Hewlett-Packard’s Massive Job Cuts Won’t Affect India
Back in May hardware giant HP announced plans to cut 8 percent of its global workforce, or 27,000 employees, by 2014. We ranked it as one of the worse tech layoffs in 2012, right up there next to the massive internal shuffles at Nokia, Sony and Cisco.
At the time chief executive Meg Whitman said that the goal was to cut $3-$3.5 billion in spending, and reinvest that money in engineering. During a recent visit to India the Hewlett-Packard CEO gave one local publication a follow-up interview, in which she elaborated a bit more about her company’s plans and disclosed that HP’s local offices won’t see an influx of pink slips. Quite the contrary:
“We are not reducing our workforce in India. We have announced a global workforce reduction, but India will stay largely intact, because we not only have all our business units here, but also our R&D and back office. We are focused on keeping our workforce here, and I think over time, probably increase the workforce,” said Whitman.
The reasoning behind this decision, in the words of the former eBay head, is that HP is far too committed to India. Whitman is “very bullish” about the region because all of Hewlett-Packard’s businesses have a local presence in one form or another and because she expects the vendor to “outgrow” the Indian market this year in several verticals.
The Indian outsourcing industry in particular is very shaky nowadays due to economic turmoil in Europe and other factors, all pinned down by a recent Everest Group paper.
Nearly 30,000 workers is not the only thing HP is letting go. It’s also distancing itself from webOS, the now open source mobile platform that won’t support existing devices on launch. That’s bad news for the ecosystem, knowing that Hewlett-Packard won’t be making any new webOS phones any time soon.
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