Exactly one month from now, tech industry icon Hewlett-Packard will split into two companies.
The board has approved the breakup that will be completed Nov. 1, the Palo Alto company said today. The approval is a formality: The split was announced late last year, and the separation process has been under way for the past few months.
HP Enterprise, which will be led by current HP CEO Meg Whitman, will begin trading Nov. 2 under the stock symbol HPE. Shareholders will get one share of HP Enterprise for every HP share they own.
The old HP will be called HP Inc. and comprise the PC and printers group. Its CEO will be Dion Weisler, who s currently running that division as executive vice president.
The moves come as HP s dominance in PCs has suffered amid the rise of mobile, and as other tech companies have split in an effort to keep up with smaller, more nimble companies.
Michelle Quinn wrote earlier this year that HP has already made some big changes since its founding in 1939, such as spinning off Agilent Technologies, its test and measuring division. Of course there s the famous Compaq acquisition. Most recently, it bought software maker Autonomy in a disastrous $11 billion deal, and it s still suffering from the fallout. (The founder of Autonomy, Mike Lynch, filed suit against HP today.)
But this move tops them all. It s the biggest split in Silicon Valley history — resulting in two publicly traded companies each with about $50 billion in revenue.
Here s another big number: 33,000. That s how many more workers HP is laying off as part of the split, the company announced a couple of weeks ago. That s on top of the 55,000 workers it has cut between 2012 and 2014. The company says the latest job slashing will save it $2.7 billion a year.
Photo by Kirstina Sangsahachart/Daily News
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