HP: Fiscal 4Q12 Financial Results

(in $ million)	4Q11	3Q12	4Q12	Q/Q growth	Y/Y growth
Quarterly revenue	1,088	924	946	2%	-13%
(in $ million)		2001	2012
Annual revenue		4,056	3,815		-6%

The companies focused on storage, for example EMC, HDS and NetApp, are more successful in 2012 than firms being involved on overall IT products, storage being only a part of their activity, like Dell, HP or IBM even if the third quarter of 2012 was poor for all of them.

HP’s Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) revenue, at $5.1 billion for the quarter, declined 9% year over year – with an 8.3% operating margin, was impacted by declines in servers and storage overall, with particular softness in EMEA.

From 4FQ11 to 4FQ12, networking was up 7%, industry standard servers down 7%, business critical systems down 25%, and storage revenue down 13% but with a slight increase (2%) from the former quarter.

In storage, HP or Dell sales are flat or down since several quarters.

For 4FQ12, 3Par was close to 60% growth, and StoreOnce, with double-digit growth, was impressive. But combined, 3par and EVA was up only 10%.

Overall HP sees a good mix shift towards its converged storage products based on its own intellectual property, a planned transition executed for several quarters. But these growths areas were not enough to offset the declines in EVA, storage networking and tape revenue during its most recent three-month period.