HP Reports A Profit Of $659M

Hewlett-Packard is putting in for a second-quarter profit of $659 million, or 29 cents a share, on revenue of $18 billion. HP CEO Carly Fiorina said Tuesday that she didn't provide comparisons to the same period a year ago because those figures predate the Compaq acquisition.

The next-best comparison is to look at the preceding quarter, but that figure doesn't account for the seasonal nature of IT purchases. Regardless, its first quarter saw a profit of $721 million, or 29 cents, on revenue of $17.9 billion.

As individual companies, HP earned $252 million on $10.6 billion in revenue and Compaq earned $44 million on $7.73 billion in revenue during their respective second quarters of 2002.

HP drew $5.5 billion in revenue from its imaging and printing group in the second quarter, ended April 30, which was down slightly from the $5.6 billion from the company's first quarter. Revenue from its enterprise systems group was $3.9 billion, up 3% sequentially, while HP services' revenue was $3 billion, up 2% sequentially. Personal systems revenue was flat at $5.1 billion.

Fiorina said she is pleased with HP's successful integration of Compaq. "We still have a lot of work to do, but I feel confident that HP is no longer an integration story." Through the end of the second quarter, HP saw an annualized savings of $3.5 billion, 140% of its target savings since the merger was completed a year ago.

Earlier this week, HP introduced HP-UX 11i v2 for the Itanium processor family, a move to improve the performance of HP's Unix-based operating system on its 64-bit Intel-based servers. HP also announced that the Chrysler Group, a unit of DaimlerChrysler AG, has moved part of its high-performance computing center to Intel Itanium 2 processor-based HP Workstation zx6000 with HP-UX in a rack configuration running MSC.Software Corp.'s Virtual Product Development applications.