It was first publicly reported in April that the activist investor group Elliott Management had taken a $1.5 billion stake in Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and since then there has been nothing but complete silence on the issue from both companies.
The investment—known to be a long position as opposed to a short bet against the company—is an acute one for HPE and its CEO, Antonio Neri. Fourteen chief executives have been forced out of their jobs after Elliott took a stake in their companies and demanded talks with their boards, according to Reuters.
Is Neri’s neck on the chopping block?
Fortune asked both companies for comment, but neither wanted to talk on the record about what is going on between them. HPE (No. 143 on the Fortune 500) provided a brief statement that said “we value the constructive input of all of our shareholders” but declined to go into specifics.
However, sources who talked to Fortune pointed to several clues, hiding in plain sight, about what Elliott potentially wants from HPE.
Pricing screwup
The most obvious sign of trouble occurred when HPE published its Q1 earnings in March, which tanked its stock by nearly 16% on the day. Neri gave an interview on CNBC in which he admitted that the company had made a mistake in accounting for the cost of its inventory, which hurt the profitability of the company.
“Near the end of the quarter, we realized that the cost of our inventory was slightly higher than the cost that we had in the pricing. That’s on us. That should never happen,” Neri said.
That was an understatement. The screwup wiped more than $3 billion off HPE’s market cap.
Underperforming stock
It also drew attention to HPE’s share price.
On the day the news broke that Elliott wanted influence over the company, JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee and his team published a research note that said Elliott was probably “1) addressing the discount at which the shares of HPE trade on a standalone basis relative to peers; and 2) improving execution and efficiencies to better align with best-in-class peers, like Dell and Cisco.”
Chatterjee also published a brutal table comparing the performance numbers of HPE against Dell, Cisco and NetApp. It showed that HPE generated only $494,000 per employee in revenue while Dell generated $885,000:
HPE stock popped upward recently after the Department of Justice dropped an investigation into its proposed acquisition of Juniper Networks. But still, since 2018, HPE stock has risen 48% to just above $21 per share. The S&P 500, meanwhile, rose 135%. That’s a dismal performance for a tech company that ought to be benefiting mightily from the mania around AI.
Elliott prefers to avoid proxy battles
Neri has been CEO for seven years. Meanwhile, six of HPE’s 12 board members have been there for 10 years or more. The chairman of the board, Patricia F. Russo, has been there since 2015. The implication is that it might be time for new blood.
But ousting Neri may not be Elliott’s plan.
Another option would be for HPE to give Elliott a seat on the board and to agree on a strategy to turn the company around. In one of Elliott’s other adventures, its assault on the oil refinery company Phillips 66, the investment fund made a plea to shareholders that showed that it actually prefers to reach a mutal agreement with a company rather than escalate to all-out civil war via a shareholder proxy vote.
“Over the last 15 years, we have collaborated with more than 200 companies to reach mutually beneficial solutions that enhance shareholder value. During this period, we have only had to pursue a U.S. proxy contest to this stage of the process three other times, making Phillips 66 an extreme outlier,” Elliott said at the time.
While it is not clear what, exactly, is going on between HPE and Elliott, it is likely that the board is in talks with its new stakeholder.
HPE told Fortune it welcomed the move: “HPE and our Board maintain an ongoing dialogue with our shareholders on a range of issues. While we do not comment on specific communications that we may have with any our shareholders, we value the constructive input of all of our shareholders and all of our other stakeholders.”
