HP predicts more revenue and profit growth in the coming year and is focusing on developing WebOS. The company is still undecided on who its next CEO will be.
In an event for financial analysts today, Cathie Lesjak, interim CEO, said they had good insider and outsider candidates for the role to replace Mark Hurd.
Lesjak has said the company is expecting revenue in the fiscal year of 2011 to be between $131.5bn and $133.5bn. It expects between $5.05 and $5.15 in earnings per share.
Analysts previously estimated that HP’s revenues would be $131.4bn and earnings per share would be $4.99.
The company sees areas such as enterprise cloud, data centre consolidation, security, digitisation and mobility to be key to fuelling this growth.
HP hopes to simplify enterprise computing for customers, offering them a one-stop shop as opposed to mixing and matching technology from different companies.
Lesjak spoke of the future of WebOS, the operating system it acquired from Palm. She sees it as “a large new market opportunity” and represents the kind of vision HP has for the next year.
Former Palm CEO and current HP senior vice-president Jon Rubinstein said to the Financial Times that next year they will be hugely focused on WebOS.
He said HP has abandoned Android and they will not release an Android tablet.
Executive vice-president Todd Bradley said his group would “aggressively attack” the smartphone market and will pump more into the Palm business.
Bradley said WebOS could grow beyond smartphones and HP wants to use it in every device it makes.
“We believe we can scale WebOS seamlessly across our entire portfolio,” he said.
HP also said it has the largest information technology supply chain in the world at $60bn.
It said it ships a new server every 15 seconds and manages more than 200 data centres and 300,000 servers.
It serves more than 1 billion customers worldwide, has 145,000 sales partners and 210,000 service partners.
