Hewlett-Packard’s second-quarter earnings slipped 32% as year-over-year sales slumped across all its major business divisions. Yet the Palo Alto, California-based tech giant’s shares jumped 13% to $23.93 in after-hours trading as investors cheered the company’s upbeat profit outlook for the current quarter. Thanks to cost cuts and better-than-expected results in its printing and services businesses, HP managed to narrow down its losses. Chief Executive Meg Whitman credited the better-than-expected performance in H-P’s printing and enterprise services businesses, along with a windfall from its ongoing restructuring work, for the earnings result. But she said the company still needed to be more efficient and perform better in competition against the wider industry. The company’s net income fell to $1.08 billion, or 55 cents a share, from $1.59 billion, or 80 cents a share, a year earlier. The company earned 87 cents per share on an operating basis during the second quarter on revenue of $27.6 billion. HP had expected earnings of 81 cents a share on revenue of just over $28 billion, according to the average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
