Whitman said to be planning massive HP job cuts

New(ish) HP CEO Meg Whitman has been at the helm for long enough to come up with a longer-term plan for the company, and according to various rumors, her plan will look eerily familiar to HPers who remember the early years of ex-CEO Mark Hurd: job cuts, predominantly in services.

According to a report on CNBC television, HP is looking to cut anywhere from 8 to 10 per cent of its 324,600-strong workforce, and will make the announcement next Wednesday, when it puts out its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2012.

The total cuts would be somewhere in the range of 26,000 to 35,000 employees, if the CNBC report is correct.

The idea, their sources say, is to cut costs not only to move to higher profits, but also to free up cash to reinvest in the company.

Bloomberg has also caught wind of the impending job cuts, and says that Whitman and her management team are looking to shed around 25,000 workers, with somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 being culled from its Enterprise Services group, which provides outsourcing and other consulting services to IT departments all over the world.

Both reports say that HP will be doing a combination of early retirement offers for several thousand employees and layoffs for the rest to reach its workforce-reduction targets.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Co is helping HP come up with the plan, according to the Bloomberg report.

An HP spokesperson told El Reg that the company does not comment on such rumors. ®