SAN FRANCISCO - Hewlett-Packard (HP) on Wednesday announced a massive layoff plan while releasing its latest quarterly earnings report.

As part of a multi-year restructuring, HP expects approximately 27,000 employees to exit the company, or eight percent of its workforce as of October 31, 2011, by the end of fiscal year 2014, the company said in a press release.

"While some of these actions are difficult because they involve the loss of jobs, they are necessary to improve execution and to fund the long-term health of the company. We are setting HP on a path to extend our global leadership and deliver the greatest value to customers and shareholders," said HP Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman.

Meanwhile, the company is offering an early retirement program, so the total number of employees to be affected will be impacted by the number of employees that participate in the program.

The restructuring is expected to generate annualized savings in the range of 3 to 3.5 billion US dollars exiting fiscal year 2014, of which the majority will be reinvested back into the company, according to HP.

The computer and IT giant expects to use the savings to boost investment in innovation around areas of its strategic focus: core printing and personal systems businesses, cloud computing, big data, security, as well as enterprise servers, storage and networking.

For the 2012 second fiscal quarter ending on April 30, HP reported a net revenue of 30.7 billion dollars, down by three percent from the same period of last year. Earnings per share in the quarter, excluding certain items, stood at 98 cents.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected HP to report revenue of 29.9 billion dollars and earnings per share of 91 cents.

Among HP's business divisions, revenue of the personal systems group, which includes the PC business, was flat year over year, while revenue in services, printing, enterprise servers, storage and networking all declined. Revenue growth was achieved in units of financial services and software.

HP has not kept up with its rivals in recent years in key areas such as mobile computing.

A latest report released on Wednesday by research firm NPD DisplaySearch showed that on the tablet and notebook computer market, Apple's share is almost twice of that of HP.