Tech giant HP just revealed that it has plans to cut 7,000 to 9,000 positions through firings and voluntary early retirement as a part of a 2020 restructuring plan.
This figure works out to about 16% of its current workforce, which is estimated to be 55,000.
The plan was announced at HP’s 2019 Securities Analyst Meeting in Palo Alto, California.
Said Enrique Lores, incoming president and chief executive officer, HP Inc: “We are taking bold and decisive actions as we embark on our next chapter. We see significant opportunities to create shareholder value and we will accomplish this by advancing our leadership, disrupting industries and aggressively transforming the way we work.”
These job reductions are predicted to help the company save US$1 billion (S$1.38 billion) by the end of fiscal 2022.
“The bulk of the savings will be in corporate functions, back-office support, and feet-on-the-street salespeople,” said CFO Steve Fieler in an interview.
This isn’t the first time that the firm has talked about job cuts.
Last June, HP revealed that it planned to increase its job cuts to 4,500 to 5,000 employees by the end of fiscal 2019. This was 1,000 more than the firm had estimated two years before.
HP has been in Singapore since 1970, and was “one of the earliest multinational corporations to invest in Singapore”.
In 2015, the firm split its operations into two companies – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) which sells business IT solutions and services, and HP Inc that focuses on PCs and printers.
The Straits Times estimated then that there were “as many as 10,000 employees in Singapore”.
In 2017, HPE revealed that it would spend US$140 million over the next five years in Singapore, “including US$16 million to nurture promising local startups in collaboration with the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB)”.
Then, HPE even opened a new Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) headquarters building in Singapore.
Then president and CEO of HPE Meg Whitman shared that HP “as a whole – including HPE, HP Inc and the newly formed DXC Technology used to employ 6,000-7,000 workers in Singapore”.
She then added that HPE had around 1,600 employees and even expressed her confidence that “the number would go up”.
It is uncertain how many HP employees in Singapore will be affected by the recent restructuring plans.
