Despite the positive financial statistics revealed by the OEM earlier this week, shares in the company have fallen sharply amid rising uncertainty.
Bloomberg reported on the fall in HP Inc shares, describing it as revealing growing scepticism about the company’s ability to “sustain the robust growth rate of the past year.”
Despite the fact that HP Inc had reported a rise in sales “for the fifth consecutive quarter”, it appears that there is “lingering investor doubt” about the potential for growth of both the OEM’s core PC and printer businesses, with analysts forecasting “stagnant sales” over the next two years.
Chief Financial Officer, Catherine Lesjak, admitted to analysts that it would “be hard to maintain that level of growth”. “The compares are tougher, we know that,” she said.
Shares in the company had declined by 5 percent by the close of Wednesday which is “the biggest single-day decline” since 23 November 2016.
Until now, shares in HP Inc had been outperforming HP Enterprise, “its more glamorous offspring”. However, Dion Weisler, the company’s CEO, “is facing the prospect of lower profitability at the printer division” as a result of HP’s well-publicised acquisition of Samsung’s printer unit, which “generates a lower proportion of revenue from the more lucrative supply of printer cartridges than HP currently does”. This means that the Samsung purchase is “unlikely to contribute to profit growth” until the second half of the 2018 fiscal year.