CEO Meg Whitman has said the group has made most of the cutbacks it needs to, but there will be more “fine-tuning” over the next two years.
The OEM executive would not specify how many more positions will be removed, as this depends on how the economy changes between now an 1 November, during an interview with CNN. That is the date which HP confirmed earlier this month will be when the company splits into HP Enterprise and HP Inc.
Whitman spoke of the need to “take advantage” of rapidly developing markets such as cloud technology, Big Data and cybersecurity. In April 2015, The Recycler reported that HP’s VP for its Helion cloud project said that the enterprise had been stifled by competition from other developers.
She said the layoffs had been “tough on morale” but that the corporation’s employees realise that they are necessary to survive in the fast-moving technology market. Speaking more widely about the US economy, the CEO said she was “pretty concerned” as there has “not [been] a robust recovery” and she believes that “we’ve got to fix our education system or we are not going to have the pipeline of science, technology, engineering and math talent”.
She added that the PC market is looking weaker than she anticipated for this year, which she attributes to an industry shift to tablets and smartphones as well as ongoing volatility within the market, while the recently strengthened US dollar is making overseas sales more expensive.
HP has cut over 55,000 jobs under Whitman’s leadership, including an additional 5,000 that were announced in October 2014, the highest number of cutbacks announced by a US company since March 2014, according to outplacement group Challenger, Gray and Christmas.