By Brenon Daly
Since when does an army with out its top basic go on the attack? That tactic would seem to be to go against convention, but Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has accomplished just that given that dumping Mark Hurd for his foibles. The tech large has chased a pair of specials to valuations which might be generally 2-3 periods the prevailing market place many. HP’s recent bidding war over 3PAR (PAR) and the purchase of ArcSight (ARST) shows a level of aggressiveness that indicates to us that the drivers for the acquisitions may have been emotional as well as financial, at least to a small degree.
If we step back and look at the setting for both specials, we can’t help but conclude that HP announced the transactions at a time when it looked vulnerable. Its star CEO had dramatically crashed back to earth,
Windows 7 Download, while its board (yet again) appeared to have bungled what looked like a fairly routine internal investigation. Statements by the company that it was ‘business as usual’ didn’t get much of a hearing on Wall Street. Shares that changed hands in the low $50s in April have been worth less than $40 for much of the past month. HP’s market cap lingers below $100bn, despite the company ringing up sales of about $120bn.
At the risk of drifting too far into psychology,
Office Pro Plus 2007 Key, we wonder if the deals weren’t a bit of overcompensation. (Certainly, paying 11x trailing sales for 3PAR might be considered overcompensation, or at the least,
Genuine Office 2010, ‘heavy compensation,
Office 2007 Pro Plus,’ if you’ll forgive the pun.) If investors and others were going to view HP as weak or directionless while its corner office was empty, well, HP could use its vast resources to counter with a signal to remind everyone that it was formidable,
Windows 7 X64, with or with out a fulltime CEO. Of course, we’re just playing armchair psychologist here. But something beyond just straight numbers seemed to be at work in HP’s recent moves.