Reversing the corporate strategy CEO Meg Whitman set three years ago, Hewlett-Packard is set to announce as early as Monday that it will split off its PC and printer business into a separate, publicly traded company, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A split-up would be an about-face on the path Whitman set when she took the reins from former HP chief Leo Apotheker in 2011. At the time, she decided to reverse Apotheker’s decision to spin off the PC business, saying PCs were key to long-term relationships with customers.

But the idea of splitting HP into a strong, nimble PC hardware business and a more focused enterprise company has lingered. There is precedent in the tech industry for the move. An HP without a PC and printer business would look something like arch-rival IBM, which has focused on enterprise technology and services after selling off first its PC operations, and then its server business, to Lenovo.

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