Palo-Alto-based Hewlett-Packard's shares fell 4.8% in Frankfurt trading, to the equivalent of $37.94 at 9:25 a.m., the news service said, noting that its stock had lost as much as 5.1% in extended Monday trading. Shares fell 61 cents to $39.80 in regular NYSE trading earlier.

News of the memo report to this morning. [Read the press release .] It had been scheduled for May 18 in the afternoon. Bloomberg's analyst survey predicted that H-P would report a profit of $1.21 a share -- excluding certain costs -- on sales of $31.5 billion in the period, which ended in April.

[Read on the announcements today.]

The morning earnings report, in slashing H-P's full-year sales forecast by $1 billion, noted that second-quarter services-business earnings fell to $1.36 billion from $1.4 billion, while its sales increased 1.5%, to $8.98 billion. The services business was an area that CFO Lesjak specifically addressed.

"They need to fix the services business," Abhey Lamba, an analyst at International Strategy & Investment Group in New York, told Bloomberg after the earnings report. "The issue in services, where Apple is not really hurting them, that's kind of isolated to HP."