HP production to move to Eastern Europe

HP is cutting 710 manufacturing jobs at a plant in Erskine, Scotland as part of a plan to move production to Eastern Europe.

The company revealed the move today in a statement saying: "HP has presented a plan to relocate its [European] Enterprise, Storage and Servers (ESS) production from Germany and Scotland to a partner company in the Czech Republic during 2010."

A spokesperson confirmed the number of jobs at the Erskine plant, near Glasgow, were related to this move and included 80 permanent staff with the remaining being temporary and contract workers.

The move and job cuts seem to be the first casualties of HP's restructuring following its quarterly figures released last week. The results showed a 17 per cent drop in profits due to a continuing fall in demand for PCs and confirmed 6,420 workers would cut from its global workforce.

In the statement today the company said the axe will mostly fall on European staff. It said: "Under the proposal, the company's planned workforce reduction in [Europe] will affect up to approximately 5,700 positions over the next two years."

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.