The two Hewletts — Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc., the concoction of Meg Whitman when she split the business a decade ago — came up short on Tuesday evening, reporting revenue below expectations, and a lackluster forecast in the case of HP.
The one Hewlett is doing quite a bit better than the other, however. Enterprise, the part that sells networking and servers and builds supercomputers, is on track to come pretty close to goals set out a year ago. It has record backlog of orders to fill, which speaks to the health of its market.
The sour result at HP Inc., on the other hand, echoes the gloomy report from competitor Dell last week with its miss on quarterly results and miss on forecast. The PC market is going through its long unraveling, which is having a major negative effect on HP’s revenue. The company doesn’t forecast revenue, but its profit per share forecast for the current quarter, seventy-nine cents to eighty-nine cents, is more than twenty percent below the consensus for a dollar and six cents. That’s in large part because revenue won’t be as high as originally expected given the weak PC market.