In its first quarterly report since Hewlett-Packard split into two separate companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise beat analysts” estimates for earnings and sales Thursday.

Shares that had closed down more than 2 percent popped more than 6 percent in after-hours trading on the solid report.

The Palo Alto business systems giant reported sales of $12.72 billion and fully reported earnings of 15 cents per share, or 41 cents per share excluding certain one-time expenses.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected sales of $12.68 billion and a fully reported 14 cents a share, or 40 cents a share excluding some costs.

“We are off to a very strong start,” said HPE CEO Meg Whitman. “We”re seeing the benefits of being a smaller, more focused company.”

The company also released figures for the same quarter a year ago, based on estimates of its earnings had it been a separate company at that time.

Fully reported earnings per share were down 30 cents from a year ago, and profit of $267 million was down from an estimated $547 million from the same quarter a year ago. Sales were down 3 percent from the same quarter last year, but up 4 percent in a “constant currency” basis, taking into account headwinds caused by a strengthening dollar and weakness overseas.

“Better than expected,” said Mehdi Hosseini, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group. “But a big chunk of HPE”s business is still legacy products which are more sensitive to the global economy. We would need a relatively stronger global economy for HPE to hit their revised target for 2016″ of $1.85 to $1.95 per share, excluding certain expenses, or a fully reported 75 to 85 cents a share.

Hosseni said he thinks HPE will have to divest legacy product lines like storage to meet Wall Street expectations. “It”s an overhang that may limit the growth that investors may require,” he said.

HP broke in two in November, with CEO Whitman moving to HPE as its new leader but remaining as executive chairman of the printer and PC company, which became HP Inc. . The breakup was intended to restructure the old HP into a consumer business of PCs and printers with the leaner, more agile HPE selling networking and systems solutions to industry.

“With a lot of businesses moving to the cloud, the classic enterprise businesses are retooling to grasp the cloud,” said industry analyst Patrick Moorhead, of Moor Insights and Strategy. “HPE has done a pretty good job. The question has become how quickly can you replace that revenue you lost in enterprise space and refill it with profitable cloud revenue?”

Another check on revenue growth is the strong dollar and weakness in China”s and Brazil”s economies. That has made U.S.-made products more expensive at a time when major overseas customers are cutting back on spending.

Shares are trading lower than they were when the company became independent Oct. 19, but most public debuts from that period have suffered from the overall market decline. Wednesday HPE closed at $13.60 per share, but was trading around $14.60 per share after hours.

HPE is grouped into an enterprise hardware business of servers and storage and networking; software services and financial services. Sales for the enterprise group of $7.1 billion were up 1 percent over the year; services revenue of $4.7 billion was down 6 percent, and software revenue of $740 million was down 10 percent. Financial services sales of $776 million were down 3 percent over the year.

Contact Pete Carey at 408-920-5419. Follow him at Twitter.com/petecarey.