14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, Hewlett Packard has been hit just as hard as its Asian counterparts by the dramatic drop in PC sales over the last year and a half, planning wide-reaching layoffs that may affect the jobs of 58,000 people.
Since the major PC sales crisis that's been affecting major IT manufacturers like Lenovo, Qualcomm and even IBM, Hewlett-Packard felt the shock wave reaching its shores, being just a matter of time until it would start mass layoffs as well.
Struggling financially for some time, and announcing possible cost cuts in 2012 by reducing headcounts, the final numbers of people being affected are amassing to staggering numbers over the years. The highest point of headcount number was reached in 2011 when the company was a worldwide empire amassing 349,000 people. Since then, it started to lay off employees in batches of a few thousand, being affected in the same time by plummeting PC sales worldwide.
The general switch towards mobile solutions affects IT giants worldwide
According to Bit-Tech until August this year, around 55,000 people left the company since 2012 and more will follow soon under the continuous restructuring program that sees the company shrinking and reorienting to new industries in order to fill the huge gap left by low PC sales.
Although such numbers will not affect the core HP teams which still count in over three hundred thousand people, continuous layoffs and 11 per cent year-on-year decline in revenue for each quarter puts the company in a bad light when it comes to its long-term sustainability. HP is no small corporation by any means, and its business-to-business practices and corporate clients will always be the company's backbone. Unfortunately, very few things will save you, even if you're a mastodon like HP when the Chinese markets shake as hard as they do these days.
It's believed that a possible split between its enterprise focus and consumer department is inevitable, something that will bring even more job losses. Almost like its headcount, HP's current market value is at half of what it was in 2011.