Actually, if you go look at their quarterly reports, the Services, Personal systems and printing groups have been making a lot of money lately. Enterprise systems has been their sore spot, but even those have been profitable. The company as a whole had revenues of around $80 Billion last year with about $4 in profits, that's not too shabby. Their margins could be better, but they aren't hurting as much as everyone in the press seems to say. I know some people that work there (they employ about 10,000 Houstonians) and they've been more positive lately then I've seen them in the last 2 years. Seems like the more money they make, the more negative people get about them. Plus their stock is WAY undervalued, trading at about 12 times this years expected earnings. Dell and IBM are trading at like 19-23 times.
I was pretty down on HP for some time, but lately, I've been much more positive about them. I usually gauge these things by what I think of a company's products, and I've been pretty happy with a lot of the stuff I've seen from HP over the past year or two. I was thinking that maybe she'd gotten everything going in the right direction finally.
Wallstreet never liked the HP and CPQ merger. It hasn't been the disaster that they predicted, and has worked out OK actually, but since she went against Wallstreet she will always be the face of the company for that merger. HP had to have her leave just to get people to stop talking about a merger that Wallstreet disagreed with. CPQ and now HP have been beat around by Wallstreet for the last 5-6 years, whether they are doing good or bad.
As an HP employee... (hey summer interns count right?? )... I hope this is a good thing, something I couldn't stand in my time there over the last summer was how everyone I worked with (mostly former Compaq employees) were so down on the company and Carly... granted I wasn't there from before so I didn't have the full picture of why, but the negative attitude all over the place didn't make for a very enjoyable work environment! So, I hope things turn around for HP and I can happily work there for years to come...
