HP’s Nick Lazaridis
The region’s new head said there are actually on-going plans to increase staff numbers.
The Australian Business Review reported the comments of Senior Vice President Nick Lazaridis, who will lead HP’s Asia-Pacific region after the company splits in November 2015. He said: “I’m actually adding people. My regional headcount from a year ago until now has increased and my plan for the next year is to continue increasing. We are going to move some people from some teams.”
He added that staff working in PCs and printing will likely increase in Asia and in Australia and that “the only place we cutback was two years ago in China given the business environment”. HP has said it will save $1 billion (€0.8 billion) from its restructure and $2 billion (€1.7 billion) through cost cutting, and Lazaridis confirmed the company would spend as much to carry out the separation, adding that “the cost in separation is a one time, the other part are ongoing savings”.
The Senior VP said the OEM has between 39 and 43 percent share of the Australian consumer and commercial print market and is number two in consumer PCs and number one in commercial, while receiving stiff competition from his former employers Dell, Acer and Lenovo.
HP’s CEO Meg Whitman recently said that there would be more cutbacks in the future as part of a process of “fine tuning”.
She added that while the layoffs had been “tough on morale”, the corporation’s employees realise that they are necessary to survive in the fast-moving technology market. Speaking more widely about the US economy, Whitman 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”.
HP has cut over 55,000 jobs under Whitman’s leadership, including an additional 5,000 that were announced in October 2014.