Hewlett Packard Enterprise has singled out the UK for its weak performance in Europe after its revenue dropped in the second quarter.
HPE reported a global revenue of $7.4 billion, down 13 percent on the same period last year.
HPE CFO Tim Stonesifer said the UK was chiefly to blame for difficulties in Europe.
“Revenue in Europe continue to be weak, driven by the UK, although strong results in Germany helped the region,” he said.
HPE suffered because of a mystery tier-one customer in its server business as a major contributor to the revenue drop, as it did when it published its first quarter results earlier this year.
CEO Meg Whitman said that if this customer is taken out of the equation, HPE would have actually reported a revenue increase of one per cent for second quarter.
Whitman said that the customer was a significant enough size to dramatically affect revenue over the coming months.
Forbes speculated that the customer could be one of the big public cloud providers Microsoft, Google, or Amazon Web Services.
HPE’s server revenue declined 14 percent year on year in the quarter to just under $3 billion, but taking the tier-one customer out of the equation brings the decline to just one percent.
HPE was one of a number of vendors to hike prices in the UK specifically after the EU Referendum.
The company was surprised that jacking up the price of their products harmed the bottom line so much. Who would have thought that raising prices in a time of uncertainty would not have made more money?
Because of the difficultly regarding pricing and commodities, HPE will look to make savings of between $200 million and $300 million in the second half of this year – as it integrates Nimble and SimpliVity and adjusts for life after the spin mergers of its software and services groups.
HPE said it was taking significant steps to optimise the cost structure of the future HPE. It is also looking to trim an incremental $200 million to $300 million in cost savings in just the second half of this year, HPE said.
These savings will be a combination of tight control over spending and simplifying the organisation through de-layering and spend-control actions as it becomes a smaller, more nimble company, HPE said.
