Stock Market

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) blew away estimates this week, raising full year projections by 5%, and sending the stock’s prices soaring on Wednesday. Just before Wednesday’s close, the stock was up 8% on the day, on top of a 3% gain during Tuesday’s after hours trading. The company’s report was glowing in several areas, including the processor division, printers, and laptop sales. According to an article in TheStreet.com:

H-P improved its gross margin 60 basis points overall, year over year, to 24.5%, in part due to price reductions on memory chips in its PC group. The printer group improved operating margin 40 basis points year over year, to 15.7%.

In addition, corporate and business sales, which had been a drain on the company for several years, were up dramatically:

In the enterprise storage and servers group, revenue rose 9% year over year to $4.8 billion. The brightest spot in this group was server blades, which grew 81%. Industry standard servers grew 11%, which accounts for the lion’s share of the group’s revenue. For the second consecutive quarter, business-critical systems were up 1%, after years of decline. Also within ESS, the storage segment was up 10% year over year, with its midrange arrays growing 14%.

At the end of the day, HP looks to be regaining its foothold in the industry. HP’s competitor, Dell, has seen it’s market value reduced by a third over the past few months, and Apple as well has given up some money.

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