HP Makes it Up: Wall Street Cheers

Well, Hewlett Packard finally gave Wall Street’s Finest what they wanted.

Ever since Mark Hurd’s unceremonious dismissal, WSF have been pestering HP to define itself and its prospects, in much the same way that IBM defines itself and its prospects.

And yesterday HP finally did just that.

The answer, in case you haven’t seen it already, is this: HP will generate “at least” $7.00 in earnings per share by Fiscal Year 2014.

How, exactly, HP will get there is left somewhat to the imagination.

It does involve things like “connectivity” and “cloud” computing—two buzz words that are today’s version of the Internet Bubble-era “eyeballs”—and it relies, apparently, on the same kind of accounting hocus-pocus HP perfected during the Hurd years. (See “Hurd by Numbers” from August, 2010: http://jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com/2010/08/hurd-by-numbers.html)

That’s because the $7.00 in “EPS” is a “Non-GAAP” figure—that is, it uses accounting principles that aren’t generally accepted by accountants.

For example, HP routinely excludes expenses related to past acquisitions to arrive at “Non-GAAP” earnings, even though it routinely includes the revenues from those acquisitions in its “Non-GAAP” sales.

If money managers could do that, they’d never have a down day, let alone a down year.

Still, Wall Street’s Finest like few things more than perceived certainty, and in this case the comfort of a specific earnings figure they can plug into their spreadsheets appears to be enough given the huzzahs from various quarters.

We will see how HP does in the next few years meeting that target, but we’ll make one bold prediction: since HP can exclude pretty much anything the company wants to exclude from “Non-GAAP” earnings so long as Wall Street’s Finest buy it, we will bet dollars to donuts the company will “beat the number” by at least a penny.

Jeff Matthews

I Am Not Making This Up

© 2011 NotMakingThisUp, LLC

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