By QUENTIN HARDY
SAN FRANCISCO — Meg Whitman is moving as fast as she can to figure out a strategy for Hewlett-Packard. For starters, she wants to keep selling personal computers.
On Thursday, Ms. Whitman, H.P.’s chief executive, announced that the company would retain its PC division. The division, called the personal systems group, was responsible for almost one third, or $40 billion, of H.P.’s $126 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year.
“First and foremost, H.P. is a hardware company,” she said in an interview. “We want to build out our software, but I don’t think we are done yet on hardware. There is a lot of opportunity.”
The company’s former chief executive, Léo Apotheker, announced in August that the company was considering selling or spinning off the unit. He was forced out of the company a month later and succeeded by Ms. Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay.
Ms. Whitman said there were concerns that an independent PC division would lose brand value and face higher overhead costs like real estate and operations. H.P., in turn, would lose the contribution the unit makes in delivering low-price components, like semiconductors, to other parts of the company. Besides personal computers, H.P. has sizable businesses in computer servers and data storage devices, printers and printer supplies, and related services.
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Originally Posted by FischOderAal
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