14 DAY TRIAL // Hewlett-Packard may be the largest maker of PCs in the world, but that is proving to be both good and bad, for its employees, or shall we say those who soon won't be its employees any longer.
We've been learning about how HP intends to reduce its workforce for months. Unfortunately, since HP is, indeed, one of the largest global corporations, job cut waves are significantly larger than those of other companies as well.
Last we heard, the total count of projected job cuts was 27,000 (8% of total workforce), to be completed over a period of two-three years.
Now, though, a new report (ZDNet) says that HP has added an extra 2,000 to those plans, so that the IT player may “simplify business processes, accelerate innovation and deliver better results for customers, employees and stockholders.”
3,800 of those jobs have already been cut. They were already cut back in July in fact, most of them from the enterprise service group.
This is something of a bemusement to us. After former CEO Leo Apotheker tried to get HP out of the consumer PC business, we half-expected the new leader, Meg Whitman, to start there, even if it did undo that particular disaster.
Then again, this multi-year restructuring process will affect all of HP's branches, and it's not like the enterprise arm was doing all that great itself. Given its contribution to the lack of profit in Q3, it makes sense to downsize it before the others, from a ruthless economic standpoint anyway.
HP expects to save over $3 billion / 23.4 billion Euro by laying off these 29,000 people, assuming it manages to do it by the end of fiscal year 2014.
Those who don't mind spending hours reading through long financial reports can check out the 10-Q quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It is there that the increase from 29 to 27 thousand job cuts came to light.