PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hew lett-Packard’s fiscal third-quarter profit jumped 14 percent, beating Wall Street’s expectations, as strong laptop sales and a robust international presence lifted the technology bellwether.
The Palo Alto-based company’s results, reported after the market closed Tuesday, signaled that HP is still holding its ground as the world’s No. 1 seller of personal computers even with stronger competition from Dell and Apple and aggressive price cuts.
HP said it earned $2.03 billion, or 80 cents per share, in the latest period, up from $1.78 billion, or 66 cents per share, a year earlier.
Excluding one-time charges, HP’s profit was 86 cents per share, 3 cents higher than the average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Investors have become accustomed to HP offering conservative guidance and topping those forecasts by a few pennies per share, so HP’s strong results for the May-July period and a fourth-quarter outlook that was slightly better than analysts expected weren’t much of a surprise.
Still, HP’s optimism about its prospects despite a tough economic environment in the U.S. and parts of Europe helped lift the stock. HP’s profits were hurt by higher prices for some of its parts and a shift toward cheaper PCs, but stronger sales of technology services and software helped offset those pressures.
The company’s gross profit margin — its profit on each dollar of revenue once manufacturing costs are stripped out — was 24.2 percent of revenues, down slightly from the year- ago period.
HP also is still benefiting from weakness in the dollar. Deals HP does in other currencies translate into more dollars as the U.S. currency falls.
Sales were $28 billion, a 10 percent increase over last year and higher than the $27.4 billion analysts were expecting.
That revenue rise would have been just 5 percent, however, when adjusted for currency fluctuations.
Sales of laptop computers rose 26 percent to $5.35 billion.
