Hewlett-Packard said Wednesday that it will cut 27,000 jobs, 8 percent of its global workforce, by late 2014 as part of efforts to streamline operations and focus on staying ahead of the curve on emerging trends.
The announcement confirmed rumors from last week and came on the same day that the computer maker — struggling as consumers turn to tablets and smartphones rather than upgrade old desktops — reported a drop in sales and profit for the quarter that ended April 30.
Officials in Colorado, where HP employs an estimated 2,000 to 3,000, are hopeful that the cuts will have a nominal impact on the company’s workforce in the state. HP has sizable campuses in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs.
“It looks like they are significantly streamlining enterprise services,” said David May, chief executive of the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce. “None of those services are provided from Fort Collins, so I anticipate the impact from (Wed-nesday’s) announcements on northern Colorado to be minimal.”
May estimated that HP employs between 1,000 and 2,000 in northern Colorado.
The company’s Fort Collins facility opened in 1978 and is the worldwide headquarters for workstations. The company also works on digital printing solutions, management software and storage products in Fort Collins, May said.
HP recently opened a 50,000-square-foot data center in Fort Collins.
In Colorado Springs, HP operates a data center and has other business-to-business functions.
Tammy Fields, an official with the Greater Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce, called HP one of the area’s “strongest technology companies” and a “very important employer in our community.”
An HP spokeswoman declined to comment about the company’s operations in Colorado and how the workforce reductions will affect the state.
Some of the cuts are to be accomplished through an early-retirement program, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said. Other expenses will be trimmed by refining its business operations, it said.
“These initiatives build upon our recent organizational realignment and will further streamline our operations, improve our processes and remove complexity from our business,” chief executive Meg Whitman said in a statement. “While some of these actions are difficult because they involve the loss of jobs, they are necessary to improve execution and to fund the long term health of the company. We are setting HP on a path to extend our global leadership and deliver the greatest value to customers and shareholders.”
The company said the cuts will generate annualized savings in the range of $3 billion to $3.5 billion, of which the majority will be reinvested in research and development for key business segments such as security software, enterprise servers, storage and networking.
