HP Announces Plans to Lay off 27,000 in Next Two Years
HP today announced that it would lay off thousands of workers. The company today confirmed last week's rumors that it planned to cut between 8 and 10 percent of its workforce as part of a massive restructuring plan.
Late last week we heard whisperings that HP had a huge restructuring plan in the works, one that would see the company cut more than 20,000 people in order to reinvest. HP today announced its plans for a multi-year restructuring initiative that will see it axe 27,000 jobs.
HP will eat a $1.7 billion pre-tax charge in fiscal 2012 as a result of the restructuring, along with another $1.8 billion through 2014. However, the company says the new plan will generate annualized savings in the range of $3 to $3.5 billion (after 2014) and hopes the new plan will simplify business processes, boost innovation and deliver better results for employees, customers and shareholders. Approximately 27,000 employees will leave the company between now and the end of 2014. The restructuring plan will involve cash-saving reductions in other areas, including supply chain optimization and SKU and platform rationalization.
"These initiatives build upon our recent organizational realignment, and will further streamline our operations, improve our processes, and remove complexity from our business," Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, said in a prepared statement. "While some of these actions are difficult because they involve the loss of jobs, they are necessary to improve execution and to fund the long term health of the company. We are setting HP on a path to extend our global leadership and deliver the greatest value to customers and shareholders."
So, with all those savings, HP's got some money to spend. What's it going to do with all that cash? Reinvest, mostly. The company plans to spread the money across all of its departments, providing extra dough for R&D for its Services, Software, and Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking divisions.
Today's restructuring initiative is part of newly-appointed CEO Meg Whitman's overall plan to return the Silicon Valley company back into positive growth. PC sales are reportedly dropping due to consumer favoritism towards tablets. The company has also been slow to shift away from ITservices and focus on the current trend of cloud computing.

The writing is on the wall.
This does make sense to make the company more efficient. In the long run it might actually create more "ground floor" jobs.
I believe there are no plans to remove customer facing jobs, R&D etc. And no plan to move jobs to china as indicated above.
From: George McCasland
Date: Wed, May 23, 2012 at 6:33 PM
Subject: Announced Layoffs
To: Meg Whitman
Dear Ms. Whitman,
Dads House has free information that will be needed by many of those facing a layoff from your company.
I would like to suggest that HP send out a notification to all those people being laid off that if they have a child support obligation, they can get help from their state to have the order modified. That they need to make the official request the moment they have been notified they are listed for release, as it can take up to a year to get a hearing.
This is a right they have under the 1988 Child Support Enforcement Act, and is detailed in the Federal Child Support Enforcement Handbook for Non-Custodial Parents. Unfortunately, the states refuse to distribute the handbook, which is free from the feds. Here is the material from it.
http://ChildSupportRights.org
If you are willing, here is a small poster that can be displayed in the employee break rooms with the above link.
http://dadshousedocs.org/ChildSupportRightsAD.pdf
I hope you will consider my request, and perhaps have one of your assitants respond to confirm you have received it. You are experiencing some public relations issues right now with this decision, and this might help it.
George R. McCasland, National Moderator
Dads House Educational Center & Groups
http://DadsHouseEdCtr.org
Postscript:
Took me a while to find a contact address, and I cc'd it to their Craig Gomez, Media Relations VP, as a backup.
The question is can HP bring back manufacturing to the USA and make as much or more profit than they're currently making. They couldn't care less about jobs in the USA, that seems to be evidenced.