Hewlett Packard Enterprises announced Tuesday that CEO Meg Whitman will be stepping down in February. The company’s stock dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading following that news and HPE’s fourth quarter earnings report.
HPE President Antonio Neri will become CEO on February 1, 2018, and Whitman will remain on the board. “Now is the right time for Antonio and a new generation of leaders to take the reins of HPE,” Whitman said in a statement. “I have tremendous confidence that they will continue to build a great company that will thrive well into the future.”
A graduate of Harvard Business School, Whitman has been an executive for more than three decades at companies including Proctor & Gamble, Bain and Hasbro. She’s best known for taking eBay from $5.7 million in sales to $8 billion in sales between 1998 and 2008 while she was CEO. After eBay, Whitman served as CEO of HP between 2011 and 2015, where she oversaw the split into two companies: HP and HPE. She then become CEO of HPE.
READ MORE: Lessons And Ideas By The 100 Greatest Living Business Minds
The company’s stock has climbed more than 30% since it started trading in November 2015. On Tuesday, HPE reported $7.8 billion in net revenue for the fourth quarter, and $37.4 billion in net revenue for the 2017 fiscal year, beating analyst expectations. HPE’s adjusted earnings per share forecast of 20 to 24 cents for the first quarter of 2018, however, fell short of analyst estimates of 27 cents per share
Over the summer, Whitman was reportedly on the short list for the CEO role at Uber, after cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick was forced to resign by the company’s board. In July, Whitman posted a statement saying that “Uber’s CEO will not be Meg Whitman.” She also said that she was “fully committed to HPE and plan[ned] to remain the company’s CEO.”
Whitman is the richest self-made American woman in tech, according to Forbes. The bulk of her $3.2 billion fortune comes from her time at eBay. She ranked sixth on Forbes‘ 2017 list of the richest self-made women in the United States. She’s also one of the most powerful women in the world, ranking 12th on Forbes‘ 2017 Power Women List. – Written by ,