HP raises Q2 guidance

Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday raised its estimate for second-quarter earnings to a range of $25.50 billion to $25.55 billion, pointing to higher than expected sales of consumer PCs and business servers.

The new guidance tops the company’s previous revenue forecast of $24.5 billion for the quarter ended April 30, 2007, and is also higher than the $22.6 billion HP earned in the same quarter a year ago.

The new estimate puts the vendor on track to report another strong financial quarter. HP passed Dell in 2006 to become the world’s largest PC vendor and the company has also rebounded quickly from a corporate spying scandal that led to the resignation of its chairman in September.

However, leaks still remain a problem at the company.

HP opted to share the results more than a week before its May 16 earnings report because someone at the company made an “inadvertent disclosure of financial information” by sending an internal e-mail to an outside party, according to a release. HP didn’t provide any more details, but said these “unusual circumstances” forced it to make the updated financial guidance public before the U.S. financial markets opened on Tuesday.

The upgrade in performance will push HP’s profit to a range of $0.64 to $0.65 per share, up from the previous goal of $0.57 to $0.58 per share. Those figures would match the average Wall Street analysts’ estimate of $0.65 earnings per share and beat the expected revenue of $24.58 billion, according to a consensus of analysts polled by Thomson Financial.