This article is more than 1 year old

HP throws an extra 2,000 staff onto chopping block

29,000 bods at risk of redundancy, morale problematic

HP has added an extra two thousand workers to its mass redundancy programme, it confirmed today.

Back in May the troubled US tech titan threatened to axe 27,000 jobs by the end of fiscal 2014 to cut overheads and use some of the savings to invest in R&D. However, in a 10Q form filed today with US financial watchdog SEC, HP revealed an upwards shift in the potential body count.

"The restructuring plan includes both a voluntary early retirement program for eligible US employees and non-voluntary workforce reductions and is expected to result in 29,000 employees exiting the company by the end of that period," Hewlett-Packard declared in its paperwork.

The firm has been hit hard by falling demand for printer hardware and consumables, and rocked by the shift in buying habits toward tablets and smartphones instead of traditional PCs.

In response, HP has already folded together its printer and PC businesses and cobbled together the enterprise servers, storage and networking unit with the global accounts and services teams. The firm is also centralising its marketing and communications functions.

"We are working to improve our execution and financial performance and to align our cost structure with our revenue and margin profile," HP stated.

"These efforts are designed to enable us to invest in our business to respond to industry shifts and capitalise on emerging opportunities in areas like cloud computing, security, and information management," it added.

There's nothing like a regulatory filing to get a better view of what's going on under a company's hood. HP said there are "significant risks" associated with its actions that could stall the redundancy plan or harm its business, including delays to implementation caused by the "highly regulated" regions of Europe and Asia.

It added "decreases in staff morale and the failure to meet operational targets due to the loss of employees" were also potential issues it deemed worth highlighting to investors. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like