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Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ)
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The Company is a global provider of products, technologies, software, solutions and services to individual consumers, small and medium sized businesses, large enterprises, including the public and education sectors.
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HP has truly lost its shine. What was once a world-class technology company has now become an assembler and seller of cheaply-made PC's and printers.HP is a conglomerate that once housed the best minds of Agilent, Dynec, Apollo, Convex, Tandem, EDS, and DEC (along with many who moved on to other companies, like Apple) yet most of the "blue" talent fled when the "red" Compaq people came in. Now HP's reputation for quality has dissolved along with the "ewlett and" "ackard" portions of its name.Anything of value outside the desktop computer/printer/storage/consulting space has been sold off or killed, and what remains is being made on the cheap. That leaves HP in the same boat as Dell and Acer/Gateway, companies forced to lower their profit margins and quality year after year while chasing each other to attract more of the computer market's lowest-common-denominator customers. The commoditization of the computer industry is squeezing this company, but HP is as guilty as anyone for causing that commoditization to happen in the first place.
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=280408This is what I said. This article says there are no winners, but there is at least one - Apple. Dell, HP, Acergatewayemachines, and Lenovo can chase each other to the bottom and destroy each other with increasingly lower profit margins while Apple rakes profits from selling real computers.
I read today that Dell has a profit margin of 5-6% and HP has one of around 11%. If you back out HP's ink business, they're probably about in line with what Dell does. These figures are from a year or so ago before things started to get bad. Meanwhile Apple's margins are in the 15% range. Who doesn't want to be Apple?
The new HP should not be judged by it's being able to compete in the home pc and printer business alone. That is not where Hewlett-Packard has been the targeting it's growth for several years now. It has long been the leading technology provider to enterprise corporate customers. Services, and providing the best price performance and server experience has also been a priority. It is also paying more attention to the SMB market.
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/w1/en/messaging/realstory-server-mktshare.html
I serve as the defacto IT person for a small office, the nonprofit where I work. If I was considering moving up to more advanced systems, adding another server, whatever, I'm going to look at the piss-poor quality of our HP printers and go with another company. The rot that has eaten through HP's personal PC and imaging businesses has spread across the entire organization, or at least has given the whole a bad appearance. At one time HP didn't need to move into the role of "leading technology provider to enterprise corporate customers" because it already HAD that role. HP played a major role in developing and popularizing the calculator, the handheld calculator, the word processor, the laser printer, and the inkjet printer - they built half the computer equipment that put men on the moon. First there was IBM, and then there was HP. Period. They spent ten years wandering down a road of stupidity and lost any good reputation they might have had - a reputation is much easier to lose than it is to regain.
They might be profitable but they aren't the HP they ought to be.
Well, I agree with most of you. HP has lost it's shine and no longer stands for innovation and striving for excellence.
Cost cutting across the board has only a short term benefit. The cuts in R&D will come home to haunt them
especially in the printer division. The Unix server group is dead and placing product people in charge of services
is poor judgement.