HP Continues Shifting Toward Enterprise

Gartner’s PC Shipment report for the third quarter this year did not offer any bright spots in PC sales. According to the report, worldwide PC shipment fell 8.6% over the year to 80.3 million units. Normally the third quarter has the advantage of back-to-school sales. But despite this advantage, sales were the lowest since 2008. Globally, Lenovo remained the market leader, with 14.15 million units shipped to command a 17.6% market share. HP (NYSE:HPQ) wasn’t too far behind, with sales of 13.73 million units or 17.1% of the market. HP was the market leader in the US with shipments of 4.33 million units, commanding 26.9% of the market. Globally, HP saw PC shipment increase 1.5%. For the U.S. market, shipment grew 4.5% over the year.

HP’s Financials

While HP’s PC shipments may be growing, the company continues to pivot away from the PC segment into the enterprise segment. HP’s Q4 revenues fell 3% over the year to $29.1 billion, ahead of the market’s projections of $28.0 billion. EPS of $1.01 fell 13% over the year but managed to surpass market expectations of $1.00.

By segment, revenues from personal systems fell 1.7% over the year to $8.58 billion driven by a 10% decline in the consumer segment. Printing revenues fell 0.6% over the year to $6.04 billion. Revenues from the enterprise group grew 1.8% over the year to $7.59 billion. Software revenues fell 9.1% over the year to $1.06 billion, and financial services revenues fell 5.6% over the year to $912 million.

By region, revenues from the Americas fell 2% over the year to $13.3 billion. EMEA fourth-quarter revenue fell 4% to $10.3 billion, and revenues from Asia Pacific and Japan were down 1% to $5.6 billion.

HP ended the year with revenues down 7% to $112.3 billion and earnings falling 12% to $3.56 per share.

HP expects EPS of $0.82-$0.86 for the current quarter and EPS of $3.55-$3.75 for the fiscal 2014. The market was looking for EPS of $0.85 for the quarter and $3.64 for the year.

HP’s Growing Product Offerings

As part of HP’s initiative to increase its enterprise offerings, the company continued to expand its product portfolio. It recently tied up with cloud CRM leader, Salesforce, to deliver Superpod, a dedicated instance of Salesforce that is located within Salesforce data centers but runs on HP’s Converged Infrastructure. The product will be sold to Salesforce’s enterprise customers.

Last quarter, it also launched OneView, a consumer-inspired infrastructure management platform that enables customers to improve data center operations while maintaining cost efficiencies. Through HP OneView, customers can use the virtual management appliance to deploy, configure, integrate, and update their HP BladeSystem infrastructure. It enables customers to discover, monitor, and manage the HP ProLiant servers as well.  HP also upgraded the HP Vertica Analytics Platform with the Version 7, which simplifies analysis of semi-structured data.

The stock is trading at $27.36 with a market capitalization of $52.58 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $27.78 in August 2013.

The market likes the overall directional shift, it seems. My take: HP should try to find a Chinese player to sell the PC business to, and gradually move over to the software side, similar to what IBM did a while ago.