By Sam Becker
It’s been a bleak fall season for the tech sector. Over the past couple of months, tech companies including Twitter, Meta, and Amazon (among others) have announced thousands of layoffs—and as of Tuesday, there was another to add to the list: HP.
As a part of its latest earnings announcement, HP shared plans to cut between 4,000 and 6,000 workers over the next few years—roughly 10% of its workforce. The job cuts are part of the company’s “Future Ready Transformation” plan, which is being implemented in response to slowing demand from consumers. All told, the company said the layoffs should help save $1.4 billion annually.
“The new Future Ready strategy we introduced this quarter will enable us to better serve our customers and drive long-term value creation by reducing our costs and reinvesting in key growth initiatives to position our business for the future,” said HP president and CEO Enrique Lores in a statement accompanying HP’s Q4 and fiscal 2022 earnings report.
HP had already been culling its ranks, having previously announced, in 2019, the elimination of between 7,000 and 9,000 jobs by the end of fiscal 2022 (which was October 31 of this year). But, as noted, HP is hardly alone in cutting jobs this year. Around 850 different tech companies have shed more than 137,000 jobs since the beginning of 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi.
While HP has been cutting jobs for at least a few years, the new batch that is scheduled for elimination is largely due to a shaky economic environment, and one in which demand for personal computers, specifically, is falling fast. Last month, data from research firm Gartner showed that worldwide personal computer shipments were down 19.5% during the third quarter of 2022—the biggest drop in two decades.
Gartner’s data also showed a big decline in HP’s overall global shipments, and specifically for laptops. Year-over-year, Gartner estimated a 28% drop in unit shipments for HP, the biggest among the top computer-maker brands, including Lenovo, Dell, and Apple.
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