Hewlett-Packard: Scattered Patches of Brightness

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) posted its quarterly financials Tuesday afternoon and they were slightly better than expected, driven by a two percent increase in PC shipments. Quarterly profit fell 19 percent to $1.64 billion, or 67 cents a share, on revenue of $27.45 billion. But excluding one-time items, HP earned $2.2 billion, or 91 cents a share, a penny better than analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had forecast.

And HP seems confident of its performance going forward. The fiscal fourth-quarter earnings view it issued today is above expectations, and the company is maintaining its fiscal-year earnings target. That bodes well for the industry.

“Business is stabilizing,” HP CEO Mark Hurd said in a statement. “We made positive gains in extending our market leadership in key segments and strengthening our competitive position….We are confident that HP will be an early beneficiary of an economic turnaround and will continue to outperform when conditions improve.”