The company gave guidance for the first quarter of $0.89 to $0.93 in earnings per share. There is a consensus estimates of $0.93 in earnings per share for the first quarter.
Hewlett-Packard’s outlook for the 2015 fiscal year puts its earnings per share in a range of $3.83 to $4.03 against a consensus estimate of $3.73. Perhaps the biggest question is whether or not the split can be effected by then or is much closer to being completed by then. H-P’s guidance did not include costs and issues associated with its planned break-up, but the company ended the last report with $15.5 billion in gross cash and cash equivalents.
The fourth quarter segment revenues came in year over year as:
- Personal Systems up 4% at $8.9 billion with a 4% operating margin
- Printing down 5% at $5.7 billion with a 18.1% operating margin
- Enterprise Group down 4% at $7.3 billion with a 14.8% operating margin
- Enterprise Services down 7% at $5.5 billion with a 6.8% operating margin
- Software down 1% at $1.1 billion with a 31.1% operating margin
- HP Financial Services down 1% at 906 million
The big news from Hewlett-Packard this quarter is still ongoing, which is that it will split into two new publicly traded companies: Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. This is expected to be completed by the end of 2015 where there will be a tax-free distribution of shares to stockholders.
The new HP Inc.’s CEO will be Dion Weisler, who is currently executive vice-president of HP’s printing and personal systems businesses. The original Hewlett-Packard CEO, Meg Whitman will be the president and CEO of the Enterprise company, as well as chairman of the board of HP Inc. The current lead independent director of Hewlett-Packard’s board will become chairman of the board of the new Enterprise company. Each of these new companies is expected to post annual revenues of around $50 billion once the separation is complete.
Following this news, the company will also increase the number of firings by 5,000 up to a total of 55,000, according to the Wall Street Journal. Under its restructuring plan, Hewlett-Packard has already fired around 36,000 people.
Meg Whitman, Chairman, President and CEO of HP, said:
In the 2014 fiscal year, we stabilized our revenue trajectory, strengthened our operations, showed strong financial discipline, and once again made innovation the cornerstone of our company. Our product roadmaps are the best they’ve been in years and our partners and customers believe in us. There’s still a lot left to do, but our efforts to date, combined with the separation we announced in October, sets the stage for accelerated progress in the 2015 fiscal year and beyond.
Deutsche Bank maintained a Buy rating for Hewlett-Packard and moved up its price target to $45 from $40, which was just one day before earnings report.
Shares of H-P closed Tuesday up 0.3% at $37.63. Following the release of the earnings report, the initial response in the post market was negative and shares were down over 1% at $36.96.
Hewlett-Packard’s stock has a consensus analyst price target of $40.34 and a 52-week trading range of $25.09 to $38.25. H-P’s highest analyst price target is up at $45 (thanks to Deutsche Bank above), and the lowest analyst price target is now $36. Hewlett-Packard has a market cap of $70 billion.
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