The Register: HP storage results borked by bleeding currency rates It’s up to HP to mitigate the impact of the currency; if the currency impact was favorable it wouldn’t get a mention.
- In the past 16 quarters, HP Storage has only shown positive year-over-year growth in four of them, and of those four, three showed growth of 1.0% or less. Was currency also to blame in all of the past 16 quarters? I don’t think so. But forget currency, just think of 15 out of 16 quarters of year-over-year-growth <+1.0% with 12 of those quarters being negative.
- With enough negative quarters in tow – remember 4 bad quarters is only one bad year but 16 bad quarters is an election cycle – it eventually becomes possible to start to appear to “outgrow†the competition, but that’s only because HP is “growing†from the very low base it created for itself.
- So if HP Storage “appears†to be doing comparatively better than EMC, IBM & NetApp because it outgrew each of them in the past quarter (FY3Q15), well that’s the first time that it has happened. Ever. One quarter marginally outgrowing EMC doesn’t make up for an eternity of under-growing EMC.
- To put last quarter’s revenue of $784M in its proper context: it’s the 2nd lowest quarter of revenue in the last ten years (the lowest was the previous quarter) and that’s 20% down from its’ 3Q peak in 2011 of $976M. In contrast, EMC is up 6% over the same period, not great, but significantly better than HP.
And ask yourself this: what exactly is it that HP Storage will be able to do after the split that it couldn’t do today?
[Pause}p.s. I really wasn’t going to post this until a friend asked at lunch how HP Storage was doing because she’d heard that they were doing rather well, at which point ….
