← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 16681 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-02-09
2005-02-09 20:20 | User Profile
Fiorina Forced Out As Hewlett-Packard CEO
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Carly Fiorina's nearly six-year reign at Hewlett-Packard Co. ended Wednesday as the company's board forced her out as chief executive, disappointed by her efforts to make the technology giant whose strongest business is printers more nimble and innovative. HP shares jumped more than 6 percent.
Board members said they fired Fiorina, one of corporate America's highest ranking female executives, because she failed to execute a planned strategy of slashing costs and boosting revenue as quickly as directors had hoped.
Fiorina had championed the 2002 acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. despite fierce resistance from shareholders and directors. Critics have called the merger a drag on profits.
"While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision," Fiorina, 50, said in a statement. "HP is a great company and I wish all the people of HP much success in the future."
Directors of Palo Alto-based HP appointed chief financial officer Robert P. Wayman to interim chief executive, and they said they would immediately begin a search for a permanent replacement. They also named director Patricia C. Dunn non-executive chairman.
Dunn said Wednesday morning in a conference call with financial analysts that directors had been discussing the change for "quite some time" based on a series of board meetings and consultations with senior advisers, ranging from venture capitalists to academics.
"Carly was brought in to catalyze a transformation of HP. She did that in a remarkable fashion, and she executed the merger with her management team in a superior fashion," Dunn said. "Looking forward, we think the job is very reliant on hands-on execution, and we thought a new set of capabilities was called for."
HP shares climbed $1.26, or 6.3 percent, to $21.40 in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange, still well shy of its 52-week high of $25. Its 52-week low was just above $16 in August.
Fiorina's departure comes after months of speculation that HP needed a major shot of Adrenalin to make it competitive with other technology companies, particularly rivals Dell Inc. and IBM Corp.
During its annual meeting in mid-January, HP's board of directors discussed shifting some day-to-day responsibilities from to other executives in an effort to improve the technology giant's performance.
In recent months, Fiorina has been the target of intensifying criticism from technology analysts and the media for failing to execute an ambitious diversification strategy - an attempt to change HP from a relatively marginal company that derived a disproportionate percentage of its profits from printers and ink into a Silicon Valley consulting and computing powerhouse.
Some Wall Street analysts have been suggesting that shareholders might be better off if the company were split into two or more pieces because the relatively dowdy printer business was sucking up resources and shifting focus from higher-profit opportunities in consulting services and areas of emerging technology.
"It appears that there's some incremental frustration," said Toni Sacconaghi Jr., an analyst with New York-based Bernstein & Co. "The change signals either the boards frustration or impatience with the status quo."
Wayman, who as recently as last year talked publicly of his desire to retire, emphasized Wednesday that he'd lead the company until the board picked a new chief executive, then return to his CFO role.
"I think I've demonstrated the flexibility to serve the company in whatever way is needed," Wayman said. "It's the board's top priority to find a new, permanent CEO, and that in no way is going to be an issue in regard to my retirement plans."
Dunn and Wayman said the board would consider all candidates but were leaning toward external applicants. They emphasized they did not foresee any other management changes at this time.
One of the lead dissenters to the acquisition of Compaq was HP director Walter Hewlett, the son of one of HP's late co-founders, who argued that HP was overpaying and couldn't afford to risk the difficulties of combining the two companies.
Fiorina took the helm at HP in 1999. The following year, the company added chairman to her list of titles, making her the first woman to hold all three top posts - president, CEO and chairman - at a major computer company.
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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2005-02-09 20:22 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius] Board members said they fired Fiorina, one of corporate America's highest ranking female executives...[/QUOTE] When are the hate crime charges being filed?
2005-02-10 00:39 | User Profile
Q,
Tech bosses defend overseas hiring Intel, HP chiefs warn that U.S. needs to improve education system
Washington -- Two leading Silicon Valley chief executives, reacting Wednesday to criticism they've shipped too many high-tech jobs overseas, defended hiring workers in India and China and warned that the United States and particularly California were in danger of losing their competitive edge to the Far East.
"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," said Carly Fiorina, chairman of Palo Alto information technology giant Hewlett Packard.
The comments came as part of the tech industry's counteroffensive against intensifying criticism about the export of high-tech jobs.
Fiorina warned against the growing protectionist backlash, saying the only alternative to losing jobs overseas was to make a national decision to stay ahead of foreign competitors by improving grade-school education, doubling federal spending on basic research and forming a national broadband policy, as Japan and Korea have done.
Craig Barrett, head of Santa Clara chipmaker Intel Corp., declared that the world had arrived at a rare "strategic inflection point" where nearly half its population -- living in China, India and Russia -- had been integrated into the global market economy, many of them highly educated workers "who can do just about any job in the world."
"We're talking about 3 billion people," Barrett said, more than 10 times the U.S. population. "The U.S. has a very simple choice to make. We have to decide if we're going to be competitive with these markets."
The two executives were representing the Computer Systems Policy Project, a group of eight chief executives from the nation's biggest information technology companies. The group issued a report Wednesday that raised an alarm in Washington about U.S. high-tech competitiveness but offered an alternative to protectionism. All these companies earn a large share of their revenues abroad and fear trade restrictions.
At the same time, high-tech executives find themselves increasingly on the defensive as they shift operations abroad. IBM Corp., a member of the group, recently announced it would move nearly 5,000 highly paid programming jobs overseas.
The exodus of high-tech jobs to India, China and elsewhere has generated rising dismay in both parties in Congress and spawned a welter of calls for retaliation, including from several Democratic presidential candidates, though no legislation has yet gained ground.
Front-runner Howard Dean declared in a debate recently that the country needed a leader who "doesn't think that big corporations who get tax cuts ought to be able to move their headquarters to Bermuda and their jobs offshore. "
High-tech executives insist that they must use overseas workers to remain competitive.
Fiorina and Barrett said their companies had been operating in India and China since the 1970s. Companies that sell two-thirds of their products overseas cannot be expected to hire all U.S. workers, they insisted, adding that their success overseas allows them to add more highly skilled "systems- level" jobs in the United States.
But these require highly educated workers, they stressed.
"It has been assumed that we basically have a padlock on high-tech jobs," Barrett said. "That's no longer the case with the enlargement of the world's workforce and the inclusion of many, many highly educated people around the world."
The Intel chief staunchly defended overseas hiring. "We'll put people next to our customers," he said. "We'll make best use of the resources around the world."
Barrett insisted that Intel was "still making massive investments in the U.S.," but he noted that jobs at these new facilities require two years of college "just to walk in the door. The infrastructure and education requirements of those jobs is forever increasing."
Fiorina warned the United States risked losing its lead in high-end products as well.
"It's interesting to me that so many people talk about China or India or Russia as being a source of low-cost labor," Fiorina said. "Truthfully, over the long term, the greater threat is the source of well-educated labor. And if you look at the number of college-educated students that China graduates every year, it's close to 40 million. The law of large numbers is fairly compelling."
Fiorina and Barrett said the United States must make a strategic choice to increase its competitiveness before it wakes up one day and finds it's too late.
They outlined a list of objectives, including a doubling of federal spending on basic research in U.S. universities. Barrett derided Washington's decision to spend as much as $40 billion a year on farm subsidies and just $5 billion on basic research in the physical sciences.
"I have a real degree of difficulty with the fact that we are spending some five to eight times as much on the industry of the 19th century than we are on the industry of the 21st century," Barrett said.
The executives also urged a national broadband policy to allow more homes and businesses to quickly take advantage of high-speed data networks, much as Japan and Korea have done.
They also called for dramatic improvements in K-12 education in the United States, saying schools act more to block budding math and science students than to foster them.
They insisted that protectionism would fail, comparing the current situation to the competitive threat from Japan in the 1980s, when U.S. corporations underwent a painful restructuring that ultimately propelled them forward, while Germany and France resorted to protection and fell behind.
"Short-term, protectionism always looks better and feels better," Fiorina said, but it ultimately fails.
Barrett also blasted California as the "least competitive business environment in the U.S. today."
The state is losing businesses to other states that are more welcoming, in much the same way the United States is losing out overseas, he said.
Cheaper labor
Companies can find low-cost technology professionals overseas:.
Country Average programmer salary
United States $60,000 - $80,000
Canada $28,174
China $8,952
India $5,880 - $11,000
Page A - 1 URL: [url]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/08/MNGDI45PV01.DTL[/url] ================================ [QUOTE]"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," said Carly Fiorina, chairman of Palo Alto information technology giant Hewlett Packard. [/QUOTE] Fine. Seeing how she thinks this way it is only appropriate that anything made by a foreign company she heads should be slapped with a tariff and her company shouldn't be allowed U.S. tax breaks by posing as an "American" Firm. These people have the world view of being "citizens of the world" and not Americans.
A guy wrote to Lou Dobbs that it would be appropriate if her job went to India. What a bitch.
2005-02-10 20:57 | User Profile
I thought I was just being sexist when I thought putting her at the top would lead to disaster.
2005-02-10 23:29 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius] Intel, HP chiefs warn that U.S. needs to improve education system
Companies can find low-cost technology professionals overseas:.
Country Average programmer salary
United States $60,000 - $80,000
Canada $28,174
China $8,952
India $5,880 - $11,000
[/QUOTE] It's not the education system that is a problem. It's just that people in other countries are willing to work for less.
2005-02-11 00:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]It's not the education system that is a problem. It's just that people in other countries are willing to work for less.[/QUOTE]
Sorry Mandrussian but that is not true, if the everyday prices were the same as in the USA then YES they are working for less but because their prices are lower than ours then they are getting paid the same as we are and paying the same, according to their standar of living.
In the US you get paid $21.00 per hour and pay $1,200 a month in rent and lunch will cost you $10.00......... in China they get paid .60 cent an hour and their rent is $22.00 a month and luch cost .55 cents.
Once the prices of renting a house and once that the price of food goes up then THE FRIKING UNION will step in and tell the workers to ask for more money and then they will be like we are in the US.
2005-02-11 02:21 | User Profile
The stock rose $2 in after-hours trading. There are 3B shares. That's 6B (!!!) in wealth created by ousting her. You might say:
Ditch the bitch. Get rich.
2005-02-11 03:18 | User Profile
Well good, now readers of the SF Chronicle (I'm not one) can get a break from constant business section Fiorina coverage.
2005-02-11 06:24 | User Profile
Now that they have tried a bitch, they should hire a darkie.
I've noticed a definite shift in the content of "The IEEE Spectrum" magazine over the last several months: now each issue comes with a "diversity" story. It's a laugh riiot, really, when they credit some African with an original microprocessor idea, and you know that that was in the public domain for a long time before that. They'll go to any length to fulfill their quota.
2005-02-11 21:06 | User Profile
[QUOTE=jay]The stock rose $2 in after-hours trading. There are 3B shares. That's 6B (!!!) in wealth created by ousting her. You might say:
Ditch the bitch. Get rich.[/QUOTE]
Ironically, even bitch Carly prospered from this herself as she owns a sizable chunk of HP shares.
HP had serious problems before Fiorina, but her reign put the nails in its coffin. They can't compete on the low, commoditized end of IT (cheap printers and PCs and other gizmos found in the average Best Buy--Jew Dell has the paper-thin margins of commodity PCs reduced to ruthless efficiency), and they've sold off or outright axed all of their crown jewels at the enterprise level: DEC Alpha (and more importantly DEC/Compaq's brilliant engineers), HP-RISC, Agilent, calculators and other scientific instruments, while betting the farm on crap like Itanium.
Fiorina had already run Lucent into the ground when she signed on with HP...but I guess "diversity" goals were more important to HP than having a corporate culture that attracted and kept the cream of the crop. She's a poster child for the plutocratic outsourcing and offshoring of IT to India and China as well.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.