Summary of Important Points from HP's Q2 Conference Call - HP (NYSE:HPQ)

Below are some highlights from HP's

HPQ

Q2 conference call on Wednesday afternoon:

results in the quarter were driven by better than expected performance in Enterprise Services and Printing
We've significantly improved the pricing processes, decreasing the turnaround time for quotes by more than 50% in Europe.
In the second quarter, cash flow from operations was $3.6 billion, up 44% over the prior year
This quarter we brought our cash conversion cycle down to 21 days, seven days better than the prior year.
lowered our operating company net debt position by $1.8 billion to $2.9 billion. This represents our fifth consecutive quarter of reducing our net debt by more than $1billion and nearly a $9 billion reduction since its peak in the first quarter of fiscal 2012.
Strong performance in printing, "sustained the strong performance we saw in the first quarter with margins in Q2 of 15.8%, up 2.6 points over the prior year.
Ink Advantage gain strength in the market and demand for new products like the Officejet Pro X outstrip supply in the quarter despite ramping our production 32% faster than we'd planned.
And we continue to close some major wins in Enterprise Services. For example in the second quarter, we closed a 10-year $210 million agreement to support Cambridge University Hospital's Trust in transforming its digital infrastructure.
In servers we launched Moonshot, a new class of server aimed at the Hyperscale market. Moonshot addresses the space, energy, cost and complexity issues
Moonshot uses up to 89% less energy, needs 80% less space and reduces complexity by over 97%, all costing 77% less.
Moonshot will take time to ramp and we continue to face near-term pressure in the Hyperscale market.
We have had strong success with our Converged Storage and the mid-range Pre power products that were launched in the first quarter.
This has been one of our most successful product introductions and Pre power has now exceeded the $1 billion run rate revenue mark.
In Software, we saw continued challenges in the traditional IT management business, which was particularly weak in Europe. This was offset by momentum at Vertica and continuing stabilization at Autonomy.
Seeing customer wins inAutonomy. For example, this quarter we announced that All Nippon Airways, Japan's largest airline, is using Autonomy's Optimost product.
In industry-standard servers, we under-performed in both the Hyperscale and mainstream server markets.
Hyperscale where we expect Moonshot will give us a differentiated offering, the transition is going to take time.
In the second quarter we saw single-digit revenue decline as competitors aggressively priced in the market.

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