Although 2013 was a great year for the US stock market, there were still a few companies that did not perform as expected. When looking at the Dow Jones Index, there were indeed two companies that closed off the year in the red. Strangely enough, Hewlett-Packard was not one of them.
The Story of HP
The story of HP is not a secret. As a company that was selling computers and printers, HP was pretty surprised by the oncoming storm of everything related to mobile. HP had arrived late to class and as a consequence, the stock price of the technology giant did not make any progress as the mobile era unfolded.
In 2011, Meg Whitman was hired as the new CEO and people are expecting that she will turn the ship around and bring it back safely to harbor. This, of course, requires a lot of time and you cannot really turn around an aircraft carrier in a swimming pool either.
On Wall Street, however, Whitman’s approach is at least getting the benefit of the doubt. In 2013, Hewlett-Packard’s stock price rose again, although the stock ticker has still not reached its all-time high from the dot com years.
Whitman is asking for a bit more patience before things are back in order. HP has done quite a few takeovers in recent years, but they did not really deliver yet what people expected. There is still a lot of work to be done, and hopefully 2014 is the year for Whitman.
Slowly but surely, she will need to be able to demonstrate the first results of the change in command however. The board of directors also has a few new faces since last year so we are curious what we will get to see from this company in the coming months. It is at least interesting to see that over the last month, HP’s stock price has had a nice rise, crossing the 32 dollar level.
Curious about investing in technology stocks? Subscribe to the Technology Report!
