“Hewlett-Packard Co and top executives misled investors for months before unveiling a series of major decisions, such as the demise of the TouchPad, that hammered its shares, a shareholder alleged in a proposed class-action lawsuit filed this week,” Edwin Chan reports for Reuters.
“Shareholder Richard Gammel accuses the world’s largest technology company [sic] of concealing the fact that its existing business model was not working and that webOS — the operating software it inherited after buying Palm — was no longer central to its business model,” Chan reports. “The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court by Robbins Geller Rudman & Down, accuses HP executives including CEO Leo Apotheker and CFO Cathie Lesjak of misleading investors by making positive statements about the company’s performance that later proved unfounded.”
Chan reports, “The lawsuit seeks to recover unspecified damages on behalf of any who bought into HP between November 22, 2010, and Aug 18 of this year, arguing that the lack of disclosure about potential issues means its shares were artificially inflated.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: RIM execs should take heed.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Boom. What a nightmare for the old guard at HP
Ha ha ha ha ha. Losers.
“Worlds largest technology company” is HP?? Did someone not do their journalistic homework or did I just imagine that that title was now Apple’s??
“Largest” does not necessarily mean highest market cap. HP is probably the “world’s largest technology company” by some definition.
“largest” has usually referred to sales, though why, I don’t know. HP’s sales are still larger than Apple’s.
It’s funny that shareholders are now suing HP, because I was just mentioning at dinner, that RIM’s shareholders will probably sue RIM soon, seeing as they were talking about $7 a share in earnings this year, and now have made about $2.13 after 6 months.
CEOs and CFOs have to be very careful about what they say, as shareholders are very litigious, which always surprised me that more Microsoft shareholders don’t sue Ballmer for all the idiotic things he says.
Do you think Ballmer will ever stop making utterly stupid statements?
If AAPL had gone down significantly (instead of actually being up after a few days) when Steve Jobs resigned, the same type of investors and law firms would have sued Apple.
Well between Mark Turd and now the SAP retread this one time industry titan is all sorts of f*ckered up
Hurd was doing a good job, iCarly left him quite the mess.
Leo is a HORRIBLE CEO.
Don’t forget the rule of queen Carly
The tech industry is quite a slippery slope for those who rely on the past to create the future. Fail to innovate and anticipate consumer trends and failure is all but inevitable for both shareholders and the corporate elite.
With Windows 8 on the horizon WebOS is now dead and worthless (and also the Playbook).
Again, this goes to show the validity of Steve Jobs business vision:
• If you don’t give out future “plans” and intentions, and if you don’t spin the future at all…(secrecy)…then you can’t be later successfully sued for “misleading” anyone. Because…you didn’t.
HP shareholders receive unexpected rim job — satisfaction falls short.
Let me rehash what I wrote about HP on 1st July 2011:
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Do you know what is wrong with the HP TouchPad? It’s not the TouchPad weakness per se, but it’s HP’s loss of its creative juice. HP was once a great company; in fact, it was one of the grandest of granddaddies of tech? But it decided that taking the shortcut route is best for its bottom line. It decided to fawn over Microsoft in order to get a leg-up on the competition. It wanted to be the most favored concubine in the Microsoft harem. In fact HP and Dell were the favorite concubines of Microsoft because they often got the best treatment from Microsoft. In the end HP became too servile to Microsoft’s featherbedding that it gave up its independence to do its own thing.
Lately HP tries to wean itself off Microsoft’s largesse. It’s a bold act but it will take time to regain its mojo. Best of luck to HP.