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HP Stock Price Down on WebOS and Possible PC Spinoff

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Investors aren’t feeling so great about HP (HPQ) after the company announced that it would discontinue the HP TouchPad and webOS devices, investigate selling the Personal Systems Group and purchase the software company Autonomy Corporation.

As the market begins to open, HP is down 16% in after hours trading on the news and the third quarter earnings report. Investors are obviously skittish about the transition from a hardware company to a software company — a software company that purchased a software company and discontinued the in-house software solution.

Uncertainty is a hazard in the market and unfortunately HP is all about the uncertainty these days. Depending how thing shake out though, HP could walk away a winner.

If the company sells the PC business to Samsung and licenses or sells the WebOS patents to one of any number of buyers, we could see HP successfully make the transformation. However, that is a long road for all involved parties.

As the market opened this morning HP’s stock price continued to drop, hitting 18.5% down before the market opened.

While the market sorts things out today there are still many questions about HP, which doesn’t bode well for the stock prices through the day and coming weeks.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. cuhulin

    08/19/2011 at 8:03 pm

    Of course, the stock price is down.  HP just announced its own death.

    Most of HP has no knowledge of the software business — even Apotheker was not all that successful at SAP — and the strategy now is to go into a business where they are an incomplete player and do so with a basically new enterprise.  This doesn’t make any sense.

    Ironically, HP had a far better play available before the conference call this week:  use WebOS across its platforms for communications and develop its own tools (buying other companies to help that is a fine plan), and be the only fully integrated vendor.  They blew it.

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