UPDATE: Wells Fargo Securities Reiterates Outperform Rating, Raises Valuation Range on Hewlett-Packard Company on Multiple Positive Factors

In a report published Wednesday, Wells Fargo Securities analyst Maynard Um reiterated an Outperform rating on

, and raised the valuation range from $39.00-$41.00 to $46.00-$49.00. In the report, Wells Fargo Securities noted, “We are raising our valuation range on HPQ for following reasons: 1) fundamental – we expect FY15 to be a bottoming in a number of its legacy businesses, which we believe should lead to multiple expansion (a la peers such as WDC, STX, MSFT, INTC), 2) the event – corporate split should unlock value and opportunity for further cost synergies; sum of the parts suggests $47/share value, 3) low multiple – at 9.9x our FY15 EPS, HPQ still lags the market and some of its megacap peers. While HPQ faces many of the same risks (macro, geopolitical, etc) as its peers, we see HPQ as having lower multiple compression risk with a potential event catalyst and bottoming fundamentals that we believe should result in multiple expansion.” Hewlett-Packard Company closed on Tuesday at $39.27.