Hewlett Packard to cut up to 30,000 jobs from enterprise unit

[EF-Roger]

Hewlett Packard said Tuesday afternoon that 25,000 to 30,000 people will leave the enterprise division as part of a planned spinoff.

The cuts, meant to cut $2.7 billion in annual costs, represent about 10% of the company's total workforce of 302,000 employees.

Read more Hewlett Packard to cut up to 30,000 jobs from enterprise unit

 

[harpazo22]

That's a bummer for all the people who will lose jobs. I wonder why they're cutting back a whole lot. I'm especially interested because I own products from that company.

 

[pwarbi]

I'd also be interested to know the reasoning behind the job cuts aswell. As far as I'm aware they aren't in any financial difficulties but to cut that amount of jobs in one swoop does make me wonder.

If it's just a money saving exercise then I think the workers will have every right to be annoyed. While the savings will amount to a lot for the company, it's not going to do any good for the moral of the staff that they have got left, that's for sure.

 

[EF-Roger]

Maybe we will find out more about this today. If so I will post about it in this thread.

 

[pwarbi]

I had a quick look before while I was online and I couldn't see any particular reason they gave other than what's already been put up but there's still time yet.

The trouble with companies the size of Hewlett-Packard, they can pretty much do whatever they want, and if the decision was just a cost cutting exercise, then they are media wise enough to be able to twist it so it doesn't sound as bad as it originally looks.

 

[Kathryn M.]

I know why. Two words: Meg Whitman.

She used to be either the CEO or a high ranking decision making executive at eBay. Ebay was a thriving gold mine from it's inception around 1995 selling beanie babies to about 2004. Around 2004 she suddenly brought on a new team of executives in an attempt to change eBay's business model to compete with Amazon, who was rising in the marketplace, and the company has been in shambles ever since.

She and her new team "laid off" an enormous amount of eBay sellers by raising fees so only sellers with large amounts of inventory, like Amazon, could sell on the site. They didn't realize eBay was a unique idea that was in a category of it's own. It didn't have any competitors. Amazon was not a threat because it was a completely different type of business. Ebay was an online garage sale with auctions, good deals, and fun, unique items, while Amazon was selling books in a regular retail format.

I knew when she took over HP it was only a matter of time before the company went down like eBay. I stopped buying their products because I knew the company no longer had a future, and I started buying Apple instead. She's exuding the same behavior at HP as at eBay. Except she probably wasn't able to raise prices on HP products, like she did with eBay fees, because Apple is in the way. If she raised prices, everyone would just go to Apple because there is not enough value in a PC anymore to pay high prices. Die hard PC fans would still buy, but there are not enough PC lovers to keep HP afloat if they raised prices, so she has to leave prices where they are. She was able to get Dr. Dre to lend her his Beats brand for some of their laptops, but he, like myself, has since moved on to Apple. The next best thing is to lay off an enormous amount of people to gather profits.

As others have already stated, there is nothing wrong with HP, so why the layoffs? There was nothing wrong with eBay either, but sellers were laid off over there as well. This is just her style of management.