Going strong
The world's biggest PC maker - Hewlett Packard - announced better than expected quarterly results yesterday.
Net profit was up to just over $2 billion, which represented a rise of 14 percent on the same quarter last year. This was all the more impressive given that net revenue only rose by ten percent, implying HP is also getting more efficient.
"By accelerating our enterprise growth and executing well across the portfolio, HP delivered a strong third quarter performance," said Mark Hurd, HP chairman and CEO. "Our global position, broad product and services offerings and incremental cost saving opportunities make us confident that we'll continue to meaningfully expand earnings."
Overall revenues were around $28 billion, of which only $11.6 billion were from North America. The EMEA region showed revenue growth of 16 percent, Asia Pacific grew by 14 percent and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries grew by 24 percent to represent ten percent of overall revenues.
Among HP's business groups, the Personal Systems Group (i.e. PCs) showed 15 percent revenue growth. This was driven mainly by notebooks, which grew in revenue by 26 percent while desktops just managed six percent revenue growth. Consumer growth was 17 percent compared to 15 percent for commercial.
The Imaging and Printing and the Enterprise Storage and Servers groups only managed three percent and five percent revenue growth respectively, but HP Services managed to grow its revenue by 14 percent.
The estimate for total revenue for the next quarter is $30.2 billion to $30.3 billion. The net revenue for that quarter last year was $28.3 billion.
Press release: HP Reports Third Quarter 2008 Results
