HP facing long road ahead for CEO's turnaround

The roadblocks to Hewlett-Packard's turnaround are mounting.

Meg Whitman, hired as chief executive almost two years ago to revive the storied Silicon Valley computer maker, had said revenue would rise next year as sales of personal computers stabilised. She scrapped that prediction on Wednesday.

PC shipments are slumping for longer than Whitman had foreseen, there is weak demand for enterprise hardware and services, and Dell and other competitors are siphoning away sales with aggressive pricing. Cost-cutting is also reaching its limit amid a move to eliminate 29,000 jobs.

Whitman is still facing hurdles after three years of write-offs, management upheaval, strategy shifts and slowing growth.

"The signs are clear that 80 per cent of their business will have headwinds in fiscal 2014 - that's PCs, printers, and services," said Abhey Lamba, an analyst at Mizuho Securities USA who has an underperform rating on the shares, the equivalent of a sell.

Whitman took the helm in 2011, asking investors to be patient and scaling back her predecessor's growth projections, which she said were too cheery. The stock had risen 78 per cent this year on signs that a turnaround might be taking hold.