Senior Management at HP Australia have said that there “will most probabaly” be job cuts at HP Australia after the global IT Company said it will slash its workforce by 27,000 – or 8 percent – as part of a massive restructuring plan.The senior executive who works in the PC Group said that the merger of the PC and Printing groups will happen shortly in Australia and that retrenchments will be “inevertable”.
South Pacific media and analyst relations manager Stephanie Aye said “We have not yet announced specific plans with regards to specific locations. We do expect the workforce reduction to impact just about every business and region,”.
The Company who are struggling in the PC and printer markets recently launched a new PC range which some observers claimed was similar in design to the Apple Macbook range.
The job cuts won’t all be immediate but will take place over the next two years. H-P claims the move, once complete, will save $3-3.5 billion annually, with most of the savings going to fund new efforts such as cloud computing and “big data” analytics.
“Workforce reductions are never easy,” CEO Meg Whitman told analysts. “They adversely affect people’s lives, but in this case they’re absolutely critical for the long-term health of the company.”
Hewlett-Packard’s forecast for third-quarter profit, also revealed yesterday, was less than analysts’ expectations, as the company grapples with slower demand for printers, services and data-centre equipment.
H-P’s income for the quarter fell to US$1.6 billion from $2.3 billion a year ago. Revenue shrank to $30.7 billion from $31.6 billion.
H-P expects to spend about $1.7 billion on the restructuring this fiscal year.
Printer revenues shrink
In the latest quarter, H-P’s personal computer group, the world’s largest, was the only major business that grew – but revenue was effectively flat at $9.5 billion.
H-P’s printer revenue declined 10 percent from a year ago to $6.1 billion, and revenue in its services group declined 1 percent to $8.8 billion. A group that makes products such as servers and storage systems saw revenue fall 6 percent to $5.2 billion.
Revenue in H-P’s software group increased 22 percent to $970 million, largely because of the $10.3 billion acquisition of Autonomy last year.
Whitman, said she was “cautiously optimistic” H-P had turned the corner. Still, observers noted the results were H-P’s third consecutive quarter of revenue and profit declines.
