HP Inc to blast more humans from employment cannon

Who needs balls when warm bodies can work out just as well

HP Inc - not wanting to be entirely out done by the other half of the business that it split from - is to toss up to another 4,000 workers onto the employment bonfire, and the ailing PC and printer market is to blame.

Confirmation of the “approved restructuring plan” was outlined last night in an SEC filing, it will be implemented between financial years 2017 to 2019 with savings of $200m to $300m expected to be realised in FY ’20.

CEO Dion Weisler admitted in a canned statement that the markets it currently serves have continued to “remain very challenged” but it was seeking out growth in pockets of the industry.

“We are committed to innovating in the core and continue to see long-term growth opportunities in commercial mobility and services, the disruption of the A3 copier market, and the digitisation of manufacturing through our leading 3D printing solutions,” he said.

Thr job cuts will vary by "country to country" the organisation said, "based on local legal requirements and consultations with employee works councils and other employee representatives".

HP Inc last month agreed to spend $1bn on Samsung’s print division - it has bossed the general printing space for years but this sector is in decline, whereas it has low-single digit share in the growing A3 copier space.

In terms of PCs, the company in concentrating on the 2-in-1 segment with higher margin machines designed to compete at the premium end with the likes of Apple, and claimed to have created a new category with its X3.

The overall traditional PC market is in decline; it last grew in 2014 but shrank in 2015 and is forecasted to do the same in 2016.

This week Gartner stats showed the global market contracted 5.7 per cent to nearly 69 million units and IDC pegged the decline at 3.9 per cent, albeit better than the latter analyst expected.

HP Inc, which undocked from HP in November last year, chopped the workforce by 3,000 heads this year, though this is way below the number of redundancies at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which also formed another separate legal entity last autumn.

According to HP Inc’s own stats, around 50,000 staff worldwide are on its payroll.

The company is not alone is rationalising, er, human capital - Lenovo is in the process of axing people, so is Dell, Cisco and IBM to name a few. ®