SAN FRANCISCO — Meg Whitman tried to stay positive Monday, even as she was managing sharply lower expectations about Hewlett-Packard’s near-term prospects.

“This company has been through a lot,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview, after delivering news to investors of a fiscal fourth quarter with a 91 percent drop in net income. “We’ve got some rebuilding to do,” she said. “What this company has been through would have felled lesser companies.”

In contrast to the ambition of her two recent predecessors, Ms. Whitman indicated that H.P. would focus on internal development of its businesses, which include personal computers, servers, printers, software and providing data management services to corporations. There will most likely be no large-scale acquisitions, she said. H.P. will instead work over the coming year to rebuild a company damaged by big purchases and excessive budget-cutting in areas like research and development.

Rebuilding may indeed be what H.P., the world’s largest technology company by revenue, needs after the tumult of the last 16 months. Ms. Whitman took over as chief executive of H.P. in mid-September from Léo Apotheker, who in less than a year roiled the company’s stock by acquiring the British software firm Autonomy for $11.7 billion, dropping its tablet computer business and publicly musing about whether H.P. might get out of the personal computer business. Mr. Apotheker had succeeded Mark V. Hurd, who wielded a sharp pencil on costs, but resigned from the company when the directors questioned his accounting of expenses involving a female contractor.

Ms. Whitman, who joined H.P.’s board only last January, kept expectations low. She said that over the coming year, “we will grow at G.D.P.-type growth rates, maybe faster,” and indicated that economic growth, particularly in Europe, would probably be sluggish. Profitability, she said, would rise through superior management of H.P.’s internal assets.

H.P. reported that net income in the fourth fiscal quarter fell to $200 million, or 12 cents a share, from $2.5 billion, or $1.10 a share, in the year-ago quarter. The quarter includes $2.1 billion in after-tax costs for closing its Web OS mobile software business. The company said revenue fell 3 percent to $32.1 billion, from $33.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago. While the bottom line was better than many on Wall Street had expected, it was not clear that the shareholders appreciated Ms. Whitman’s longer-term focus. H.P. closed at $26.86 a share, down 4 percent, in a tough day for the market. On the first news of the earnings, the stock rose 4 percent because the results were better than expected by Wall Street analysts. Once Ms. Whitman delivered her vision for H.P. in a conference call with analysts after the earnings release, however, the shares began dropping 2 percent below the market’s closing price.

Some analysts thought Ms. Whitman was smart to intentionally tamp down expectations, so that she might surprise investors with better than expected results in the coming year. “H.P. did the right thing by lowering the bar and lowering expectations,” said A.M. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein. “If anything, it was a little too forceful. They were calling for earnings to go down 15 percent, year on year.”

Several of H.P.’s mainstay lines were hit hard in the last quarter. The printing division, often a big money maker because of the high profit margins on replacement ink, recorded revenue 14 percent lower than in the fourth quarter of 2010. Ms. Whitman called those results “painful,” but said they were tied to poor management and a weak economy, and not a shift away from printing or H.P.’s products.

Revenue from the server business and notebook computers also dropped. The services business, which has been trying to move from things like call centers to higher-margin software design, barely grew.

Earlier Monday, the research firm Canalys projected that Apple would overtake H.P. to become the leading global PC vendor in 2012, thanks to strong sales of its iPad tablet. While not everyone counts tablets as PCs, the mobile devices are clearly a replacement for a PC for many people. Ms. Whitman said in the interview that H.P. would re-enter the tablet market around mid-2012 with a product using Microsoft’s operating system.

Ms. Whitman said she saw strength in the company and pointed to innovations like low-power servers that use the kind of chips found in mobile phones, and software to analyze very large sets of data for pattern analysis and prediction coming out of the Autonomy acquisition. These products would not have meaningful impact on H.P.’s fortunes for at least a year, however, she said.

Instead, the company would try to function less as a collection of separate businesses, and more as a single corporate entity. “I feel quite good about the portfolio of assets. We can do more,” she said.

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