HP (NYSE: HPQ) reported quarterly results late Tuesday that were generally in line with Wall Street expectations, but the company’s shares slipped in after-hours trading on a current quarter sales forecast that was below estimates.
HP’s non-GAAP earnings of 86 cents a share met the Thomson Reuters consensus forecast, while sales of $27.35 billion were just below $27.42 billion estimates. Sales were down 3% from the year-ago quarter, helped by the addition of more than $8 billion in services revenue from the acquisition of EDS.
Enterprise storage and servers revenue fell 28%, software sales were down 15%, personal systems sales were off 19%, and imaging and printing fell 23%.
HP said it expects to meet earnings expectations for the current quarter and exceed them for the full fiscal year ending in October, but the company’s prediction that current quarter sales will be flat to down 2% sequentially would come in below $27.51 billion estimates.
The company said U.S. consumers and China were strong markets in its April quarter.
HP shares lost 4% in late trading.
The stock market stalled ahead of HP’s report on mixed results from Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and weaker than expected housing starts, but AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Ciena (NASDAQ: CIEN) were standouts. Ciena shares rose 7.6% on upbeat comments from a Jefferies & Co. analyst, while AMD gained 6% after the company predicted improving profitability.
Palm (NASDAQ: PALM) slipped after finally releasing Pre details.
Kulicke & Soffa (NASDAQ: KLIC) soared 25% after boosting its sales outlook.
Investors this week are also awaiting IPOs from OpenTable and SolarWinds, the first venture-backed IPOs since Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) last August.
The Nasdaq added 2 to 1734, the S&P 500 lost 1 to 908, and the Dow fell 29 to 8474. Volume declined to 5.61 billion shares on the NYSE, and rose to 2.14 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 23-14 margin on the NYSE, and by a few issues on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 55% on the NYSE, and 65% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 26-48 on the NYSE, and 35-13 on the Nasdaq.
