[dragonwriter]

Yes, but the reason you will see companies put out press releases explaining layoffs is because the market does not on its own make such generous assumptions reliably when it sees layoffs.

(And even if it does, the fact that the NPV of a project "turned negative" indicates that the value of the company dropped, and the layoffs are only a partial mitigation, which still hurts the perception of the company if the market hadn't discovered and priced in the drop before the company did and reacted with layoffs.)