HP has announced plans to cut 9,000 jobs worldwide.

Hewlett Packard (HP) has announced it is to cut 9,000 jobs worldwide, while it plans to invest US$1 billion (around £685m) in the next generation of its Enterprise Services business.

In an effort to help businesses run faster and more smoothly, over the last 20 months HP has focused on integrating its Enterprise Services business (previously known as ‘EDS’) and improving profitability. Now that this is complete, the next step is to grow and scale the business.

In a statement, HP said: “HP will consolidate Enterprise Services’ commercial data centres, management platforms, networks, tools and applications to create a more scalable, modernized and automated IT infrastructure that will better serve its clients’ needs.

“As a result of productivity gains and automation, HP expects to eliminate roughly 9,000 positions over a multi-year period to reinvest for further growth and to increase shareholder value.”

Once the consolidation is completed, HP expects to generate annual gross savings of around $1bn and net savings after reinvestment of between $500m and $700m.

HP is headquartered in California, USA, and serves more than one billion customers in more than 170 countries on six continents. It currently has approximately 304,000 employees worldwide.