Today Salto Partners’ Andreas Scherer talked with E-Commerce Times about Hewlett Packard’s first quarter earnings for the new fiscal year 2013. No matter how one looks at the numbers, they ain’t pretty.

HP reported first quarter earnings of $1.6 billion, or 63 cents a share, on revenue of $28.4 billion. This is down 6 percent from a year ago. Some analysts expected worse, so the good news is that is not as bad as some believed it would be.

 If you take a look under the hood you’ll see that all major business units are down year over year and quarter over quarter.

 1. The Printing and Personal Systems delivered $14.13 billion revenue. That is $1.02 billion less revenue compared to the $15.15 billion revenue it did in Q1 of 2012. This division of HP is competing in a tough market segment without any significant market share in hot segments such as tablets and smart phones.

 2. The Enterprise Group delivered $6.984 billion revenue. It dropped more than $475 million compared to last quarter. The EBITDA contribution of this group has declined year over year and quarter over quarter.

 3. Enterprise Services delivered $5.919 billion revenue. It dropped more than $433 million quarter over quarter. What’s even worse. The group only delivered only $76 million EBIDTA. A service organization operating at 1.3 percent EBITDA margin is at this revenue level a significant concern. Another 5-10% drop in revenue and HP is going to lose a lot of money in this business unit.

Now, Meg Whitmen gave a more upbeat outlook for the rest of FY 2013. This could mean that the sales pipeline across the major business units looks stronger than the current numbers indicate. It could mean that there are new products in the pipeline that can make an instant impact. Or it could mean that HP’s strategy is simply hope. The next quarters will be telling which way the Silicon Valley icon is going.

You find the full article here.