Hewlett-Packard (HWP Quote - Cramer on HWP - Stock Picks) hasn't given up on its plans to buy a consulting company.
Speaking Monday at the
Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium in La Quinta, Calif., H-P CFO Robert Wayman said that the company's rapidly expanding services business still has more to grow. "We're actively exploring options for growing this business aggressively, whether organically, or though acquisition," Wayman said.
Services is one of a number of non-PC businesses that H-P has been counting on to boost its long-term sales growth. The company hopes that segment, together with its considerable portfolio of hardware products, will help it fulfill its vision of itself as a one-stop shop for enterprise customers.
H-P aborted a plan to buy the consulting unit of
PriceWaterhouse Coopers in 2000 for as much as $18 billion. The deal would have added about 30,000 consultants to H-P's services operations -- the sort of scale H-P couldn't get on its own. H-P hired 1,700 consultants in 2000, said Wayman.
Predictably, Wayman didn't offer conference attendees any new financial guidance. H-P may do that on Thursday when it reports its first-quarter earnings. Just last week, Goldman analyst Laura Conigliaro revised her H-P model to account for weakness in the PC market, softness in the enterprise segment and the maturation of the market for printers, which, at about 65% of sales, are still the company's core business. Conigliaro estimated that the company could grow its sales at 10% to 12% in the long term.
H-P has not talked formally about growth targets since December, when CEO Carly Fiorina
told analysts to expect the company's 2001 sales growth to be at the low end of a 15% to 17% range. The company's
profit warning last month made it clear that it wouldn't be coming anywhere that target. H-P was down 80 cents Monday at $32.70.
Thomas Lepri
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