HP earnings show continued struggle
Source: AP-EXCITE
By BRANDON BAILEY
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Hewlett-Packard Co.'s latest earnings report shows that despite three years of efforts to turn its business around, the venerable tech giant still has a lot more work ahead.
CEO Meg Whitman has decided to split the pioneering Silicon Valley company in two. But she has said it will take a year to disengage the sluggish printer-and-PC division from units that sell commercial tech hardware, software and services, where Whitman believes there are more opportunities for growth. Meanwhile, the company reported Tuesday that its sales fell 2 percent in the most recent three-month period, marking its 12th revenue decline in the last 13 quarters.
Profit was down 6 percent from a year ago. For the August-October fiscal quarter, HP reported net income of $1.3 billion, or 70 cents a share, on revenue of $28.4 billion. That fell short of the expectations of analysts polled by FactSet, who predicted earnings of 80 cents a share on revenue of $28.7 billion.
And there was little comfort in a new forecast issued Tuesday by the market research firm IDC. Although the firm says total PC sales by all makers should level out in the next few years, "no significant growth" is expected. The only "good" news is that the global PC market won't shrink as much this year. IDC now expects the decline to be 2.7 percent rather than 3.7 percent, as forecast earlier.
FULL story at link.
FILE - In this Feb. 16, 2010, file photo, Hewlett-Packard inks are seen on display in Mountain View, Calif. Hewlett-Packard Co. reports quarterly financial results on Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
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I worked at DEC, which was run into the ground by its PC biz, then sold in a gunshot marriage to Compaq, which ran the very successful storage biz into the ground. Then sold to HP, where a laptop with all our pension info on it was "stolen" from a Fidelity VP's rental car in HP's parking lot and, after months of assurances that it was a "random theft" our identities were stolen.
The Fidelity VP happened to be married to a former colleague of mine from DEC, who happened to contact me for contract work the week before my identity was stolen. So along with all my personal information in the pension file, they got my education history, current address and phone (which I had not yet updated with Fidelity), and detailed employment history.
Last I checked, he still had my old job at DEC, so presumably she is still a VP at Fidelity, along with their sideline jobs as part of an identity theft ring.
I swing between wanting to see HP sink to the bottom of the swamp, and fearing it will take my little pension with it. 
That takes ingenuity and all that has been squeezed out of the system, or are waiting tables for less than minimum wage. Likewise, all the U.S. firms (those great stock market numbers not-with-standing), at the end of the day, won't wash either. It's all a sham. And when it crashes next time, there won't be any uncles around to help. And it will crash. They don't even pretend anymore. They're just paying themselves all these bonuses and stockholders dividends -- all of it from borrowing cheap Fed money. Money we're responsible for backing up when they go bankrupt, remember?
Ever since Quantitative Easing made collecting free cash a snap for banksters its been all the rage on Wall Street. And as with those famous ''Derivatives'' they have more slimy ways they've cooked up to skin us -- than anyone ever thought possible.
I mean why wait for some third-party like Bain Capital to show up and take over your hard earned company theft, and then sell everything off piece by piece until there's nothing left and the worker's pension and bennies are shot to hell? Huh? Not when you can do it yourself using cheap Fed money that you have no intention of ever paying back!?!?
- At least this way the company will be ripped apart and flushed down the john by people everyone knows, instead of some cold, unfeeling outsiders......
K&R
by The Sovereign Investor • November 15, 2014
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Take IBM, for example. For years now, its earnings per share have increased steadily, even though its revenues have remained flat since 2008. It achieved this magical result by buying boatloads of its own shares to drive up the price. For example, in the first six months of 2014, IBM spent $12 billion on its own shares. It has spent $108 billion on share buybacks since 2000.
This made shareholders happy, the more so because IBM also paid them hefty dividends during the same period. It also made IBM executives like CEO Virginia M. Rometty very happy, since a large part of their compensation is in the form of stock options: The higher the share price, the more they make.
At one level, so what? After all, reducing the pool of outstanding shares should drive up the intrinsic value of the remainder. The problem is that IBM, like many American firms, financed its share buybacks not out of retained earnings, but with debt — the cheap money sloshing around the U.S. economy courtesy of the Federal Reserve’s QE programs.
In effect, what IBM has been doing is liquidating itself — distributing the actual underlying value of the firm to shareholders (via dividends) and to executives (via options), and replacing it with debt. It’s precisely what many American households did prior to the 2008 crash, by borrowing against the value of their homes and using it to splurge on vacations, boats and RVs.
And just as many observers have taken American households to task for failing to convert their household equity into increased earnings capacity — say by investing home equity loans into education or small business — so IBM and other U.S. firms stand accused of selling the family silver and failing to invest it in growing market share, developing new products, or improving production efficiency for existing ones … the “fundamentals” that drive future performance, and thus share price performance.
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