Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman resigns in shock move

Meg Whitman has shocked Wall Street by stepping down as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The former eBay boss, one the most high-profile executives in the US, said on Tuesday she would quit in February and hand over the reins to company veteran Antonio Neri.

Shares in the software company fell six per cent as her decision took traders by surprise.

Meg Whitman has shocked Wall Street by stepping down as CEO of Hewlett Packard

Whitman said in July she was fully committed to HPE and planned to remain CEO after reports surfaced that she was being considered for the top job at Uber

‘We have a lot of work still to do at HPE and I am not going anywhere. Uber’s CEO will not be Meg Whitman,’ she had tweeted.

On Wednesday, Whitman, 61, told CNBC that talks with Uber had not been a factor in her decision to leave HPE ‘at all.’

Her move caught analysts off guard. HPE is in the middle of a restructuring to cut costs, invest in research and focus on high-margin businesses.

Whitman was a senior member of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 and ran for governor of California as a Republican (pictured) but supported Hillary Clinton in 2016

Its mainstay server business has been struggling as customers increasingly buy non-branded, assembled servers that are much cheaper.

‘We are surprised by the timing of the CEO transition given commentary at the recent analyst day that seemed to imply a CEO transition was not in the offing,’ BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long said in a research note.

Meg Whitman’s career

Whitman was a senior member of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 and ran for governor of California as a Republican but supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.

After graduating from Harvard Business School, Whitman served as an executive in The Walt Disney Company, where she was Vice President of Strategic Planning throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s, she served as an executive for DreamWorks, Procter & Gamble, and Hasbro.

Whitman served as President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay, from 1998 to 2008. During Whitman’s 10 years with the company, she oversaw its expansion from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue, to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue.

In 2014, Whitman was named 20th in Forbes List of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World.

Long added that Neri’s experience running the company’s Enterprise Group made him a strong fit for the CEO role.

Neri is a computer engineer who has spent more than two decades with the company and is HPE’s current president.

His appointment is not a surprise given his increased visibility in recent months, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty wrote in a research note.

Neri began his career in Hewlett Packard as a customer service engineer in the EMEA call center. He previously led HP’s technology services business and then its server and networking businesses, before taking over the whole Enterprise Group in 2015.

Barclays analyst Mark Moskowitz and Morgan Stanley’s Huberty expect Neri to shift gears and aggressively develop technology in-house, rather than focus on mergers.

Since its split from Hewlett-Packard Inc in late 2015, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has spent billions buying companies providing cloud software and data storage to better position itself to serve customers who are moving their operations to the cloud.

HPE’s shares have risen five per cent this year, compared with a 16 per cent gain in the S&P 500 index. They were trading at $13.28 in early trading on Wednesday.

2006: Meg Whitman when she was President and CEO of eBay Inc

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