Hewlett-Packard Co reckons that its business is bucking any business trend towards softening of orders. Our business is very good, chief executive John Young told Reuters: my impression is that there is an awful lot of interest out there for our products. He looks for higher earnings for the company’s fiscal second quarter over the $162m, 63 cents a share recorded a year ago, but declined to make any forecasts. He also sees growth in the second quarter quite possibly matching the very healthy 26% scored in the first quarter. One reason that Hewlett-Packard is doing so well is that customers for its HP3000 business computer clearly like the machine so much that they were prepared to bear with Hewlett’s woes in getting the input-output for the new RISC processor family right, and wait for the new high-end machines rather than defect to rival suppliers. As a result, now that all those problems are behind Hewlett, the company is sizeably backlogged with HP3000 orders – but Young says that the company will launch an aggressive campaign in the second half of the year to win new customers for the HP3000. The other benefit that is feeding straight through to the bottom line is that Hewlett’s ambitious claims for its RISC Precision Architecture – which enables it to build the same fundamental hardware for its three incompatible product lines – really do seem to be valid: the company is finding that the cost per MIPS of building its new generation machines is substantially lower than it would have been had Hewlett persisted with three complex instruction set lines.
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