Hewlett Packard’s new chief executive officer, Mark Hurd, is likely to axe between 5% and 10% of the workforce to achieve his aim of slashing the company’s cost base.
The prediction has been made by leading IT industry analyst Toni Sacconaghi, of Sanford C Bernstein & Co. If HP does cut jobs on this scale, between 7,500 and 15,000 HP employees could be shown the door.
Despite posting steady sales and profits in the last quarter, Hurd is seen as a cost-cutter, and the company had already embarked on a big redundancy programme before he arrived as the replacement for ousted CEO Carly Fiorina.
After delivering his first quarterly results, Hurd said he would continue the cuts, and indicated that HP’s storage business could see a rapid reduction in headcount, along with the cuts already planned for the very profitable printing and imaging division, where Hurd is seeking even higher profits.
The HP services business has already felt the jobs axe, and cuts are likely to continue there, along with other areas of the business.
Sacconaghi previously forecast 10,000 lost jobs at IBM after the company posted a bad quarter, with IBM eventually announcing 13,000 redundancies. He also correctly predicted that Sun Microsystems would continue to wield the jobs axe.
