Hewlett-Packard’s stock plummeted 14 percent to a 10-year low of $11.54 this morning after the manufacturer posted financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012.
SiliconANGLE Founder and Editor in Chief John Furrier has the scoop on what happened and when it happened – here.
HP posted non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.16, more than the market’s consensus estimate of $1.14, on revenue of $30 billion. Analysts expected $30.5 billion.
The company says that total hardware sales declined by 20 percent year over year: printing revenue is down 5 percent from the same period 12 months ago, and consumer unit shipment dropped by 22 percent. HP made 12 percent less off PC sales than it did last year, but its software business raked in 14.4% more revenue than it did in 4Q2011.
The latter growth can be credited in great part to the acquisition of Autonomy, but HP’s $10.5 billion ticket into the analytics market is proving to be a double-edged sword. Hewlett-Packard said it’s taking a $8.8 billion charge left over by the company’s previous management, including more than $5 billion in alleged fraud.
“HP is extremely disappointed to find that some former members of Autonomy’s management team used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company, prior to Autonomy’s acquisition by HP,” Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard said today in a statement.”
Fourth quarter net loss was $6.85 billion, or $3.49 a share, compared with the net income of $239 million, or 12 cents in the fourth quarter 2011. Almost adding insult to injury, the consumer electrics giant said that it expects earnings of 68 to 71 cents per share in the next quarter, considerably less than the consensus estimate of 85 cents.
HP CEO Meg Whitman stressed during the earnings call that Leo Apotheker, the CEO at the time, and the chief strategist who led the deal, have both left the company since.
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