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HP: We are shifting resources from PCs to tablets

We're catching up fast, insists chief executive Meg Whitman, as HP shifts its focus to tablets
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

Innovation is not dead at HP, according to the company's chief Meg Whitman, who says the company is shifting resources from PCs to tablets in a game of catchup.

"In September 2011 we were nowhere on mobility, so we're catching up fast but we have to manage these transitions when they were perhaps not managed as well as they could have been," Whitman said at the Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

The company has recently revealed a few changes to its PC business, selling off WebOS to LG this week, and launching its first Chromebook as well as a new $169 Android tablet.

"We're not incrementally changing the business, we are shifting resources from PCs to tablets, from one operating system to another, from one kind of chipset to another."

The company hopes to meet "specific needs of customer segments" with its new approach to multiple operating systems and chipsets in its products. 

But in an effort to convince investors that HP has stabilised since her arrival in 2011, Whitman said not to expect changes on the scale of the once-considered spin off its Personal Systems Group business.

HP will however look to further "portfolio rationalisation within the portfolio", which could include smaller products or projects, similar in scale to its sale of Halo to Polycom.

There are still 15,000 more redundancies to go in its three-year workforce reduction campaign announced last year, which aimed to cut 29,000 from its roughly 300,000 global workforce. 

In addition, Whitman said HP will address "non labour savings", including its supply chain and back-end IT systems, which she said HP had "underinvested" in recent years. One example was that it recently moved 27,000 sales staff to Salesforce.com. 

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