No 2017 bonus for you, HPE tells employees

Exclusive Thousands of employees at Hewlett Packard Enterprise will not be taking home a bonus after falling short of sales targets for fiscal 2017, The Register can reveal.

HPE closed off the year ended October 31 with a 6 per cent drop in total revenue to $26.21bn. All of the major hardware units reported declines, professional services arm Pointnext was flat and Financial Services grew.

A spokeswoman told us that one element of employees' compensation is an annual variable bonus that is dependent on hitting business targets and then distributed based on individual performance.

"In FY17, performance in some segments of the business was below budget, so the bonus was not funded for those segments," HPE said.

"Other segments performed at or above budget and therefore the bonus was funded. Our employees are critical to HPE's success, but we are a company that pays for performance, and having our rewards programmes fully aligned to our business metrics is important to us. It's important to note that none of our senior executives received an annual bonus."

CEO Meg Whitman is already worth $3.1bn so likely has enough wonga to finance another stab at American politics and might not be too phased by missing out on the latest bonus. Plus she is paid tens of millions of dollars each year. Her team does OK too.

Server sales dropped 8 per cent year-on-year to $12.67bn, storage dropped 3 per cent to $3.144bn and networking fell 11 per cent to $2.51bn. The consulting/pro services arm didn't make or lose ground at $7.88bn and the bank of HPE was up 13 per cent to $3.6bn.

HPE refused to confirm if staff in certain product groups that reported growth – Nimble and Aruba spring to mind – were in fact handed a financial fillip or whether all bonuses were set at a divisional level.

The loss of bonus will come as a bitter blow to employees that have witnessed dramatic changes at the company, including relentless redundancy programmes, the latest being HPE Next, and curbs on expenses for travel and meal allowances. ®