1. Discuss possible financial and other reasons for HP seriously considering spinning-off its PC division (PSG) into a separate company when it was the world’s largest PC manufacturing company in terms of sales.
2. Discuss likely financial and other reasons for HP later deciding to retain PSG within the company.
3. Discuss possible financial and other reasons for HP deciding to stop production of Touchpad after only 7 weeks from its launch.
4. Discuss likely financial and other reasons for HP deciding to drop the price of its 16GB TouchPad from $399 to $99, and the price of its 32GB TouchPad when bundled with a HP or Compaq PC from $599 to $149. In both cases, the indicated sales price is lower than the estimated direct materials costs for the products presented in Table 1 (Appendix).
5. Discuss possible financial and other reasons for HP temporarily restarting production of the 16GB TouchPad 11 days after ceasing production.
6. Discuss likely financial and other reasons for HP deciding to continue developing webOS and to providing it free-of-charge to anyone wishing to use it.
7. Discuss the strategic decision announced by HP in October 2014 to once again separate its businesses into two separate companies, one of which will focus on personal systems and printing (HP 2014).
