HP is going to lay off another 5,000 workers

Company will now have laid off 34,000 people by October of 2014

Tonight is New Year's Eve, which generally means joy and partying and celebrating what is to come over the next 12 months. If you're an employee at Hewlett Packard, though, somehow I doubt that you will be doing much celebrating as the ball drops. 

The PC maker, which has been struggling as the world increasingly goes mobile and PC sales drop, has added to the number of employees it plans to lay off between now and the end of October of next year, according to a document filed with the Securities and Exchance Commission on Monday.

In all, HP will be cutting an additional 5,000 jobs. The company currently employs 331,800 people.

"Due to continued market and business pressures, as of October 31, 2013, HP expects to eliminate an additional 15% of those 29,000 positions, or a total of approximately 34,000 positions, and to record an additional 15% of that $3.6 billion in total costs, or approximately $4.1 billion in aggregate charges," the company wrote.

"HP expects to record these charges through the end of HP's 2014 fiscal year as the accounting recognition."

The other 29,000 jobs in question were already being eliminated as part of HP's multi-year restructuring plan, called the "2012 Plan," which it announced in May of last year. The company had originally said it would be 27,000 jobs, before upping the number in September. 

Many of the announced cuts have already taken place; around 24,600 jobs were already eliminated as of the end of October of this year. That leaves around 9.400 more people who will be getting the axe.

It is unclear at this time which departments at Hewlett Packard would be seeing the cuts.

HP CEO Meg Whitman has promised that HP will not do another big layoff once this latest round is finished.

The company has been struggling to keep up with an increasingly mobile world, and has seen its sales continue to drop.

In its latest quarterly earnings report, HP said it saw revenue from its personal computers fall 2% year to year, printing revenue fall 1%, and revenue from software fall 9% year to year. 

PC sales

While shipments of tablets are expected to grow by 53.4% this year, P.C. shipments are expected to get hit hard, declining by 8.4% overall, according to a report from Gartner in October. 

That is an increase from its previous prediction of 7.6% back in April.

P.C. shipments include three types of devices: desktops, laptops and "ultramobiles," which are lightweight computers that are basically a hybrid tablet, running a desktop operating system.

Shipments of laptops and desktops are actually going to go down 11.2% this year. In fact, it is only the projected sales of these ultramobiles that saves the space from total embarrassment. Ultramobile shipments are actually expected to double this year, going from 9.8 million last year to 18.6 million this year.

Any way you slice it, the P.C. is still dominating the tablet, with combined sales of the desktops, laptops and ultramobiles reaching 321.7 million. That is compared to 184 million for tablets. But what really matter is how the devices are trending. And that is where is gets really ugly for the personal computer.

By next year, combined P.C. shipments will decline slightly to 321.5 million, even with ultramobiles once again doubling, while laptops and desktops go all the way down to 303 million. At the same time, tablet shipments will significant close the gap with 263 million. Its easy to see tablets finally taking over in just a few short years.

The SEC document was first noticed by Business Insider on Monday. 

VatorNews has reached out to Hewlett Packard for a comment on the layoffs, and we will update the story if we learn more. 

(Image source: https://www.eweek.com)