A recent rumour suggesting IBM is about to lay off 26% of its workforce has provoked a response and some clarification from the company, which called the rumour “totally ludicrous”.
IBM stated, “We have already announced, after our disappointing 3Q earnings report, that the company would take a $600 million charge for restructuring—that's several thousand people, significantly fewer than the rumour suggested. Moreover, IBM currently has job postings for more than ten thousand professionals worldwide, with more than half of them in growth areas such as cloud, analytics, security and mobile technologies. IBM's new cloud leader, Senior Vice President Robert LeBlanc, told Fortune this week that IBM has plans to hire a thousand cloud professionals.”
The company emphasised that it is still making a huge profit—$21 billion in operating pre-tax profit last year—and that IBM's ‘strategic imperatives’ represent 27% of the company's total $25 billion revenue, which is up 16%.
The company’s statement continued, “We have high growth in a substantial portion of the portfolio, and those areas (CAMSS) have better-than-normal margins in areas that matter most to clients today—that's the heart of the IBM transformation.”
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
