Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Lay Off 10% of its Staff

Master of share-buybacks and revenue-shrinkage does what it does best.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which blew nearly $2 billion on debt-funded share buybacks over the three quarters of its fiscal year 2017, even as revenues fell 7%, will do the only other thing that, in addition to share buybacks and revenue-shrinkage, it has been doing really well for years since it was still the full-blown Hewlett-Packard: Mass layoffs.
The company will ax about 10% of its employees. That would amount to at least 5,000 workers of its workforce of about 52,000. The cuts will hit employees, including managers, in the US and abroad, ‘people familiar with the matter’ told Bloomberg.
CEO Meg Whitman has been redoing the company since she took the job in 2011, after she lost out in her efforts to become governor of California. At the time, Hewlett-Packard, as it was still called, had 350,000 employees. After serial layoffs came some big divestitures: PCs, printers, business services, and some software units had to go. This includes the largest breakup in US corporate history, spinning off the PC and printer division to create two companies, her HPE and the PC business, HP Inc.

This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ Sep 22, 2017.