• Operating profit stood at $12m in the third quarter compared to a loss of $76m a year ago.
• Its revenues decline close to 6% to $6.8b.
• Annualised revenue run-rate increases by 11% to $528m and reduces its second-quarter backlog by more than $500m through improved supply chain execution.
• CEO sees edge as a significant opportunity over the long-term.

Bengaluru: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is back in black with a profit of $9 million in the third quarter of this year compared to a loss of $27 million a year ago, due to right-back of taxes.

The US-based company reported a $34 million loss before taxes but it got $43 million as benefit from taxes in the third quarter.

Its operating profit stood at $12 million in the third quarter compared to a loss of $76 million a year ago.

HPE revenues declined close to 6 per cent to $6.8 billion in the third quarter compared to $7.2 billion a year ago.

“We significantly improved operational and supply chain execution and advanced our innovation agenda with the introduction of HPE GreenLake cloud services solutions, our new HPE Ezmeral software portfolio, and our planned acquisition of SD-WAN leader Silver Peak,” Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said.

Moreover, he said that the company gained momentum in key areas of differentiation and accelerated our as-a-service pivot with strong annualised revenue run-rate (ARR) growth and a record number of HPE GreenLake services orders.

HPE’s ARR increased by 11 per cent to $528 million and reduced its second-quarter backlog by more than $500 million through improved supply chain execution.

“We expect to return to normalised level of backlog by the end of fourth quarter through continued improvements in both supply chain execution and customer acceptances.“ Neri said.

HPE GreenLake services orders grew a record 80 per cent from the prior-year period or 82 per cent when adjusted for currency.

Competitive differentiation

Neri believes that this is faster than the growth of the order of public cloud vendors and it is a validation of its hyper strategy and competitive differentiation.

“We are focused on delivering one seamless cloud experience for all applications and data, no matter where they exist; at the edge, in a data center, in a colocation, or in a public cloud estate. While others are publicly declaring plans to offer everything-as-a-service, we have been focused on this for several years and have made significant organic and inorganic investments to deliver a differentiated experience for our customers,” he said.

HPE chief continues to see the edge as a significant opportunity over the long-term and the explosion of data devices and application will drive demand for secure multi-protocol connectivity, analytics and cloud computing capabilities at the edge, especially in the post-Covid world.

“We are now entering the edge of insights, driven by the amount of data we are generating and the utilization of new analytic tools, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Customers are looking to power a new breed of applications and workloads that work in concert with the cloud, but analyze and process data at the edge,” he said.

Navigating through the pandemic and planning for a post-Covid world have increased customers’ needs for as-a-service offerings, secure connectivity, remote work capabilities and analytics to unlock insights from data that are aligned to its strategy, he said.

Board of Directors have declared a regular cash dividend of $0.12 per share on the company’s common stock. This dividend, the fourth in Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s fiscal year 2020, is payable on October 7, 2020, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on September 9, 2020.