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By Tom Espiner, 29 May 2009 08:32

NEWS

Hardware giant HP plans to axe up to 5,700 employees, in addition to previously announced losses, the company said on Thursday.

Thousands of employee positions will be terminated in Europe, Middle East and Africa over the next two years, HP said. The company has approximately 80,000 employees in the region. The countries especially affected will be Scotland and Germany, where HP has its EMEA Enterprise, Storage and Servers production facilities. These factories are slated to be closed in 2010 and production moved to the Czech Republic.

The factory closure in Scotland will affect 710 workers at the enterprise, storage and server plant in Erskine, an HP spokesperson told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday. Earlier reports had suggested that the number of HP workers affected by the cuts in Scotland would be 840.

"We can confirm that the number of jobs affected will be 710," said the spokesperson. "Out of that number, 80 are permanent HP employees and the remaining are temporary workers and contractors." The spokesperson declined to say how many jobs would be affected by the factory closure in Germany.

The company did not give details of how it would proceed with the layoffs. "In keeping with governing local law and established practice, HP will consult with employee representatives in the countries affected by the proposal on the conditions for the implementation of the restructuring measures," the company said in a statement.

HP employees have been hard hit by layoffs over the past year. The company announced 6,400 job cuts earlier this month, following a fall in PC revenue of 19 per cent in its last financial year. In the same period, its imaging and printing revenue dropped 23 per cent and its storage and server sales declined 28 per cent. These layoffs came on top of previous job cuts, which followed the integration of IT services company EDS.