Today is the last time computing giant Hewlett-Packard will report quarterly earnings as a single company.
HP Reports Its Final Quarter Before It Splits in Two
Less than two months remain before the $100 billion IT giant splits into two $50 billion mini-giants.
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A little more than two months remain before HP’s planned Nov. 1 separation into two companies — Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. — the first devoted to corporate computing and services, the second to personal computing and printing. It will report final results for the fourth quarter of the 2015 fiscal year sometime in late November but will have already split in two before then.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect HP to post earnings of 85 cents a share on revenue of $25.4 billion, and to forecast for earnings of $1 a share on sales of $26.8 billion in the fourth quarter. The value of HP shares has declined by more than 25 percent since this time last year.
There are a few things worth watching for on today’s call. First will be the status of PC sales, about which expectations have worsened incrementally amid weak sales. One saving grace for HP may be sales of PCs to businesses upgrading to the latest version of Windows. Another will be server sales, a market where HP leads the world — those have been looking up.
And here’s what will hang over both businesses: Global currencies. With the U.S. dollar remaining strong versus the euro and the Japanese yen, HP is one of several companies that has struggled to prevent currency exchange rates from eating into its revenue. When the dollar is strong, companies that sell their products in local currencies can suffer when converting that money back into dollars.
The effect of currency exchange rates has been the subject of repeated complaints by CEO Meg Whitman and CFO Cathie Lesjak on conference calls with analysts, and today will likely be no different. Both will say that HP generally aims to hedge against currency’s typical up-and-down swings. But with Greece weighing on the euro and China’s economy swooning, there’s nothing about the current state of play that’s typical.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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