It's no secret that Hewlett Packard's cost-cutting campaign will probably include layoffs, and now it’s becoming clearer as to how many of the company's 324,000 employees will be affected.
On Wednesday, Business Insider reported that HP will lay off between 10 and 15 percent of its workforce, which would mean anywhere from 32,000 and 48,000 employees.
On Thursday, All Things Digital reported that 30,000 jobs will be cut, while Bloomberg put the number at 25,000. All three reports quoted sources familiar with HP's plans.
Whitman has previously said that "everything is on the table" in regard to HP's ongoing campaign to streamline its internal operations, and so layoffs of such a scale would not come as a huge surprise.
In a Q&A last week at HP's Global Influencer Summit in Shanghai, China, Whitman offered examples of areas she thinks could be improved.
"The vast majority of our cost structure is goods sold and procurement," she said at the event. "We have to think about how to use the supply chain to our best advantage." Whitman also said that HP's China-based operations would not be impacted on any large scale.
Another Whitman battle cry is that HP needs to "double down" on R&D in all its business units. But in HP's first-quarter earnings in February, Whitman made it clear that HP will need to cut costs before this can happen.
"On the current trajectory, we just won’t have the capacity that we need to invest," she said during the earnings call.
