Stuttgart – Computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) profited from the good mood in the IT industry in Germany. In its last fiscal year (2006/07, ended 31.10.), the Böbligen company improved its turnover by ten per cent to 6.5 billion euros, according to a statement by Germany's HP boss Uli Holdenried in Stuttgart on Wednesday. Private customer business with desktops and notebooks made a decisive contribution to this result, he continued.

Normally, the manager makes no comment on profit. However, the German company, he said, made a "significant" contribution to the HP group's overall result, whereby the profit was within expectations for the year. Compared to the previous year, the number of employees in Germany rose by 300 to 8,500.

For the current fiscal year, the computer group is expecting the strong demand for mobile products to continue. "We will achieve substantial growth in private customer business", said the CEO of Hewlett-Packard GmbH. More than 50 per cent of over turnover in PC business, he continued, would be done in Germany, which was therefore one of the growth countries in this area of business.

For fiscal 2007/08, Holdenried's goal is for the company to grow more than the market as a whole. HP, he said, also wanted to expand its workforce in Germany, in spite of the noticeable lack of qualified staff in the IT industry. The manager refrained from making any detailed prognoses of how business would develop in the next few months.

Source: dpa/lsw