Posted on 09/17/2015 6:21:28 PM PDT by jimbo123
Presidential hopeful and former Hewlett-Packard HPQ -3.70% CEO Carly Fiorina has built her entire campaign around the fact that she comes from the business world, not politics.
“A fish swims in water, it doesn’t know it’s water. It’s not that politicians are bad people, it’s that they’ve been in that system forever,” she said at Wednesday night’s second debate among Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidential Election.
The line was consistent with Fiorina’s pitch to voters as a no-nonsense executive who knows how to revitalize the U.S. economy, but to hear one of her chief Republican rivals tell it, the business track record she leans on isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“Hewlett-Packard was a disaster. Lucent, the company she was at before Hewlett-Packard, was a disaster. These were two disastrous reigns,” said Donald Trump in an interview with CBS’ Face The Nation.
For all Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail, he has a point here. Under Fiorina’s reign at HP shareholders took a beating. During her tenure, HP shares lost 42% while the broader market slid just 6%. The day she was fired in February 2005, the stock popped 7%.
Fiorina joined HP as CEO in 1999 and her campaign website lists a raft of accomplishments at the company, saying she ”doubled revenues; more than quadrupled its growth rate; tripled the rate of innovation, with 11 patents a day.”
Those figures are impressive at first glance, but also largely misleading. While Fiorina did double revenues to nearly $90 billion during her tenure, it was almost entirely because of the highly controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002. The merger, a bet on personal computers just as their sales were starting to slide, faced strong opposition and Fiorina had to launch a proxy battle to win approval, pitting her
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Karl hope you got more money and another candidate.
Stockholders lost their money and Carly got 100 Million
You are to quick to dismiss her, Scooby321, She has a VJJ. Besides she is STILL the GOPe insurance against any democrat with the SAME. Anything to STOP that ‘WAR ON WOMEN’ stuff biting them in the but again.
PREDICTION: TRUMP will crash and burn before Thanksgiving. Probably say something derogatory about Pres. Washington, Lincoln or REAGAN.
CRUZ or LOSE.
Don’t forget Lucent. First hand account from tonight in NH.
They will be coming out of woodwork now that she is “getting better known “!
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See if you can make a clip of it here. The Fiorina-Lucent part starts at 31 minutes and 06 seconds. There is a way to make a clip but not from my phone
http://www.c-span.org/video/?328138-1/donald-trump-town-hall-meeting-rochester-new-hampshire&live
Let me explain a few things these articles never do. One, the PC industry was split at that time between HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, and others who built standard configurations and pumped them into the distribution channel. If technology or even operating systems changed to favor different feature sets, the already-built PCs piled up in warehouses, unsold. On the other side was DELL with it’s amazingly powerful “build to order” model that gave customers the ability to “have it their way”.
Public companies like HP are under constant pressure to show quarterly improvement in earnings or the stock price drops as shareholders invest elsewhere. That was the scenario facing the HP board when they decided to acquire Compaq, which Fiorina as CEO was responsible for executing. The problem was, it not only created a larger version of the type of PC company that wasn’t working very well, but it added the thin margins of the PC business with the very high margins of HPs’ existing printer and ink business with the result that sales grew but profit actually went down.
Anyone who thinks Fiorina did this on her own has no clue about how corporations work. It was a calculated decision that the added revenue would buy enough time to move to a DELL-like model with a more valuable stock price, but that is not how it turned out, and Fiorina was fired. If this was a “disaster”, she may have been in the wheelhouse of the Titanic but she wasn’t alone.
Finally, what about Agilent, which was spun out of HP in 1999 and subsequently shed the component business (Avago) and the legacy Test and Measurement business that Grandpa Dave started in his garage in 1939 (Keysight Technologies). You have to add them to today’s HP computer company in order to get the same picture of the company as when Fiorina came on board.
Interesting to see the anti Fiorina articles appearing the day after the debate. I can only assume these are from Bush supporters attempting to take her down a few notches.
So now we have Bush supporters targeting Fiorina. Is this pure luck, or did Trump just play some sort of 3D chess move; elevate her visibility, and then let her and Bush pummel each other via the MSM. It’s like a zero cost negative campaign to take her out.
Great excerpt.
True enough, but she was the CEO. That's why they get paid the big bucks.
She’s a weak candidate and has zero chance of being nominated. That is all.
by almost any measure you choose: political candidacy (boxer and worse the shoving out of chuck devore and ruination of many a tea party candidate), business acumen, leadership, results, even the stockholder value she was hired to pump up ( after training in in the corrupt hot-mess at at&t) at lucent and hp. fiorina is an abject failure.
fiorina was hired as a spinoff jocky. that’s it. wall street wanted to dismantle hp (a beautiful co) and feed it to the stockholders. ergo she was hired to break it up and spin off agilent the heart of the co and hewlett and packard’s great American vision.
the fact that anyone in the gop supports her goes to show how clueless many are in the gop.
She is a dangerous Rove operative.
And the part about bribing Russian government officials to land contracts? Would that be something to assign to her watch? After all, HP recently was socked with a 59 million dollar fine for a long history of doing that, starting with Russia in 2000.
really bob?
the board (including Walter Hewlett) changed it’s mind and the co employees agreed. they fought fiorina tooth and nail.
fiorina went right ahead got the shareholders to sign off (at least that’s the story). so no, she did it on her own. no excuses. and it is and was her responsibility.
Let’s not forget that many companies went out of business in the same time period.
Her demeanor is foul, condescending, arrogant and attempts to speak like a founding father. Very phony.
Snarly Carly! It fits.
Perfect ;-)
How did she shove out Devore? I worked with his campaign with our own liberty group and I didn’t see what you’re talking about. If you mean she campaigned in a Republican primary and won, then ok....
Oh sadly Steve is not here
huh? you worked with him and you don’t know how a political novice, johnny come lately ceo used her boat load of money, name recognition and the ca romney gope apparatus to swamp the last great conservative candidate in ca?
her job was in part to take out devore.
ok.
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