Pointless spin-off: HP back and forth toss behind

Wen/Sun Yongjie from hearsay to fact, only one day, Hewlett-Packard finally split itself, the current Hewlett-Packard company to split into a main PC and printer business Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc.) and a main enterprise hardware and service business of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise ( Hewlett-packardenterprise), after the break-up of the new Hewlett-Packard Company still use the current logo. While the industry, including HP itself, has commented and explained why HP has been spun off and the benefits it has brought to HP after the break-up, but we think the biggest and most immediate benefit of the spin-off is that, through the break-up, HP has clarified to the industry and investors the positioning of HP, which has puzzled them all these years, That is, HP is a more consumer properties of the PC Enterprise, or enterprise-class attributes are more enterprise-oriented companies. Of course, HP has also increased the size of layoffs. Apart from that, can the break-up give HP a real boost in performance? Let's take a look at Hewlett-Packard, the main PC and printer business after the break-up. As we all know, the PC industry has already passed the growth period, even though this year, the PC market has seen a decline or decline in Microsoft's lack of support for Windows XP and the slowing down of the Tablet PC impact. But it still takes time to revive growth, which means that in the short term, the PC industry itself will struggle to provide greater growth opportunities for HP's PC business. In addition, the competition from the emergence of the PC industry, such as the hybrid of flat-panel PC, HP's performance is not as good as the Lenovo of its former PC champion, which means that it is difficult for HP PCs to make substantial progress in terms of competition from the PC industry. So we think that HP PC business will still be in a small growth or decline in the future (as a result of the overall PC industry growth or decline). Similarly, the spin-off of Hewlett-Packard's printer business, which says HP has few rivals in the industry, is shrinking as the Internet, including mobile Internet, reduces demand for print, This is evident from the HP printer business that has been in stagflation since the 2008 financial crisis. And into this year, Hewlett-Packard printer business revenue is more than two consecutive quarters of 4% decline. As for the so-called 3D printing, although the industry believes that this may be the printer industry new opportunities and growth, but optimistic analysis that by 2025, 3D printer Market size is about 4 billion U.S. dollars, and previously from the British Museum of Design and the recent Ipsos MORI A survey of public perceptions of the future of 3D printing and manufacturing shows that, because of the low coverage of science and technology in the mass media, 71% of respondents said they hardly heard of 3D printing. This shows that HP to let 3D printing in the short term to improve their declining printer business, and even become the entire new HP company revenue and profitThe new growth point is not realistic. In the face of the new HP Company's PC and printer business growth, the industry has suggested that Hewlett-Packard should re-enter the mobile Internet market (such as smartphones and tablets), in fact, HP has launched a number of tablet computers in the market, but its market share and revenue are not in the industry and HP has a substantial impact inside , as for smartphones, after the sale of Palm's webOS to LG, this year HP released two Android-based smartphone Slate6 and Slate7, which the industry believes was its return to the smartphone market, and the main Indian market, but unfortunately The two handsets were sold shortly after they were released, in this regard, there are comments that after the abandonment of webOS, HP Mobile strategy and the talent team suffered a setback, and from the two tablet phones, its product research and development capabilities, it is difficult and the old mobile phone manufacturers, and are rushing into the mobile phone and tablet areas of other computer manufacturers (such as Lenovo, Asus ). More importantly, smartphones and tablets have missed the fast-growing period, its growth focus is shifting to emerging markets with low prices, and it is well known that China's mini-alliance, Motorola (to be merged with Lenovo), Microsoft Lumia and other brands and vendors are among those markets, and why does HP stand out? Looking at the split, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, although its use of IBM to sell X86 server business at the time of robbing some of the original IBM customers, and in the last quarter of the server market revenue overtook IBM to become the first, but with Lenovo recently completed the IBM X86 Server business acquisition, Its traditional and dominant industry standard server business in the future is bound to be strong Lenovo challenges. Lenovo in the PC market with low-cost and scale advantages to surpass HP in the near future in the current HP occupies the first X86 server market repeat? After all, hardware (server, storage, etc.) is still the foundation of HP Enterprise. But the bigger challenge is how HP is changing the status quo, which is bigger and less powerful than its rivals. According to statistics, after splitting the HP Enterprise, although the revenue can still compete with IBM, Oracle, EMC, but in profit margins is far less than rivals. HP, for example, has a profit margin of around 10% per cent, compared with Oracle's profit margin of 40%;IBM of 20%;EMC of 17%. This means that HP companies will still have to face the future of scale or profit choices and challenges. In fact, do not say that compared with the enterprise-level competitors, and after the break-up of their own HP, HP Company's profit margin is not high. In the past fiscal year, for example, HP (PC and printer) had a profit margin of 9.4%, less than 1% of its 10.2% profit margin. In addition, from a growth point of view, Hewlett-Packard companies than the industry is not optimistic about HP. In the last quarter, for example, HP's network, industrial standard servers, enterprise-critical systems, storage, technical services, Enterprise Services, software, financialServices and other business, in addition to industry standard servers, other business revenue are in the year-on-year decline. From this, the industry and HP's own optimistic about the future development of HP Enterprises is not optimistic, this is probably why the break-up, Hewlett-Packard chairman, President and CEO Whitman (Meg Whitman) to personally run HP Enterprise CEO reins main reason. Of course, we are not saying that HP's business is not competitive at all. Since Whitman as HP CEO, HP's business has launched a variety of innovative products, including moonshot server, integrated 3PAR data storage systems and Helion Open cloud computing architecture, and in the industry and the market has been praised. Just how to raise the scale or profit margins will become more urgent after the break-up, after all, one of the biggest reasons for HP's break-up is the tendency towards profitable and growth-potential corporate markets, where profitability is measured by corporate innovation and the ability to provide added value. To sum up, we believe that the Hewlett-Packard split, more to the previous positioning of the vague and the industry has been criticized for the name of HP (the industry clear positioning), but the previous HP faced with the choice and challenges remain. And given that previous Whitman's opposition to the former CEO Lee AI division of the supply chain advantage remains, and the split short-term Neinian have practical results, HP can create 1+1 (HP and Hewlett-Packard companies) than 1 (the original HP) results remain variable. This also let the spin-off reveal some meaningless ingredient. (Disclaimer: This article only represents the author's opinion, does not represent Sina's position.) ）