Ray Lane Cedes Hewlett-Packard Chairmanship, Will Stay On Board

Hewlett-Packard announced a new look for its board of directors after the closing bell Thursday. Chairman Ray Lane will give up that role, but remain on the board, while fellow directors Ken Thompson and John Hammergren will depart. Ralph Whitworth will assume Lane’s chairmanship on an interim basis until a permanent replacement is found.

The move comes after Lane received something of a shareholder rebuke at HP’s March 20 shareholder meeting, where he received only 59% of the vote for re-election to the board. Prior to the meeting several of the firm’s directors had been the target of shareholder ire, largely stemming from a series of missteps that led to multiple CEO changes over the past several years and November’s $8.8 billion write-down on the 2011 acquisition of Autonomy.

“Ray, John and Ken have invested a part of themselves in HP,” CEO Meg Whitman said in the release announcing the changes, a commitment “reflected in the early success we’ve had turning the company around.”

For his part, Lane said he decided to give up the chair “to reduce any distraction form HP’s ongoing turnaround.”

In a statement of his own, Whitworth stressed that with his firm, Relational Investors, owning roughly $800 million of the company’s stock his interests are “completely aligned” with shareholders. Whitworth also promised a fully-stocked board is his priority. “We will recruit a world-class chairman to take my place as soon a possible, and we also hope to recruit at least two other outstanding directors before the end of this year.”

Relational owns 1.8% of Hewlett-Packard’s shares. The stock, which paced the Dow Jones industrial average with a 1.8% gain Thursday, slipped 0.5% to $22.20 after hours.

Source: Forbes

Posted in: Technology