In a recent interview with CRN, HP chairman Ray Lane outlined situations in which HP may hang on to its PC business. “If we don’t make that decision [to spin off], it’s because of two things: We can’t offer a better proposition to customers and investors,” Lane said. “If we can’t it stays inside HP.” If the company does decide to spin-off its personal systems group, Lane has suggested the company call it the “HP PC Business.” HP has the “largest and most profitable [PC] business in the world,” Lane explained during the InformationWeek 500 conference in California. “I am lobbying, and I don’t have to lobby very hard, to call it the HP PC Business. Call it HP. It will be a sister company,” Lane explained, pointing to HP’s spinoff of Agilent. “Agilent was a better business once spun off, because it was a very different business from what the rest of HP was doing.” Read on for more.
Lane believes the personal systems group will be more successful outside of HP, since it is on a different track than HP’s enterprise business. The company announced the possibility of a PSG spin-off to avoid a leak in the press, Lane explained. “We can’t afford to have hundreds of people working on a project without some kind of leak, and then we’re having to explain it to the press anyway,” he said. “So we thought it best that we go out and explain that we are going to look at this option for the benefit of that business model, the customers and the investors.” Early reports on Tuesday suggested HP had started to lay off as many as 525 employees from its Palm branch.
[Via CNET]
