[charia]

'As many as', suggests there might have been one particular case where that happened, probably due to a complex situation, (small company, pandemic, company going out of business, lack of strong oversight, policies on returning equipment not set in place at the time of layoffs, ect).

Using that one particular statistic to make this point seems like an obvious use of bad statistics. The average or median is probably much more normal, and probably a huge number of computers worth a good chunk of money, but it doesn't sound that eyecatching so they choose to go with this particular number.