Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Hewlett-Packard: Scattered Patches of Brightness
Hewlett-Packard posted its quarterly financials Tuesday afternoon and they were slightly better than expected, driven by a two percent increase in PC shipments. Quarterly profit fell 19 percent to $1.64 billion, or 67 cents a share, on revenue of $27.45 billion. But excluding one-time items, HP earned $2.2 billion, or 91 cents a share, a penny better than analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had forecast. And the company seems confident of its performance going forward.
The shareholders of Sun Microsystems have given the thumbs-up to the company’s merger agreement with Oracle. At a special meeting Thursday, a 62 percent majority of Sun’s common stock owners–not including CEO Jonathan Schwartz and board chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy, who, oddly, did not attend–approved the deal.
Here’s an interesting metric: Apple’s Web site last month drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. The number of visitors was more than double that of Hewlett-Packard, which drew 21.9 million people, and triple Dell’s, which drew 16.8 million.
Hewlett-Packard ushered in a new paradigm for printing today, one absent the PC. This morning the company announced a wireless touchscreen printer that will allow users to print documents from the Web without ever using a PC or browser. 
Hewlett-Packard’s second-quarter financials may have been in line with forecasts, but they were troubling nonetheless. A number of analysts predicted that the company might report better-than-expected earnings. Sadly, it did not. 
If you’re reading this on an HP Pavilion or Compaq Presario laptop, you might want to switch from battery to AC power before reading the remainder of this post. Fearing they might burst into flame, Hewlett-Packard is recalling 70,000 lithium-ion batteries that shipped with several types of its portable machines.
Larry Ellison’s got some news for skeptics predicting Oracle will dump the Sun Microsystems hardware business when its $7.4 billion acquisition of the company closes: It’s not gonna happen. In an interview with Reuters subsequently filed with the SEC, the Oracle CEO said he plans to maintain that part of Sun’s business.
Cisco has finally crossed the Rubicon. Long a partner to the big server makers, the networking equipment giant today became a competitor, announcing an aggressive push into the server market. No longer content to peddle switches and routers alone, Cisco is now selling a full-blown data center solution.
Palm hasn’t yet set its price or launch date, but it already has a winner on its hands in the Pre. That’s the word from RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky, who gave the device one hell of a write-up this morning. Seems Abramsky, who had previously been neutral on Palm, now believes the company has a chance at “smartphone leadership.”
Brave guy, Yair Reiner, for singlehandedly assailing the “Macs are more expensive” myth (or truism, depending on your particular world view). In a research note on Apple’s new desktops, the Oppenheimer analyst compared, spec-by-spec, the new iMac, Dell’s XPS One 24 and Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart IQ800t and concluded that the iMac offers a better value.
Here is the letter Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd broadcast to employees Wednesday explaining the company’s stunning reversal in outlook for the fiscal year and its plans to reduce pay and benefits across the board. “In an environment like this, there’s no margin for error and no tolerance for inaction,” he wrote.
According to market-research outfits Gartner and IDC, PC shipment growth in the fourth quarter of 2008 was the worst since 2002. IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker shows global PC shipments down 0.4 percent year over year. So much for that annual holiday season uptick.
