Personal Systems division, which brings in a lion’s share to the company’s top line, continued its strong performance, improving sales by 11% to $10.1 billion. Meanwhile, the printing segment saw 9% growth over last year bringing in $5.3 billion to the top line.
Total hardware units were up 11% with Commercial hardware units showing huge year-over-year growth of 85% compared to the slight 3% rise in Consumer hardware units.
Looking ahead into the first quarter, HP expects its earnings in the range of $0.46 to $0.49 per share and adjusted earnings of $0.50 to $0.53 per share. For the full year 2019, HP predicts earnings in the range of $2.04 to $2.14 per share and adjusted earnings in the range of $2.12 to $2.22 per share.
For the fourth quarter, notebooks and workstations have contributed a double-digit revenue growth in the Personal Systems division while commercial hardware alone incurred a double-digit revenue growth in the Printing division.
The company used $0.2 billion worth of cash for dividend payment of $0.1393 per share in the fourth quarter. HP utilized $0.6 billion of cash to repurchase about 24.4 million shares of common stock in the open market. As a result, HP returned 97% of its free cash flow to shareholders in the fourth quarter.
HP exited the fourth quarter with $5.9 billion in gross cash, which includes cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments of $0.7 billion included in other current assets. HP generated $0.8 billion of free cash flow in the fourth quarter.
Shares of HP ended Thursday’s regular trading session down 2.43% at $22.86 on the NYSE. The stock has risen over 8% in the year so far and over 6% in the past year.