Revenue for the quarter grew 12% to $14.6 billion.
Personal Systems division, which brings in a lion’s share to the company’s top line, continued its strong performance, improving sales by 12% to $9.4 billion. Meanwhile, the printing segment saw 11% growth over last year bringing in $5.2 billion to the top line.
Total hardware units were up 12% with Commercial hardware units showing huge year-over-year growth compared to the slight rise in Consumer hardware units.
Looking ahead, HP expects its earnings to be between $0.48 and $0.51 per share. On an adjusted basis, earnings are expected to be $0.52 to $0.55 per share.
For the fiscal year 2018, HP lifted non-GAAP EPS outlook to the range of $2.00 to $2.03 from prior estimate of $1.97 to $2.02. GAAP earnings are now predicted to be $2.82 to $2.85 for the full year 2018.
The company used $0.2 billion worth of cash for dividend payment of $0.1393 per share in the third quarter. HP utilized $0.7 billion of cash to repurchase about 30.4 million shares of common stock in the open market. As a result, HP returned 66% of its free cash flow to shareholders in the third quarter.
HP exited the third quarter with $7.1 billion in gross cash, which includes cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments of $0.9 billion included in other current assets. HP generated $1.4 billion of free cash flow in the third quarter.
Shares of HP ended Thursday’s regular trading session up 0.49% at $24.63 on the NYSE. The stock turned negative in the after-hours following the results.