Former maker of expensive printer ink Hewlett Packard Enterprise has said that Brexit did have an impact on its bottom line.
The vendor said that there had been a slowdown in public sector spending following the referendum decision to exit the EU. HPE mentioned the slow down of public sector activity in its latest results announcement but this was largely missed when HPE announced it was off-loading its software business in a spin merger with UK firm Micro Focus.
Speaking to analysts, HPE CEO Meg “Yahoo” Whitman said that Brexit was something that it had felt in its order books in the UK and across the continent.
“What we saw was actually a pause in purchasing in the UK. Certainly the UK public sector, but also the UK and then more broadly Europe which was, this was unexpected, a big change, let’s take a pause and decide what we want to do here. What I will say is that in the last couple of weeks we’re actually seeing orders pick up again,” she added.
But the result of Brexit and the shock to the UK economic system, particularly the value of the pound, has led to ongoing price scrutiny.
“We continue to also monitor the pricing, competitive pricing environment that we see and we adjust as necessary particularly in the channel. So the channel is where we serve SMB and that’s where our ability to sort of move the pricing in response to competition, we look at that actually every single week sometime multiple times a week,” added Whitman.
