The former maker of expensive printer ink HPE surprised everyone with some rather good results.
HPE showed off a 12 per cent annual revenue hike for its fiscal 2023 First Quarter ending 31 January 2023.
HPE reached the high end of its First Quarter revenue outlook by recording revenues of $7.8 billion, a 12 per cent rise on the previous year and the highest best it recorded since 2016.
Intelligent Edge and High Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence grew 25 and 34 per cent to $1.1billion respectively.
Compute revenue grew 14 per cent to $3.5 billion, while storage revenue rose five per cent to $1.2 billion.
The outfit said its supply chain woes were easing and “almost back to pre-pandemic levels.”
CFO Tarek Robbiati said: “We benefited from improvements in the supply environment, particularly in our Compute segment. This allowed us to execute against our order book, which our customers greatly appreciated. ”
HPE CEO Antonio Neri warned that he does not anticipate all shortages coming to an end.
“Our order book at the start of Q1 was larger than it was a year ago. And as we exit the quarter, it is more than twice the size of normalised historical levels,” he said.
Neri talked up HPE’s latest acquisition of cloud security provider Access Security and said HPE was considering more acquisitions.
“We will continue to assess organic and inorganic investments that improve our competitive position in growth markets while driving higher level of recurring revenue and profitability,” Neri said.
HPE said the emergence of large language models such as ChatGPT and BART would be good for HPE as some of them run on HPE’s systems,.
“We believe AI at scale is a high-growth market and then the building and refinement of AI models will require unique computational capabilities that our Cray supercomputers and HPI solutions are extremely well positioned to enable,” he said.
