HP To Slash Up Tp 30,000 Jobs

News is breaking that HP is planning on slashing up to 30,000 jobs as it splits into two companies. Here’s the highlights:

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise will split from the current Hewlett-Packard entity and will primarily sell servers and software that corporations use to run their operations.
  • The staff reductions represents about 10% of H-P’s 300,000-person workforce
  • The costs for those reductions will trigger a $2.7 billion charge to earnings that will begin to appear with the company’s October-ending fourth-quarter financial statement
  • In addition to severance costs, the charge to earnings includes $700 million in cost reductions from things such as lease and property disposals
  • If all goes according to plan, there will not be a need for future job cuts.

The last part is going to be key. Since Meg Whitman became CEO, she’s cut about 85,000 jobs. The company cut about 55,000 under prior restructuring plans. Now HP has not had a great track record when it comes to acquiring companies, rightsizing, downsizing and the like. Example: HP’s disastrous 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, the British software firm for which it later said it overpaid by more than $5 billion. Whitman’s predecessor, Léo Apotheker, was fired by the HP board of directors after that deal. Or the EDS deal where a massive amount of jobs were slashed.

My guess is that we’ll be revisiting this soon enough, and it will not go well. Stay tuned.

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