Hewlett-Packard Company: Corporate Audit The Comp

Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1938 by two Stanford engineers in a garage in Palo Alto, California. The initial investment was $538. The first product was an audio oscillator, eight of which were purchased by Walt Disney Studios for the production of Fantasia. The company made electronic testing equipment and successfully marketed this during World War II. Revenue increased to near $1 million by 1943, and the company expanded 50 to 100 percent per year during the 1950s. In 1972 Hewlett-Packard was a pioneer in personal computing by developing the first hand-held scientific calculator. Computers would account for half the company's revenues by the late 1970s. The company became a leader in the computer workstation market. The original business of test and measurement equipment is now minuscule next to the computer business, all based on technological innovations and innovative marketing strategies that took advantage of a growing need. Hewlett-Packard today is the dominant company in producing laser and inkjet printers, and it is second only to Sun Microsystems in the RISC-based workstation market. Hewlett-Packard's RISC chip is used by competitors Oki, Hitachi, Samsung, and Convex Computer. The company also makes networking devices, medical electronic instruments, disk drives, and calculators. The company is dedicated to R&D and benefits greatly from the money it invests on new product development (Wilsher, 19

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the laboratory as recently as two years ago. The company is also confident that this stream of new products will continue. The most recent addition is a line of new super-powerful workstations offering mainframe performance and custom-tailored flexibility at two thirds the equivalent price. The company does not concentrate on such high-end goods to the exclusion of less expensive products, however, and is just as likely to come up with a gadget that can be sold to the housewife. Hof thus cites as the second leg of the company's strategy the husbanding of the company's financial strength so it can take a more aggressive stance as needed, something it was able to do just as the economy entered a recession. The company already holds a dominant position in some areas, such as laser printers, and it is able to place a systematic concentration on cutting costs and raising specifications that give it scope to offer customers a good combination of higher quality and lower prices. The reputation of the company has remained high, while other companies trying to hold onto their margins have panicked and cut prices drastically, reducing the value of their image. The third leg of the strategy cited by Hof came about as the senior execu
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Approximate Word count = 1686
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)