Of the tech groups in India, this is the one most worthy of the group tag. Its diverse range of activities is integrated under a common brand. It has the widest own-brand portfolio in terms of product span: personal systems and servers, software and services, printers and scanners. And its seen relatively smooth sailing in India, over these nearly five years since its big merger.

Not so, globally. HP settled down after four turbulent years following its 2002 merger with Compaq. Its management stabilized, its structure settled down to three well-defined groups: PSG (personal systems) for PCs, workstations and mobile devices; IPG (imaging and printing); and TSG (technology solutions)business products including storage and servers, managed services and software.

Global Turmoil, Local Calm
This 68-year old Palo Alto, California-based company, fourteenth in the Fortune 500, is the worlds largest IT company at $97 billion for FY07.

Mark V Hurd, 51, took over the CEO reigns from Carly Fiorina in March 2005, and the position of chairman from Patricia C Dunn (who resigned after a criminal indictment) in September 2006. Fiorina had been sacked by the board after post-merger performance glitches, and the exodus of top talent. She left with a $21 mn cash severance package, part of the over $100 mn she earned from HP, and a year down, two big investors sued HP for violating its severance cap.

Against this turmoil, HP India did rather well. The merger was relatively smooth here. Compaq had been the dominant company in India and it is to the credit of HP that it allowed Compaqs managers to run HP India. Compaq India chief Balu Doraisamy and his colleagues Ravi Swaminathan, Kapil Jain, Neelam Dhawan (who then left in 2005 to head Microsoft India sales) took over, while HPs Ravi Aggarwal took charge of IPG.

HP is blessed with a wide range of products with at least one cash cow in each of its three divisions. In IPG, its consumables: inkjet ink and laser toner supplies (for the millions of HP printers), adding up to a tenth of HP India sales. HP overwhelmingly dominates printers, and all the competition is for second place.

In the enterprise business, its services, another one-tenth of sales. Thats modest, given HPs aspirations and arch-rival IBMs achievements. HP says it does not go for mega-deals at the cost of marginsa reference to IBMs total outsourcing deals with Bharti and Idea. But one mega-deal would do much for HPs visibility in services. So if and when BSNL, Reliance, Tata Indicom do similar deals, expect the competition to be tough. But HP does have strong outsourcing deals with Indian banksBoB, UBI, Uco Bank, et aland in other sectors.

Yet HP Indias real jump in profitable revenues came from a less-than-expected group: personal systems, globally busy with low-margin PC sales. The mobility boom had laptop sales in India near-doubling for three years running. That took the focus off PDAs and smartphones, but laptops more than made up for everything. With celebrity endorsements and a "The computer is personal again" campaign, it was a big year for PCs.

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