In an initiative to get back on track, HP decided to cut jobs of around 4,000 employees during its third fiscal quarter. The technology giant hopes to slash its employee count by 27,000 employees by the end of 2014. Disclosing the updated numbers in an earnings conference call, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of HP said that the company expects about 11,500 employees to depart this fiscal year, ending Oct. 31, in contrast to the earlier estimate of 9,000 employees. Currently, HP has employed around 350,000 people. Inflow and outflow of the tech giant does affect the overall job market, particularly in Silicon Valley. Whitman pointed that the company is trying to fix its sales force, and this has put an impact on results in the near term. HP worked on to grow various segments during the quarter including storage, networking, commercial printer ink sales, and “hyperscale” services. Pricing in hardware is still difficult, but HP believes it gained market share in high-end PC sales. The headwinds will continue in the fiscal fourth quarter, so the company now predicts its earnings per share to be at the low end of the previously predicted range. HP continues to revamp its enterprise unit, though the mainstream server business continues to be weak. The firms’ Ink Advantage sales have also improved following a new affordable pricing plan in emerging markets. HP is pushing heavily into cloud and information businesses, and it has 750 customers for its HP CloudSystem service. The firm has also targeted cloud services at airline companies with HP Converged Cloud services. Throwing light on this Cloud service, Whiteman said that this hybrid delivery approach to the cloud is exclusively made to facilitate airlines create new revenue streams, deliver better service to their customers, lower their costs, and increase productivity.
