Dell sheds ten percent of staff for the second year in a row

Confirmed: 12,000 people let go over 12 months

Rumours of swingeing layoffs at Dell were not exaggerated, a statement The Register offers after reading the hardware giant’s most recent annual report which reveals its workforce shrank by 12,000 in the year to January 31st, 2025.

According to Dell’s Form 10-K, the formal regulatory filing that serves as an annual report rather than the glossy version produced for shareholders, it employed around 108,000 at the end of January. Last year’s Form 10-K revealed 13,000 layoffs and headcount of 120,000.

Dell therefore let go ten percent of its staff last year and the year before.

This year’s layoffs could therefore have been worse, as they were smaller than last year’s cuts and lower than an estimated target of 12,500 cuts we encountered when a Dell insider let us know about a round of layoffs in August 2024.

Some staff at all businesses decide to leave of their own volition, and tech businesses often trim the teams that work on older products. It’s therefore not sound to assume the only reason for Dell’s headcount reduction was layoffs.

It would also be foolish to assume many were not the result of layoffs, as Dell in September 2024 admitted its increasing use of AI had helped it to trim jobs.

We should also mention that Dell last year told staff they must return to the office or face a heightened possibility of being targeted by layoffs.

For what it’s worth, here’s Dell’s headcount for the last six years.

Year	Headcount
2020	134,000
2021	124,000
2022	133,000
2023	133,000
2024	120,000
2025	108,000

Those numbers exclude staff employed VMware, but appear to include Secureworks staff because Dell’s deal to sell that operation to Sophos closed after the period discussed in the Form 10-K. Dell's headcount is therefore probably already lower than reported in the Form 10-K.

Sophos made around 300 layoffs days after taking control of Secureworks. ®