HP's Ax Falls On 1,100 Jobs In Germany

Wall Street Journal CIO Network HP CEO Meg Whitman

HP today said it was shutting down a site in Germany and plans to lay off 1,100 workers—about 9 percent of its workforce in the country.

Of those workers, HP said that some 250 will have a chance to transfer to HP partners or customers.

This is part of HP's long and painful multiyear restructuring that will eventually eliminate about 29,000 jobs.

The German unit belonged to HP's beleaguered Enterprise Services outsourcing unit.

As we previously reported, insiders expect HP Enterprise Services to take the brunt of HP's layoffs and restructuring.

HP Enterprise Services was born from HP's $13.9 billion purchase of EDS in 2008. It's been a problem child for the company almost from the onset. Last August, HP wrote off $8 billion worth of goodwill from the unit.

HP has been steadily shedding jobs from HP Enterprise Services. In October, HP announced that GM would be hiring 3,000 workers from the unit—people who previously worked on GM's IT systems as HP employees, and will now do the same work in-house. That's outsourcing in reverse, or "insourcing."

HP still has significant operations in Germany, and employs about 10,000 people there, it says. But workers in Europe have become antsy over HP's drawn-out restructuring. A group of European workers even filed a lawsuit against HP over it last November. And workers staged a strike at the location in 2009.

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