Quick: Name the world's biggest tech company
Posted by: Peter Burrows on June 01, 2006
It’s IBM, right?
Well, that’s only half right—because Hewlett-Packard has now pulled into a dead heat with Big Blue. I discovered this while rummaging around Yahoo Finance this morning. If one looks at trailing twelve months of financial reports, both companies have sold exactly $88.89 billion over the last year. And analysts’ consensus estimates are that HP will grow 5.1% in fiscal 2007, versus 4.3% for IBM. So a changing of the guard may not be far off.
Obviously, the fact that HP is on a roll is not news. And part of the explanation is IBM’s sale of its PC business to Lenovo. Still, it’s a surprising marker—one that is not lost on HP’s top brass, and I’m sure won’t go unnoticed by former CEO Carly Fiorina in her upcoming book.
