CEO Meg Whitman of HP has decided to restructure HP’s entire plan and is planning on cutting 8% of the current workforce. Even if 8% doesn’t seem too excessive, it amounts to over 27,000 jobs, and is planned to be completed by the end of 2014. Though the cuts will affect many employees in many different positions within the company, they are necessary because of HP’s lack of productivity and sales.
HP doesn’t plan on stopping at job cuts, however. There are many changes in the works, including a new marketing strategy, a more focused product portfolio, and improved business practices. In all, the changes are expected to save the company nearly $4 billion by the end of 2014, and HP expects to see a 5% rise in revenue – assuming that current revenue doesn’t drop significantly.
Whitman has decided, with these changes, that HP will continue its consumer side and will focus even more on potential customers. The new CEO has also decided that new changes must come to the company after a series of failures from previous CEOs – including the 27,000 jobs Whitman is cutting, there have been over 75,000 jobs cut only in the past 10 years. Knowing that job cutting alone won’t do it this time, Whitman has decided to reinvest the new profit in big data, security, application management and servers for cloud services.
HP, to some extent, already does a number of these things, but Whitman plans to “step up” the company’s efforts. Whitman is also planning on investing in things such as marketing and sales to provide a better experience for future clients.
Some believe that the cuts and losses these past few years in HP are due to the hundreds of recent acquisitions: HP lacks direction and a competitive nature and is now suffering the consequences. Whitman, when asked how she feels about cutting so many jobs, said: “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.”