one year to another, however, doesn’t reveal much about how the company performed over a six-year period. In fact, revenue growth figures fluctuated significantly during her time as CEO: In 2001, the growth was a negative 3 percent, while 2003, the first full fiscal year of the merged company, saw 23 percent growth, both currency-adjusted numbers. The 2003 10-K report filed with the SEC attributes the big jump that year to the Compaq acquisition, saying: “The net revenue increase in fiscal 2003 as compared to fiscal 2002 and in fiscal 2002 as compared to fiscal 2001 was attributable primarily to our acquisition of Compaq at the beginning of May 2002.”
HP revenue growth rate chart, FactCheck.org
Revenue growth didn’t follow a clear trajectory over Fiorina’s time; instead it dipped, increased and dipped again, as the chart shows.
Cash Flow and Patents
In saying she “quadrupled the cash flow,” Fiorina is comparing cash and short-term investments from Oct. 31, 1998 ($4 billion) to Oct. 31, 2005 ($13.9 billion). That’s an increase of 240 percent (or more than a tripling). Using Oct. 31, 1999 as the starting point — the same date used for her “doubled” revenue claim — drops the increase to 150 percent (cash and cash equivalents were $5.6 billion then).
Either way, it’s a sizable increase in cash flow, again primarily attributable to the 2002 merger. Cash flow remained around $4 billion through fiscal 2001, and then jumped to $11.4 billion in 2002 and $14.2 billion in 2003.
The number of patents also increased under Fiorina. She claims, “We tripled the rate of innovations to 11 patents a day.” Precise numbers are difficult to come by — and we disagree with the math provided by the PAC to back up Fiorina’s claim — but there is support for the claim that the rate of obtaining patents tripled.
Here’s how the PAC comes up with those numbers: It says, “When Carly started at the company in 1999, HP had 10,000 patents in force.” That figure also appears in a December 1999 news article. That year’s 10-K report doesn’t say anything about the number of patents. But the 2005 10-K report says the company had 30,000 patents. That’s an increase of 20,000 patents over six years, for an average of nine patents per day. Not 11, as the PAC says.
The sheer number of patents tripled, but — as the Post‘s Kessler also points out — Fiorina claims a tripling of “the rate,” not the number. The 1999 news article said that Fiorina had said patents were growing at a rate of five per working day. Since Fiorina is talking about a change in patent rates from the time she joined the company compared with the time she left, it’s best to look at the rate of patents in her final year with the company.
From fiscal 2003 to 2004, the final full year she was with HP, patents increased by 4,000, according to the company’s 10-K reports. That’s nearly 11 patents every day of the year, but if we discount weekends, we get 15 patents per working day. That would be a tripling of the rate compared with 1999.
The following year, HP saw an even greater increase in the number of patents, going from 25,000 at the end of fiscal 2004 to 30,000 at the end of fiscal 2005.
Now, the Compaq merger again had an impact on this facet of the company. Compaq’s 2001 10-K report (its last year before the merger) says the company had 3,900 patents at the end of that calendar year, with another 1,800 patent applications pending.
Btw
I do have extensive entrepreneurial and boss experience since aged 17 in 1974
I’m sure there are more successful here like stephenjohnbanker or southack or bnblflag(rip)
But I’m qualified to give reasonable appraisal of creating new businesses and IPOs and so forth
I’m involved in two new start ups as we speak on the Angel side which is why I post wee hours since I’m always busy 7 days a week
You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 CEO to comment of publicly traded company performance
I don’t much care for her, nor the claims of her doing in HP.
But in looking at the chart, if you look at when she started and when she was forced out, the data are not as high as in her tenure’s infancy. Only years after did it reach the same level as in 99-00. The eye is automatically drawn to the beginning and the conclusion of the data, her force out was in the middle near the low point.
Secondly, this is financial data only. If one were to do a total assessment he/she might also look at the number of jobs, overall revenues, production, etc. it would give a more complete picture.
For a real journalistic article, the author should have done more homework, instead of copying WaPo attack piece for half of his/her article, then use one single chart from Bloomberg to make the point.
How about a real comparison of what Dell, IBM, Sun (the other companies listed on the chart) did during that time period? How many each laid off, how many of these CEO got fired then got a 100 million bonus, etc. for a start.
Then come back and tell us Fiorina really didn’t do too bad at HP.
Post a Lucent chart. It was during Her tenure that any company with a pulse was provided internal loans to “buy” Lucent gear. when the bubble burst on .com The loans became worthless and Lunent was a buck stock. Think it recovered to around 5 enforce they merged withAlcatel.
Is that enough failure for you? does anyone need to operate a business to understand that fiasco? Is it alright that she was only following the herd over the fiscal cliff when she implemented the product loan scheme?
a leader, or lemming?
She is garbage and just another insider. She is utilizing her rolodex to fund her BS outsider status. She is an insider. Just an insider who has not been able to win.
How many OTHER corporations hired her? none.
He two CEO tenures speak for themselves. Catastrophic failure and expulsion.
She even had to PAY for the NYT ad endorsing her.