Cramer Backs Mark Hurd at Hewlett-Packard

Cramer’s second CEO in his "Transformational CEO’s" list is Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ).He said you can slap a buy on him because he took over H-P in March of2005 after Carly Fiorina was leading the company.  H-P shares havedoubled and he took it out of disarray.  It was even behind Dell(NASDAQ:DELL)in market share.  The payrolls were bloated and the server business wasa joke.  Hurd went back to focus on engineering and the company even delivered on Cramer’s prediction of an earnings upside surprise.  Hurd even took NCR (NYSE:NCR) up some 300% before joining H-P.

Last night, Cramer noted Schering-Plough’s Fred Hassan as one of his top 5 transformational CEO’s.

The call on H-P and Mark Hurd is hard to argue with.  Dell still mayhave more of a leveraged upside if the company can swing it around andlive up to the expectations, but so far it is hard to argue with thiscall.

Jon C. Ogg
May 15, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.