“Terrorist acts, conflicts of wars (wherever located throughout the world) may cause damage or disruption to HP, our employees, facilities, partners, suppliers, distributors, resellers or customers or adversely affect our ability to manage logistics……..The potential for future attacks, the national and international responses……or wars, including ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, have created many economic and political uncertainties……actions against or by the United States may impact our business and employees.”-HP Form 10-K, Security & Exchange Commission report, 27 December 2012
Hewlett Packard filed a 10-K report with the U.S. SEC, and it’s full of what if scenarios, mostly bad scenarios. Obviously the executives of HP are not positive about 2013. Employees will continue to be shed: “The restructuring plan includes both voluntary early retirement programs and non-voluntary workforce reductions and is expected to result in 29,000 employees exiting the company by the end of the period [by the end of 2014].”
HP is also dealing with trouble from competitors, dealers and divisions.
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating HP’s claims that the executives of the British company Autonomy, lied about its financial situation. HP shelled out $11 billion USD for Autonomy in 2011!
After a challenge by IBM (International Business Machines) the U.S. Federal government will continue with a $543 million five year Department of Veterans Affairs contract with HP.
Despite Idaho voters rejecting a laptop for students proposition, HP was awarded a $180 million contract to provide the laptops, at least one week before the voting took place!!!
Skycom Tech, a business partner of Chinese company Huawei, tried to sell $1.72 million worth of HP communication equipment to an Iranian company, some say in violation of U.S./European sanctions. The deal didn’t go through, but Huawei said: “Huawei’s business in Iran is in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations including those of the UN, U.S. and EU….”
HP officials said: “HP’s distribution contract terms prohibit the sale of HP products into Iran…”
There are reports that HP is no longer directly selling printers on Amazon. Some analysts think it’s actually retaliation by Amazon, because HP’s new Cloud computing system is in direct competition with Amazon’s own computing system.
A report out of India says a state government is investigating HP’s claims of being able to supply 1,500,000 school laptops by a certain date. If government officials don’t think HP can make the deadline they will split up the contract to other competitors: “If HP is found to have insufficient capacity, then it could, accordingly, get a contract to supply a reduced quantity of laptops and the remaining quantity will be divided among the bidders ready to offer the quantity at the rate quoted by HP.”-Uttar Pradesh government statement
HP and General Motors (GM) are going after each other in court. It involves GM’s recent decision to hire away from HP 3,000 employees, to start its own inhouse tech service. HP claims it’s more than coincidence that GM’s plans to dump HP (and IBM) as tech service providers come after GM hired several HP executives to run GM’s technology operations. HP said the initial 18 HP employees hired by GM resigned “en masse and without notice.”