All is not well at Meg Whitman's HP, we learned during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call this morning. HP just recorded a $9 billion devaluation of its assets stemming from serious accounting tomfoolery at a company that HP bought for $10 billion last year. Ouch.
Last August, HP bought the British software company Autonomy for $10.3 billion making it one of HP's biggest assets. In today's call, HP claimed that Autonomy's books had been cooked before HP ever got there, and the company will take an $8.8 billion hit to its balance sheet to compensate. Some nitty-gritty from the earnings statement:
The majority of this impairment charge is linked to serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy Corporation plc that occurred prior to HP's acquisition of Autonomy and the associated impact of those improprieties, failures and misrepresentations on the expected future financial performance of the Autonomy business over the long-term.
http://gizmodo.com/5962107/company-hp-bought-for-10-billion-just-cost-hp-9-billion?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
