HP changes CEO again as it looks to Whitman to stem the slide

Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) board today ousted CEO Leo Apotheker after just 11 months on the job, replacing him with Meg Whitman.

HP’s board said the company needed a change at the top. The company cut its financial outlook three times in Apotheker’s tenure, and on September 22, HP said it was not confident it would be able to meet its sales targets for the current quarter.

HP’s stock price has slipped by more than 40 per cent this year alone.

Whitman, who is also an HP board member, was formerly the CEO of eBay

“We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead,” said Ray Lane, who on was named executive chairman of HP’s board.

Lane was formerly an independent, non-executive chair. The company said it will look for someone to fill that independent role on its board.

The chairman said on a conference call that the board considered many candidates and decided together that Whitman was the right fit.

Whitman, who is also an HP board member, was formerly the CEO of eBay. She headed the online auction site for 10 years, taking over the company in 1998 when it was in its infancy. By the time she left in 2008, the company had grown to a US$8.5 billion e-commerce behemoth.

The ousting of HP’s third CEO marks yet another dramatic crisis in a decade of turmoil for one of Silicon Valley’s original pioneers. A year earlier, Mark Hurd was fired as HP’s CEO after submitting false expense reports in what appeared to be an effort to conceal a relationship with a former employee.

In 2006, HP’s chairwoman Pattie Dunn was shown the door after it was revealed that she had spearheaded a secret probe to spy on fellow board members and journalists, in an attempt to find the source of board-level media leaks.

A year before that, in 2005, then-CEO Carly Fiorina left after spearheading HP’s failed merger with Compaq. The company’s stock price was cut in half during her tenure.