HP Earnings: 7 Straight HPQ Quarterly Revenue Declines

Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) streak of consecutive quarters with declining revenue now stands at seven straight, most of which have occurred on current chief executive Meg Whitman’s watch. With a 10 percent sales slide in its just concluded Q2 2013, it's the deepest drop yet in the vendor’s nearly two-year long slump.

Aside from HP’s well-chronicled bungles that have stripped it of profits and significantly pared the company’s valuation, where HP intends to turn to move the battleship northward still isn't clear.

Silver Lining: Beating Wall Street's Expectations

Overall, the beleaguered Silicon Valley stalwart posted $27.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 10 percent fall year-over-year, and $1.1 billion in net earnings, a 32 percent slide from the year earlier period. Second quarter earnings per share slid to $0.55, down 31 percent from last year.

That HP’s results beat Wall Street and its own earnings estimates is one way to look at its quarterly performance, albeit one that Whitman latched onto in a statement, expressing optimism although she appeared to have to look far for supporting evidence—networking and software support were the only two HP business segment to record upticks in year-over-year revenue.

"We beat the upper end of our non-GAAP diluted EPS outlook for the quarter by $0.05 per share, driven by better than expected performance in Enterprise Services and Printing, coupled with the accelerated capture of restructuring savings and improvement in our operations," she said.  And, in an earnings conference call, Whitman said that the feeling around HP is the company’s strategy and tactics to right the bobbing ship are coming to fruition.

‘‘You can feel the turnaround taking hold at HP,’’ she said.

HP's Business By Business Performance

Here’s a lineup of HP’s Q2 2013 performance…

PCs

Printers

Networking, servers, storage

Enterprise Services

Software

HP Financial Services

Whitman’s contention all along has been that fixing HP is a matter of putting its priorities in order and executing on that strategy better than her predecessors. So far, no one has publicly questioned her plan, giving her plenty of leeway in the process. But maybe now is the proper time to begin asking if she can effect a true turnaround at HP.