Hewlett-Packard Co. investors bet on printers and PCs instead of business technology in the first trading since the company split up.
HP Inc., which kept the HPQ ticker symbol of the legacy company, jumped 13 percent to $13.83 on Monday in New York. The stock earlier climbed 14 percent, the biggest intraday gain for the ticker since May 2013. The advance gave HP, which sells printers and computers, a market value of about $26 billion.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which sells servers, storage devices and services, fell 1.6 percent to $14.49, after trading higher much of the morning. The decline gave the company a market capitalization of about $27 billion.
“I expected a lot of volatility in the next couple of weeks,” Meg Whitman, who drove the separation as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co., said in an interview.”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.”
She is betting that the split will help the companies compete better in a fast-changing landscape for gear and services. Now, resources and time can be focused on a smaller group of businesses and more narrow markets. The division of the company, after months of preparation, took place Sunday. Whitman is the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and chairman for HP Inc., which is led by Dion Weisler.
Hewlett-Packard has had engineering hubs in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. The two new companies will continue to employ people in Colorado, though a company spokeswoman on Friday declined to say how many.
Larger personal-computer makers such as HP are gaining market share, suggesting that the battered industry could be showing signs of stabilization, James Kisner, an analyst at Jefferies LLC, wrote to investors. HP was No. 2 in the industry in the third quarter with 18.5 percent of shipments, up from 17.8 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner Inc.
“Tactically, it’s hard to imagine that this is time to be selling stocks like HPI with PC exposure,” Kisner wrote. Opportunities exist for gains in printers as well, he wrote.
Shares of the original Hewlett-Packard stock fell 33 percent this year through Friday. Revenue fell 8.1 percent to $25.3 billion in its latest quarter, compared with analyst projections for $25.4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Sales have declined for 15 of the past 16 quarters.
