HP Inc reaches new low as shares slump

HP results announcement prompts bad day on Wall Street

Shares of HP Inc - one of the new companies created after HP split - have hit their lowest point since the company's inception on the back of its results announcement.

As CRN reported yesterday, Meg Whitman - chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and HP Inc president - unveiled a set of HP numbers for the final time yesterday. The figures were for the year and quarter ending 31 October, the day before it legally split into two.

On the earnings call, Whitman said HPE was off to a "very strong start" and was bullish about its progress. Since the company split in two, HPE has been especially keen to shout about itself, launching a big advertising campaign and preparing for its inaugural HPE Discover event next week on London.

Since the results announcement, HPE shares have risen as much as five per cent, but it was a different story over at HP Inc, where shares have plummeted more than 13 per cent over the same period, according to Fortune, which described it as a new low for the firm.

In Q4, the divisions of what was HP which now form part of HP Inc - Printing and Personal Systems - saw double-digit sales decline, both down 14 per cent on the year-ago quarter.

On the earnings call, HP Inc's chief executive Dion Weisler said currency fluctuations were among some of the issues facing that side of the business in Q4.

"The most significant factor was the continued effects of currency movements that have accelerated pricing pressures, even more than we expected in certain profitable segments of the Printing markets," he said, on a call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

"Secondly, the market was somewhat weaker than we expected in the calendar third quarter. And you will see this in our results and you saw in the results of some of our peers, some of whom have announced their intention to re-evaluate strategic options."

He is not overly optimistic about the near future of the market either, he added.

"We do not expect the landscape to improve in the near future and we will constantly assess how the market evolves," he said. "In any case our market leadership and scale serve us well, but we have much more work to do on many dimensions."