More layoffs at IBM

The company is also relocating a few employees to offices in India and Costa Rica from the US.

Job cuts are ‘on’ at IBM. According to media reports, in the third week of May, IBM laid off a few more employees at its offices in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, New York City; Poughkeepsie, NY and Boulder, Colorado. This is part of the retrenchment, the company had announced in April, 2016. In March, around 5,000 people were asked to leave.

In addition, the company is also relocating a few employees to offices in India and Costa Rica from these offices.

According to the website, thelayoff.com, an employee who joined IBM in 1980, was asked to leave. After his severance, he offered to work for a vendor!

An estimate by Sanford Bernstein analyst, Toni Sacconaghi, puts the total layoff figure at 14,000 jobs. The job cuts are a result of four straight years of declining revenues as the rise of cloud computing threatens the company’s software and services business.

“We have estimated that it has historically cost IBM about $70,000 to eliminate an employee, which would imply a workforce reduction of about 14,000 employees this quarter,” he said.

The note from Bernstein estimated that IBM saved $6.78bn from ‘workforce rebalancing’ in the last decade, by cutting some 96,986 jobs.

The company’s total workforce was 377,757 at the end of 2015.

It is said that S&D and GTS have been hit the hardest as the entire departments have been decimated.

However, if we go by the official version, IBM plans to restructure its workforce to enable them to work for cloud services and data analysis. It even said that it was planning to hire more than 20,000 people. Though, its internal job search tool has 7,000–8,000 open positions.

Earlier in the week, IBM said it would close its 70-acre Somers, New York, campus and move those jobs to a facility in North Castle, New York.