Fiorina aims to foil attacks on her record as CEO

Mrs. Fiorina defends her tenure, armed with statistics that sounded like a PowerPoint presentation. The support of Mr. Perkins, a former HP board member and founder of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, could prove critical in making her argument stick.

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“We doubled the size of the company,” Mrs. Fiorina said in last week’s debate. “We quadrupled its top-line growth rate. We quadrupled its cash flow. We tripled its rate of innovation.”

But much of that growth resulted from the Compaq acquisition. Profits as a percentage of revenue in the six years Mrs. Fiorina served as chief executive declined about 40 percent. The stock price fell sharply. Mrs. Fiorina blames the burst of the dot-com bubble for the drop, but HP shares fell by more than the stocks of competitors like Dell, IBM, Intel and Microsoft.

Mrs. Fiorina’s political rivals have also highlighted that she ushered in a period of corporate scandal, including public clashes with members of the Hewlett family. Fired in 2005, she left with more than $42 million in severance, stock options and pension.

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