I hate to see this for a stock I own, but someone on my site just posted an article by Jon Markman who named Carly as one of the three worst CEOs...
suite101.com
Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina
It’s fashionable these days to suggest that Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina is a genius for improving results slightly in the past couple of quarters, but let’s be frank: She’s not. Not even close. Under her egotistical direction, a company that was once a paradigm of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship has simply failed to make any progress at enhancing shareholder value. It is now trading at the same value as it did in 1995. Almost 10 years of marking time.
Fiorina’s reign at Hewlett -- combined with that of the CEO just before her -- makes a great case study of exactly what not to do. They took a company that was fantastic at doing one thing (printers), and made it a company that is increasingly marginalized at that one thing, and truly lousy at everything else. Her stubborn, ill-conceived purchase of fading, unprofitable computer giant Compaq has utterly failed to deliver on its promise of making shareholders richer with a soup-to-nuts strategy. The printer business still brings in the majority of the earnings of the entire entity.
And yet because Fiorina decided to pick a fight with Dell (DELL, news, msgs) in the personal computer business, Dell has turned the tables and made a strategic decision to return the favor. Dell has steadily released a very nice suite of new low-cost devices made by a variety of partners and, to make matters worse, it has slashed prices on ink -- the most profitable part of the printer trade. “If Hewlett is not profitable in personal computers, and it’s not profitable in mainframe computers, and it’s not profitable in services, and their printer business is being hollowed out by Dell, then what’s left?” asks Bret Rekas, a hedge fund manager in Minneapolis. “I’ll answer that: nothing.”
Here’s a stat for you: In 1995, Hewlett-Packard posted $38 billion in sales and earned $2.5 billon. In 2003, it posted $73 billion in sales and earned the same $2.5 billion. That’s not progress. That’s running harder to stay in the same place. Hewlett’s new focus on digital imaging is great. It would probably do the company a world of good for Fiorina to do the math on one of her flagship financial calculators and admit her mistake with Compaq. She should sell off or just write down the purchase, and return the company to its roots as a smaller, duller but more profitable and innovative designer of digital imaging solutions.
my own stats:
$800M paid to the top technical contributors to get them to back the merger.
$16M paid to Capellis to pretend it was a great deal
Without those two "payments".....
And option dilution expense that could have gone to dividends rather than paying executives for piss poor stock performance.
Who knows... perhaps the stock will really start to do well now that some of us who've owned it for decades are bitching. |
