The company has negative equity, The current and the former CEO gorged on cheap debt for years. Most of the debt will soon roll over at much higher rates.
https://ycharts.com/companies/HPQ/debt_equity_ratio
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This is peanuts compared to Dell's debt!
Instead of paying off debt, the company spend tons of money rewarding shareholders via dividend and share buyback to boost share price. Nothing wrong but long term wise, they will suffer from high debt cost
I have done some research on this question. You can see the financial statements from HP on various sites such as Yahoo finance. Debt has certainly increased recently under the current CEO. Interest rates will go up accordingly this year on all corporate debt. Even the amount of interest the US Treasury pays has overtaken the military budget this year, so HP and other indebted companies are not immune.
HP long term debt for 2022 was $10.796B, a 69.06% increase from 2021.
HP long term debt for 2021 was $6.386B, a 15.21% increase from 2020.
HP long term debt for 2020 was $5.543B, a 15.96% increase from 2019.
Looking at that chart HP is doing pretty good. It was far worse 2 years ago.
It also has nothing to do with layoffs. It is only used by investors to gage if they want to buy stocks in the company or not.
Most publicly traded companies use the money from the sale of their stocks for investing in the company, that is what stock is used for. They rarely borrow from banks like private companies do.
"Pardon my ignorance, but what does this have to do with layoffs?"
Higher interest rates mean that they company can't keep on borrowing to continue operations as easily as before. Look at the distress in commercial real estate. Many hotels have defaulted due to the rise in interest rates. Companies in this situation start laying people off to cover their rising interest expenses.
Pardon my ignorance, but what does this have to do with layoffs?