UPDATED 15:26 EDT / OCTOBER 05 2012

Hewlett-Packard Not Selling EDS, But Should

Hewlett-Packard’s stock is down more than 12 percent at a 10-year low of $14.91 after the company said it expects profit for fiscal year 2013 to be between $3.40 and $3.60 per share. Wall Street’s’ consensus estimate was a considerably higher at $4.18 a share.

CEO Meg Whitman tried to do some PR damage control at an analyst event held this week at the company’s headquarters, but that didn’t seem to mitigate the aftermath too much.

“The market reaction was brutal and Brian White of Topeka Capital markets called the new outlook a ‘bomb’ from the world’s biggest PC maker,” reads an AP report.

“Given this weak outlook, the stock is selling off, but we believe there remains more downside potential,” White said, pointing out that HP’s key segment in PCs and printers faces “negative secular trends.”

The disappointing forecast by Hewlett-Packard didn’t exclude its enterprise services unit. The firm expects revenue from services to drop by 11 to 13 percent in fiscal 13.

The update follows rumors that HP may be looking to sell Electronic Data Systems, a $13.9 billion acquisition dating back to Mark Hurd’s rein in 2009. EDS, which at the time had 140,000, employees was merged with HP’s services unit to form the Enterprise Services Group.

Hewlett-Packard officially declines claims that it had tried to sell EDS, which is now down at 110,000 workers, although the anonymous report did cite the likelihood of such a response.

Whitman is trying to turn things at HP around, and that involves some tough decisions. Recently HP announced intentions to lay off nearly 30,000 workers  by 2014. The original plan was to trim 8 percent of the global workforce, or 27,000 employees, but a few weeks later the company disclosed that it will be cutting an additional 2000 jobs.


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