HP return to smartphones is not planned for 2013.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.

HP return to smartphones is not planned for 2013.

Whitman sees a feeble economy and expects to weaken even more during the next year.

It could be 2015 before Hewlett-Packard Co.'s revenue growth begins to accelerate again, according to Whitman. By 2016, she envisions HP's revenue increasing as the same pace as the U.S. economy's overall growth, with earnings rising at a faster clip.

"It is going to take longer to right this ship than any of us would like," Whitman said.

In her shake-up of HP, Whitman has already reshuffled management and started to eliminate 29,000 jobs through employee buyouts, attrition and layoffs. She's trying to trim the company's annual expenses by more than $3 billion.

HP also is reducing the number of different printers that it makes. It is also rolling out a new line of personal computers and tablets running on Windows 8, an overhaul of Microsoft Corp.'s operating system that's designed to appeal to consumers and companies that want more mobile devices with touch-control display screens.

Whitman also is lacing big bets on "cloud computing" - a term that refers to the increasingly popular trend of storing software applications in remote data centers that are accessed over the Internet instead of installing programs on individual machines.

HP also is angling for a bigger piece of the "Big Data" market, a field devoted to helping companies and government agencies navigate through the torrent of information cascading through Internet-connected devices.

Finally, Whitman wants HP to design another smartphone, something it did two years ago after buying Palm Inc. only to scrap the device after a few months on the market. HP's return to the smartphone business isn't planned for next year, though, but will in some time in the future as she said before to fox business news. (video below)

"There are no silver bullets to solve our challenges," Whitman said Wednesday. "We will solve our challenges through consistency of leadership, focus, good blocking and tackling and, most importantly, great products and services delivered in the way that customers want to buy them."

Whitman delivered the disappointing forecast Wednesday at a meeting that the ailing Silicon Valley pioneer held for analysts and investors. The gathering gave Whitman the opportunity to persuade Wall Street that she has come up with a compelling strategy for turning around HP one year after being named CEO.

Investors evidently didn't like what they heard. HP's stock plunged 13 percent after Whitman's presentation, shoving the company's shares to their lowest level in nearly a decade.

AP.