Hewlett-Packard Co. said Tuesday that it plans to cut another 25,000 to 30,000 jobs as it whittles down its services group and restructures the company into separate entities.
The layoffs are part of a plan to cut $2.7 billion in annual costs, the company said. They amount to approximately 10 percent of the company’s workforce of 300,000 and primarily will affect the company’s enterprise services group, which has struggled to expand profit margins in the face of a changing services business.
“These restructuring activities will enable a more competitive, sustainable cost structure for the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise,” Chief Executive Meg Whitman said in a news release. “We’ve done a significant amount of work over the past few years to take costs out and simplify processes, and these final actions will eliminate the need for any future corporate restructuring.”
The cuts will be part of a $2.7 billion charge that will start to show up in the earnings for the company’s fourth quarter, which ends in October. In addition to the layoffs, this charge includes $700 million in cost reductions from things such as site reductions and other cuts as the company splits in two.
The layoffs are in addition to a 55,000 head count reduction that the company previously announced.
Observers had been expecting tens of thousands of layoffs since May, when HP had warned that it expected to incur $2 billion in restructuring charges, but today was the first time that the company spelled out the exact number of layoffs it expects. HP didn’t say when these layoffs will occur.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is expected to split from the current Hewlett-Packard on Nov. 1, primarily will sell servers and software that corporations use to run their operations. That business is threatened by big companies renting computing power from Inc., Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp., among others.
In July, the Coloradoan newspaper reported that about 1,500 Fort Collins workers expected to be spun off to the HP Enterprise division with about 500 others remaining with Hewlett-Packard, the personal computer and printer company.
