Inside HP's Optimistic Turnaround WIth CEO Meg Whitman

Hewlett-Packard CEO

Meg Whitman appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box Wednesday morning from the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas to discuss the company's recent turnaround and future after a rough couple of years. HP just had a great quarter, with their stock up significantly and earnings higher than analysts' projections. Whitman said that it was only part of the five year plan she laid out to get HP running exactly how it should be, saying that they're a bit ahead of where they thought they would be eighteen months into the turnaround. "There's a lot of heavy lifting ahead," said Whitman. Whitman said that HP would need to adjust to the changing tech world. Personal computer sales are at their lowest and dropping while tablets and smartphones seem to be running victory laps in the market. "We think growth is still possible in 2014, our next fiscal year. I think the biggest wildcard is what happens to the PC market in the whole," said Whitman. "We define that business now as personal systems, but the vast majority of our personal systems are PCs, and so I think that will largely depend on the market, but we remain pretty confident." Many tech analysts don't see the PC surviving when portable information technology is so popular, and HP needs to get revenue growing. According to Whitman, however, the HP veterans think this is the strongest lineup of products that they've had in the past 20 years, and she agrees. "The need to create, consume, to share is exploding because data is exploding, and there's so many more things you can do as an individual," said Whitman. "It just turns out that those devices are becoming multiform factor, multi-operating system, multi-architecture in terms of chips that are in those devices. So the good news is, the business is growing, it's just the PC segment is declining." Whitman commented that HP is halfway through reducing their workforce by 29,000 over a three year period, and that their strategy has moved to providing solutions for the new style of IT. "Technology has become a real completive weapon. In the old days it was all about how you could make your own operations more efficient. Now what our technologists are seeing, and what I see in our costumers is IT needs to help drive revenue and be a competitive advantage for those costumers," said Whitman.