The streamlining announced Wednesday represents HP’s largest payroll purge in its 73-year history. The reductions will affect about 8 percent of HP’s nearly 350,000 employees by the time the overhaul is completed in October 2014. The company, which has a big campus in Roseville, didn’t specify from where the cuts would come.

The cuts come eight months after HP hired Meg Whitman as CEO to turn the company around.

HP hopes to avoid as many layoffs as possible by offering early retirement packages.

The company expects to save $3 billion to $3.5 billion annually from the job cuts and other austerity measures.

Word of the mass layoff had leaked out in media reports late last week, so the news didn’t come as a surprise.

Nevertheless, the sobering details overshadowed the release of HP’s latest quarterly results. Although HP’s earnings and revenue declined from a year ago, the numbers were better than analysts had projected. HP also delivered another pleasant surprise by offering a forecast that raised hopes that HP may be poised to bounce back.

“While I wouldn’t say we have turned the corner, we are making real progress,” Whitman told analysts during a conference call.

Echoing comments she made three months ago, Whitman cautioned that “turning HP around is going to be a lot of hard work. It’s going to take time. But we know what needs to be done.”

Investors were pleased, although it wasn’t clear whether their glee had more to do with the cost-cutting or the company’s performance during its fiscal second quarter, which ended in April.

HP shares surged $1.97, or more than 9 percent, to $23.05 in Wednesday’s extended trading. That’s still about half their value before HP parted ways with Mark Hurd, a cost-costing specialist who stepped down in 2010 amid a scandal revolving around the nature of his relationship with a former actress who worked as an HP contractor. An investigation into it uncovered inaccurate expense reports.

The current troubles at HP have been traced both to Hurd, who cut research and development to boost profits, and his successor, Leo Apotheker, who didn’t respond to the threat posed by a shift to computing on smartphones and tablets.

Whitman’s plan calls for less bureaucracy so the company can respond more quickly to customer needs. She also wants to boost research and development to spur more innovation.

HP, which is based in Palo Alto, has been struggling to sell more personal computers and printers, partly because they aren’t needed as much now that people are spending so much time surfing the Web on phones and tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad. The company’s efforts to sell more business software and consulting services have been stymied by competition from the likes of IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp.

“Work force reductions are never easy,” Whitman said Wednesday. “They adversely impact people’s lives, but in this case, they are absolutely critical to the long-term health of the company. Our goal is simple: a better outcome for the customers at reduced cost for HP.”

Whitman plans to funnel most of the savings from the job cuts into product development. Some of the extra cash will go toward boosting HP’s earnings, too.

HP’s workforce has undergone several other reorganizations during the past decade. Two of the biggest occurred during Hurd’s regime. HP announced 14,500 job cuts in 2005 in one of his first big acts as CEO. HP also announced 24,600 cuts in 2008 after buying technology consulting service EDS for $13.9 billion.

HP did not say where the latest cuts would come from. HP is combining its printers and PCs division, which could reduce some overhead.

As part of the latest crackdown, Whitman is changing the leadership at HP’s recently acquired Autonomy division, which makes software that finds and analyzes data within companies and government agencies.

Bill Veghte, HP’s chief strategy officer, is replacing Autonomy founder Mike Lynch in an effort to boost the division’s financial performance. The shake-up is likely to amplify investor questions about whether HP blundered last year when it paid $11 billion to buy Autonomy. That deal was announced in August by Apotheker, just a month before he was fired.

Whitman told analysts she still believes the Autonomy acquisition was smart.

The company earned $1.6 billion, or 80 cent per share, in the February-April quarter. That represented a 31 percent decline from $2.3 billion, or $1.05 per share, at the same time last year.

If not for several items unrelated to HP’s ongoing business, the company said it would have earned 98 cents per share. That figure topped the average estimate of 91 cents per share among analysts surveyed by FactSet.

Revenue fell 3 percent from last year to $30.7 billion. That was about $800 million above analyst projections.

To pay for severance and other restructuring costs, HP expects to take a pre-tax charge of about $1.7 billion in the current fiscal year, which ends in October. About $1 billon of those charges will come in the current quarter ending in July. HP expects to take charges of an additional $1.8 billion through fiscal 2014.

The company also expects to register a charge of $1.2 billion to account for the declining value of the Compaq computer brand. HP bought Compaq a decade ago in a deal that many shareholders, including the son of a company founder William Hewlett, tried to block.

(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.)

By early afternoon, the stock fell more than 11 percent to $33.81.

Investors and technology industry watchers are closely tracking the Menlo Park, California-based company’s shares. The world’s largest online social network was one of the most anticipated initial public stock offerings ever, and now serves as a bellwether for other social media companies.

Facebook’s market debut Friday suffered some hiccups, with trading on the Nasdaq delayed for a half hour and issues with traders’ orders. The stock closed Friday just 23 cents above where it priced Thursday night, when many investors had hoped for a big first-day pop.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

The looming cuts cited by Bloomberg News and the technology blog All Things D would trim as much as 9 percent of HP’s workforce, based on the 349,600 people employed by the Palo Alto, Calif., company as of last October. A breakdown on HP’s website listed 324,600 employees, but company spokesman Michael Thacker said the information was wrong. He pointed to the October figure listed in HP’s annual report as the most accurate head count.

Bloomberg News says HP is mulling 25,000 job cuts. All Things D, which is affiliated with The Wall Street Journal, estimates the purge will jettison 30,000 jobs. Both reports cited unnamed people familiar with HP’s plans.

Thacker declined to comment on the reports.

The job cuts could be announced next Wednesday, when HP is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings.

Those results are expected to show that HP, the world’s largest maker of PCs and printers, is still struggling to adapt to a technological shift that is enabling more computing tasks to be completed on smartphones and tablet computers such as Apple Inc.’s hot-selling iPad.

The trend has been crimping HP’s sales. Analysts predict HP’s revenue for its current fiscal year ending in October will total $122 billion, down 4 percent from $127 billion last year.

If HP trims its payroll by at least 18,000 workers, the company could save more than $1 billion annually, according to ISI Group analyst Brian Marshall.

If it occurs, the purge would be the most dramatic step taken so far by HP CEO Meg Whitman, who took the job last September after the company abruptly ended the 11-month reign of her predecessor, Leo Apotheker.

Whitman told analysts that she inherited such a messy situation that it may take several years for the company to bounce back. HP is trying to lift its stock price back to where it was nearly two years ago before the company demanded the resignation of another CEO, Mark Hurd, who was widely respected on Wall Street. Hurd stepped down in August 2010 amid questions about his relationship with an HP marketing contractor.

HP’s shares are worth half as much as they were before Hurd’s departure. The stock gained 3 cents Thursday to close at $22.03.

Whitman has said she is also trying to fix some problems that she blames on Hurd. In particular, she says Hurd crippled HP’s ability to innovate by imposing deep reductions in the company’s research and development budget. Whitman has indicated that she would reduce expenses in other areas so she can funnel more money into research and development.

(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.)

The Democratic governor signed a compact in March with the 1,300-member Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which intends to build on 254 acres in Sonoma County.

The Senate and Assembly voted by wide margins earlier this month to pass a bill ratifying the compact, and Brown signed it into law Thursday. The agreement allows for 3,000 slot machines and card games.

The tribe would pay the state $1.4 million a year for costs related to regulating gambling and assisting problem gamblers. A portion of the winnings also would go to the city and county.

The plan now goes to the U.S. Department of Interior for approval.

(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.)

WEST SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – California trade schools may soon have to prove they can put students on a new career path. In record numbers, students are graduating from colleges and vocational schools with no jobs to go to.

Charting a new career course can be as difficult as parallel parking an 18-wheeler.

Jody Tucker is one of about 1,000 students at Western Truck School looking for a new route in life.

“Here I am,” he said on Tuesday. “I became unemployed in a career I was in for 11 and a half years.

This West Sacramento vocational school sets its students up with jobs before they spend the $5,000 tuition.

“We have some job offers, which is great,” another student said. “I don’t see how we wouldn’t be able to get a job out there.”

But for every success story, there is a failure. Students protested at a for-profit school for medical and dental assistants earlier this year. The state shut down the school for allegedly making false claims about its programs.

Now assemblyman Marty Block (D-San Diego) wants new rules for all of California’s vocational schools.

“It’s more meaningful than ever that students know if these private for-profits are doing what they purport to be doing, giving these students training they can actually use,” he said.

Block’s bill would force all vocational schools to show students specific job placement statistics, show how many students were working after six months, their hours, their salaries and the most recent default rates on any federal loans.

It’s a new effort to fuel quality schooling and put the brakes on predatory for-profit education.

“We’ve never had a problem with being transparent,” said Michael Darling, Western Trucking’s vice president of operations. “If it’s a good school, it typically shouldn’t be an issue.”

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.