Rapports have now come out saying that Hewlett-Packard is rethinking their plans to spin off the PC business. Looking in to the figures analysts say that the cost to make this spin off, might outweigh the benefits.
Newly appointed CEO Meg Whitman is apparently going through the numbers and according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, neither Whitman nor the company’s board have made a final decision on the new strategy presented by the former CEO Leo Apotheker. She publicly that she would like to make a decision by the end of October.
HP has been under pressure from both manufacturing partners and large customers to keep their personal computer business, and when the new strategy was presented the news was not going down well in the public either. It was hard to see why the number one PC manufacturer would just let go of this top position, since it was also making a profit.
The main reason for HP to keep its PC unit though might be related to the company’s supply chain. Getting out of the PC business would most likely hurt the component makers financials, and this could in turn affect HP’s other business such as it’s server division. Some components makes might even be forced out of business.
Meg Whitman took over the reins of HP following the ouster of Leo Apotheker in August. The former CEO originally came up with the plan to spin off HP’s consumer PC business and shut the webOS device development. Since Apotheker was previously CEO at SAP there was a lot of speculation that his background that revolved around services and software, affected his decision and that he was not the right person for the job.
