HPE may as well have stayed at home in bed: Biz turns non-profit as sales fall, costs rise

HPE announced its fiscal third quarter results for this year on Tuesday, reporting mixed results with an overall dip in sales and growth in gross margins compared to the previous year. However, the enterprise giant couldn't do the biggest job – actually turning a profit.

CEO Antonio Neri opened an earnings call with analysts on Tuesday: “In Q3, we improved both gross and operating margins, delivered strong non-GAAP earnings, and generated a record level of year-to-date free cash flow.”

Here’s the lowdown on the numbers for the three months to July 31:

• Revenues of $7.22bn, 7 per cent lower than the previous year of $7.76bn.
• Total costs and expenses were $7.29bn, a smidgen up on last year’s figure of $7.27bn.
• This translated into net earnings of a loss of $27m, down 106 per cent year-on-year.
• Non-GAAP earnings per share were $0.45, a slight increase of 7 per cent of $0.42 from the year ago.

HPE’s services and products are mainly grouped under two areas: Hybrid IT, which include things like its GreenLake hardware for private cloud, storage, or databases, and Intelligent Edge, an umbrella-term covering its IoT devices.

• Hybrid IT revenues were $5.55bn, down 9 per cent year-on-year from $6.11bn.
• Intelligent Edge revenues were $762m, a decrease of 3 per cent compared to $785m from last year.

“We also invested in important innovation for our customers and announced strategic acquisitions, including Cray, which we now expect to close by the end of fiscal year 2019, earlier than originally planned,” Neri added.

HPE didn't quite make predicted targets set by analysts, this hasn't impacted the company's shares too much, however, which were priced at $12.93 - down just 0.077% at the time of writing. ®