HP has been dealing with a lot of issues over the past couple of months and now a new rumor suggests that the tech company could be looking for a new leader. Bloomberg reports via unnamed sources that HP's board of directors could be meeting soon, with the idea to discuss the future of its current CEO Leo Apotheker. If the board does decide to fire Apotheker, one source claims that former eBay CEO Meg Whitman could picked by the board to become HP's next leader.
Apotheker has been at the helm of HP since November 2010, but under his brief watch the company has seen its stock price plunge down 47 percent. In mid-August HP announced it would shut down its webOS hardware division after the sales failure of its HP TouchPad tablet. It also announced that it was thinking about spinning off its PC division, which remains the biggest PC business in the world. Under Apotheker, HP has also cut its revenue forecasts three times since he has been in charge.
Whitman came on board as one of HP's board members in January 2011. While she ran eBay for a decade, she did have some missteps in the final years. Her biggest was letting eBay pay $2.6 billion for the Internet phone business Skype back in 2005. However, in 2007 eBay admitted it overpaid for Skype. In 2009 it sold 70 percent of Skype to a number of investment partners for $2 billion. Microsoft has now come in and proposed to pay $8.5 billion for Skype but that deal, announced in May 2011, has yet to officially close.
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