Meg Whitman's Hewlett-Packard shows how to fatten shareholders while firing workers
Source: Los Angeles Times
Shareholders of the big high-tech company Hewlett-Packard have done pretty nicely over the last year. Their stock gains have outpaced the Standard & Poor's 500 Index by about 14 percentage points, and in 2014 they pocketed a handsome $2.7 billion through share repurchases and $1.2 billion in dividends.
Other stakeholders and the rest of H-P's business, not so much. The company has cut about 44,000 jobs since 2012 and plans to bring the total toll to 55,000 by the end of this fiscal year. That would be more than 15% of the workforce the company employed in October 2011, around the time that Meg Whitman took over as its chief executive.
Doubts about whether Whitman has a sustainable strategy for H-P were resurgent Tuesday, when the company released its first-quarter results. The stock has dropped almost 10% Wednesday as we write.
... Taking the long view, one can argue that Whitman's H-P defines all that's wrong with American corporate management today. The company's big advances have been largely in the category of financial engineering and corporate restructuring.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-hewlettpackard-shows-how-20150225-column.html
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