A historic day comes to end for the industry pioneer Hewlett-Packard as it gets split into two companies: HP Inc. and HP Enterprise. Starting today both the companies will begin trading as separate entities.
The two companies will share the plethora of HP’s products and services amongst each other. HP Inc. will deal with personal computers and printers, whereas HP Enterprise will cater to the server, storage, networking, services, software, and cloud businesses sector.
Dion Weisler will be at the helm of HP Inc. as its president and CEO. His counterpart for the HP Enterprise will be Meg Whitman, who will also don the role of chairman for HP Inc.
The split has taken a full year to complete after HP’s announcement came as a surprise to many in October 2014. The split is aimed to sustain the name of the seventy-seven year old company amidst the rise of several companies who have started out with the ‘garage model’ almost mythicized by its founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. With this paradigm shift, HP will hope to break new grounds in domain of smartphones and the cloud.
HP has been trying to undo many decisions that have led to losses and a dent in its image. Be it the company allegations of sexual harassment against its CEO Mark Hurd in 2010 or charges of espionage on one of its board member, an executive for spying on journalists.
The company that was once the largest manufacturer of personal computers following its acquisition of Compaq in 2002, appears to be a mere shadow of its former self. HP that evolved with the times, somehow has found it difficult to change to the present market dominated by the likes of Apple and Google.
Following the split HP Inc. rose 12 percent to trade at $13.76 earlier today. This jump boosted the market value of the company to about $26 billion. Its sibling, Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the other hand saw an opposite reaction and fell by 1.6 percent to $14.49.
Meg Whitman stated that “I expected a lot of volatility in the next couple of weeks. Probably by the end of November, we’ll have a pretty good read on, you know, what is the market assessing the value of each company.”
