Hewlett-Packard Co, the world’s biggest personal-computer (PC) maker, said it was concerned about the impact of financial-market turmoil on the company, after UBS AG cut its PC-shipment forecast and the IMF trimmed its global growth estimate.
“We manage our business very conservatively on a day-to-day basis,” Todd Bradley, head of the company’s PC division, said at a briefing in Beijing yesterday. “Clearly we are concerned.”
PC makers including HP and Dell Inc face slower sales as the credit crisis that’s forced governments to bail out banks in the US and Europe erodes demand, prompting UBS on Oct. 6 to lower its estimate for next year’s PC shipment growth to 9.8 percent from 12 percent. The global economy will expand 3 percent next year, less than the 3.7 percent forecast earlier, the IMF said in its latest report.
Dell, HP’s closest rival, said on Sept. 16 that there was “further softening” of demand for PCs and computer services.
HP will focus on executing “long-term strategies,” Bradley said. He declined to specify the impact of the credit-market turmoil on earnings.
The company is adding investments in Asia, where sales are expanding three times faster than in the Americas, its biggest market by sales.
HP said on Thursday it plans to open a 20,000m2 factory in Chongqing, southwest China, that will produce laptop and desktop computers for the domestic market.
The plant, scheduled to start operations in 2010, will be HP’s “hub” for western China, Bradley said. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
HP opened its first office in China in 1981 and bills itself as the leading foreign manufacturer of PCs in the country.
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