HP Analyst Says Stock Should Be Worth Negative $2

HP obviously has seen better days, and the company's CEO even said herself that 2013 would be a tough year for the company. So it may not come as a surprise that analysts are kind of going nuts over the company — in a negative way, that is. Specifically, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said that HP's stock should be worth negative $2.

Wu called the company's balance sheet "a mess" and said it is "fortunate the stock's not zero." He also says that HP has a ton of other issues, which there might not be easy fixes for. Wu cited that their PC business was under attack from mobile devices, Windows 8 sales might not be all that great, and their printer business was dying due to users converting to digital documents and files.

Wu explains the negative $2 figure that he came up with by stating, "The book value, when you look at it, says $16. But you have to take out the $36 billion in goodwill. They are going to write that off, the whole thing at some point. So basically, the company's intrinsic value is negative."

Not a good sign for HP by any means. The analyst could be exaggerating a little bit, but perhaps the situation is actually as bad as he's describing. Either way, HP is in for a long year in 2013. Hopefully their focus and growing efforts with their open webOS platform will allow the company to gain some much-needed traction.

[via Business Insider]