RSSHP shows more success in PCs, servers and storage than in printers
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published February 20, 2008, 6:36 PM
Hewlett-Packard is off to a great start for 2008, on the whole, turning in first quarter results that show growth across PCs, storage, servers, and most other product categories.
But surprisngly, revenues from printers -- traditionally the mainstay of HP's business -- actually showed a drop of two percentage points in consumer unit sales from the beginning quarter of 2007.
"HP delivered a strong first quarter," maintained HP CEO Mark Hurd, during a financial conference call held last night which detailed HP's revenue gain of 13% year-over-year to $28.5 billion for the quarter. "We had balanced growth and profitability across all regions and gained share in key market segments," Hurd told analysts.
In the call, Hurd and HP CFO Cathie Lesjak highlighted the growth figures across a number of specific markets, including increases of 24% for Personal Systems, 9% for Enterprise Storage and Servers, 17% for HP Financial Services, and 22% for commercial client revenue in the enterprise and mid-market arenas.
In addition, unit shipments rose 49% for PC laptops and 15% for desktop PCs and workstations.
"We could have done better than we did, and just to be very blunt, I'm not real happy about it," he said.
Even then, HP's Deskjet printer line did inch up one percentage point in terms of worldwide unit sales, according to the CEO.
But acknowledging that the supplies revenues generated by printer sales are very important to HP's business, Hurd said "there is more work for us yet to do" on printer sales.
Through increasing diversification, however, HP's business model seems to be shifting somewhat away from the company's historic reliance on printers above all else, and PCs as a second linchpin.
"No tech company is immune to a tech spending slowdown, but HP has the most customer and geographic diversity in our group," according to David C. Bailey, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. In a client note, Bailey wrote that HP "continues to have multiple economically idendepent cost cutting levers, which give its earnings greater resiliency in a weaker macro environment."
In terms of HP's consumer markets, Hurd told financial analysts that, "in the US, at the end of the quarter, we saw a little more caution [than] we've seen in the past."
Like other major systems vendors, including IBM and Microsoft, HP is now placing a big emphasis on sales in emerging markets.
"Emerging geographies accounted for hearly half of the PC units shipped in the mark and over 60 percent of growth," Hurd admitted during the call.
In any event, on stock exchanges, HP's strong first quarter results spurred price jumps today in share prices for HP and tech stocks in general.
By early afternoon today, HP stock value had gained 7 points on the New York Stock Exchange, reaching $47.37 per share.
I like their calculators.
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Our company has some of the newer LaserJet 4700 color printers and so far these things are rock solid. Have had a couple that needed only minor maintenance which is simple enough to handle.
I was also just deployed an HP 6510b laptop which I'm liking so far. Seems like a nice machine.
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Would have expected when they dumped their printer (their cash cow) and focus on their other line of business.
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HP Lasers used to be great...5si anyone? They even had a truly great support staff for the laserjets. I still remember a support call I had in for a 4100DN where the tech instructed me over the phone on how to disassemble the magneto-resistive clutch assembly in one of the rollers. This, whith barely any hold time and all of two minutes of explaination/troubleshooting! No one could then or can now touch that level of service.
Sadly, the laserjet support engineers were layed off under the witch that killed HP, their color lasers are "teH sux0rs" and lets just say their driver packages have become less than ideal. PS emulation? Lets get real... Crashing a server with a print driver....common HP!
Inkjets? Please...lets be serious heh. ;)
We've started getting Xerox color lasers and haven't looked back.
OTOH... we've stopped getting Dell servers and are finding the HP DL380 G5 really hard to beat :) The optiplexes may be the next to bite the dust and you better believe an HP SFF will be among the first to get a look.
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HP printers will seriously last you forever. I've had my HP all in one for about five years now and I can get about a year and a half out of the ink cartridges.
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5 years is "forever" now?
sheesh. Our bar has been set so low....
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I'm still using an HP DeskJet 812 from 1999 and it still works great. Printers at work are predominantly HP and we've had very few problems, with the exception of the Color LaserJet 3700 that we have (lots of jams on that model) and the DeskJet 3950s that we have (numerous problems - thankfully we don't have very many of that model - it was picked before I came on board).
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Is this because the printers have a very low failure rate?
I've had 1 Epsom and 2 HPs thus far.
The Epsom died in a year.
Neither HP died, the first was a Parallel cabled one, and I got sick of the long wait before printing began and bought a new USB one, and it's lasted ever since (approx 4 years).
Their computers on the other hand I don't like.
Funny that.
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You haven't owned a laserjet 4200 then. The fusers break quite often.
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Buy a Kodak inkjet printer instead. You'll save tons of $$ on ink and they work great. I've had mine since they came out last year and it's far outperformed the HP I had. I always hated putting out $60 each time to replace the cartridges in the HP. The Kodak ink only costs $21 for both cartridges and seems to print more pages than my HP did on a set of cartridges!
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Our HP's get 15,000 pages on a $100 toner. Seems reasonable. I'd rather get rid of our desire to print to dead trees than switch to yet another printer.
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8 x 2300's had from new from when time began. Never had anything done to them apart from toners and the odd paper jam.
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