HP News, Views & Updates on Ulitzer

After things clicked for HP in the January quarter and it sniffed an “accelerating market,” it decided to raise its outlook for the year believing it can outperform the market. CEO Mark Hurd says 2010 ain’t gonna be 2009 redux, at least not for HP. He’s predicting growth of 6%-7% and an earnings tickle of 14%-15%. He also means to hire, at least in sales.

In its first fiscal quarter HP’s net revenues came to $31.2 billion, up 8%, making for earnings of $2.3 billion, or 96 cents a share, up 25%. It earned $2.7 billion before charges. It exceeded its own and Wall Street expectations on the revenue side by better than a billion dollars. Hurd’s cost-cutting didn’t hurt the earnings.

HP said it saw double-digit year-over-year growth in printers, industry standard servers and PCs. Printers, HP’s old gold mine, performed the best in three years in terms of shipments and if it wasn’t for product shortages, Hurd said he could have sold more.

The Americas were up 9% to $13.6 billion and Asia Pacific up 26% to $12.1 billion in revenues. EMEA overall is still stuck in the mud with revenue up only 1% to $5.4 billion. Revenue from outside of the United States accounted for 65% of HP’s total revenue, with revenue in the BRIC countries increasing 41% and now accounting for 10% of total revenue.

The company’s Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) unit came in with revenue of $4.4 billion, up 11%. Industry standard server revenues increased 27%; storage revenue dropped 3% with the mid-range EVA product line down 5%. Business Critical Systems revenue declined 22%, while ESS blade revenue was up 24%. Its operating profit was $552 million, or 12.6% of revenue.

Printer revenues increased 4% to $6.2 billion. Supplies revenue was up 1%. Commercial hardware revenue was up 4% and consumer hardware revenue increased 21%. Unit shipments were up 16%, 11% on the commercial side, 18% on the consumer side. The unit’s operating profit was a flat $1.1 billion, or 17% of revenue.

HP is forecasting double-digit growth in printers this year.

PC unit shipments were up 26%. Revenue increased 20% to $10.6 billion. Notebook revenue was up 25%, desktop revenue increased 16%. Commercial revenues were up 16%, consumer up 26%. PC operating profit was $530 million, or 5% of revenue.

HP said ASPs improved in PCs and some servers.

Services revenue dropped 1% to $8.7 billion. HP said infrastructure technology outsourcing revenue were up 2% to $3.9 billion. Technology services revenue were down 2% to $2.4 billion. Application services came in with $1.5 billion, down 8%, and business process outsourcing with $734 million, down 3%. Operating profit was $1.4 billion, or 15.8% of revenue, up from $1.1 billion, or 12.9% of revenue, in the prior-year period.

Software revenue was flat at $878 million. Operating profit was $167 million, or 19% of revenue.

Financial services revenue was up 13% to $719 million. HP said financing volume increased 30%, and net portfolio assets increased 23%. The unit posted an operating margin of 9.3%, up from 6.4%.

HP’s gross margin for the quarter was 22.8%. Its operating margin was 11.2%.

This quarter HP expects revenue of $29.4 billion-$29.7 billion and non-GAAP earnings of $1.03-$1.05.

For the year, it thinks it can do $121.5 billion-$122.5 billion, up from its previous estimate of $118 billion-$119 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $4.37 to $4.44, up from $4.25 to $4.35.