My track record at Hewlett-Packard is very clear. Together with the people of that great company, we took a business during the worst technology recession in 25 years. …We took a company and doubled it in size to almost $90 billion. We took the growth rate from two percent to nine percent. We tripled the rate of innovation to 11 patents a day. …And yes, indeed, we grew jobs, because we transformed a company that was falling behind and failing to one that was growing and succeeding.”
— GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, interview on Fox News, May 5, 2015
(This column has been updated to make it clear that questions about the statement were answered by Fiorina’s Super PAC.)
Fiorina is running for president in part on her record in the business world, as a former executive at AT&T, Lucent and Hewlett-Packard. On the surface, that might seem like a hard sell, given that she was fired as chief executive of HP less than six years after she took the helm in mid-1999. “Carly Fiorina’s time at the top of HP was a disaster” is the subhed for a Bloomberg articlethat recently appeared in The Chicago Tribune.
Still, Fiorina has her talking points, which are also echoed on her Web site: “Under Carly’s leadership, great things happened at HP: Doubled revenues; more than quadrupled its growth rate; tripled the rate of innovation, with 11 patents a day.”
So let’s check each of these claims as she framed them. The campaign directed questions to Fiorina’s Super PAC, Carly for America.