HP CEO Meg Whitman sees the impending split of her company as an opportunity to start two Fortune 500 companies with clean balance sheets, though giving Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. both fresh starts will likely result in more layoffs.
HP reported flat revenue, $111.5 billion, for its 2014 fiscal year, down 1 percent year-over-year. HP had net revenue of $28.4 billion during the fourth quarter of its 2014 fiscal year, which was down 2 percent year-over-year.
"There's still a lot left to do, but our efforts to date, combined with the separation we announced in October, sets the stage for accelerated progress in fiscal year 2015 and beyond," said Whitman.
News in early October of HP's plan to split itself in two has been generally well received on Wall Street, as the company's shares continued to rebound after dipping to $32.24 in the middle of October -- right now, they're up to $39.04 per share. During HP's quarterly conference call, analysts asked Whitman how the company's split would affect its human capital.
While Whitman didn't answer the question of layoffs as directly as some might have liked, the HP CEO indicated that it would be a missed opportunity to split the company in two and to just leave both halves as they are.
"It's remarkable how it focuses the mind around overhead," stated Whitman. "Do we need exactly what we have today? What we are not doing is separating the company into two pieces exactly as we have today."
At the start of 2015, HP plans to start dividing its might across HP and Hewlett-Packard. The enterprise and cloud services business will be funneled into Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, while the consumer services and products operations of PCs and printers will become HP Inc.
Whitman says the rebirth of the HP half allows the company to move away from its manufacturing heritage and place its focus on newer technologies.
"We don't have to do it that way anymore, and we can really just build the entire new style of IT for both these companies," Whitman said. "Those are the kinds of things that are going to make us more efficient and effective for the next decade."
HP has been laying off large numbers of employees periodically since 2008, though an estimated 275,000 are still employed by the stagnating tech company. The business has laid off about 45,000 of the 50,000 individuals it planned to release during the latest round of job cuts, which began in 2012.
