Snippet: HP Plans 16,000 More Layoffs ☇

Rick Merritt for EE Times (via John Gruber):

Hewlett-Packard will lay off another 16,000 workers on top of 34,000 layoffs it already announced. The move could save up to an additional billion dollars a year by 2016 on top of the maximum $4 billion savings previously anticipated.

The layoffs will come across all HP’s product divisions and geographical locations. About 7,000 of the new layoffs will come before the end of HP’s 2014 fiscal year and the rest before the end of 2015.

On a quarterly earnings call, HP chief executive Meg Whitman took a hammering from Wall Street analysts, clearly surprised by the magnitude of the numbers. Whitman announced her turnaround plan in May 2012 estimating layoffs of 27,000. The numbers were later boosted to 29,000, then 34,000 and now are estimated at a total 50,000.

This is sad news for one of the original Silicon Valley companies. At my day job, we’re an HP operation (at least when it comes to PCs), and I’ve come to appreciate some of their business models. However, they sell almost thirty distinctly different models (not configurations) of laptops, and my non-scientific counts lead to about half being business-oriented and half being consumer-oriented. This overlap and model confusion certainly can’t be helping things, especially when you look at Apple selling five MacBooks (and one is probably going to get discontinued soon). Maybe HP ought to lay off 3/4 of their product line?