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“It’s not going to be easy,” said Michael Mullaney, who helps manage $9.5 billion, including Hewlett-Packard shares, at Fiduciary Trust in Boston. “They have to go back and redefine what they want to be as a company, go back to the drawing board.”
Apotheker’s ouster would leave the board looking for a leader who can do a better job helping Hewlett-Packard weather a personal-computer slump while pushing further into the market for products that deliver computing services over the Web. CEO candidates may also include Todd Bradley, who runs Hewlett- Packard’s PC unit, and David Donatelli, head of the business in charge of servers, storage and networking, said Jayson Noland, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. in San Francisco.
Other possible candidates that would make sense include Gary Moore, chief operating officer of Cisco Systems Inc., or Steve Mills, who runs the software unit at International Business Machines Corp., said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. in San Francisco.
Hewlett-Packard’s board plans to consider firing Apotheker, two people familiar with the matter said yesterday. It may appoint former EBay Inc. (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, a Hewlett-Packard director, to serve as an interim leader, said one of the people. Board Discussions
Hewlett-Packard directors met yesterday in committees and will gather today as a full board, according to a person close to the situation. Directors are concerned about the stock price and its lack of improvement under Apotheker’s leadership, the person said. Some top Hewlett-Packard executives also opposed the acquisition of Autonomy Corp., a deal pushed by Apotheker, according to the person.
Hewlett-Packard, based in Palo Alto, California, jumped $1.51, or 6.7 percent, to $23.98 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange after Bloomberg reported the possible management change. The stock is still down 44 percent since Apotheker, 58, became CEO on Nov. 1, compared with the 1.5 percent decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
A new CEO would be Hewlett-Packard’s seventh leader since 1999, when Carly Fiorina took over from Lewis Platt. Fiorina departed in 2005 and was replaced on an interim basis by Robert Wayman, until the company named Mark Hurd to the top job. After Hurd resigned, Cathie Lesjaktook the reins temporarily until Apotheker came aboard.
Source: Bloomberg.
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