When Carly Fiorina talks about her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she’s got a pretty positive perspective. (Video via Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library)
“We saved 80,000 jobs, we went on to grow to 150,000 jobs. We quadrupled the growth rate of the company, quadrupled cash flow of the company, tripled the rate of innovation of the company,” Carly Fiorina said on NBC.
Right. So, those sound like some pretty impressive accomplishments. But Fiorina’s claim she doubled HP’s employee count doesn’t tell the whole story.
When Fiorina was made CEO of HP in 1999, the company had around 84,400 employees.
It was up to 86,200 by 2001, the year before HP merged with Compaq, which itself had 63,700 employees - so that’s 149,900 employees combined.
Factor in massive layoffs and, HP’s employee count was at 141,000 when the two companies actually merged, in what is often cited as one of the worst mergers of the decade. By the time Fiorina was ousted, HP had around 150,000 employees.
So saying Fiorina grew HP’s jobs from 80,000 to 150,000 is a bit of a stretch, considering more than 63,000 of them were actually bought.
This video includes images from Getty Images and music "dark roasted" from Birocratic / CC BY ND 3.0.
