SAN FRANCISCO — IBM Corp. plans to lay off about 5,000 U.S. employees in a new round of job cuts, The Associated Press has learned. The move reflects IBM’s aggressiveness in shifting labor to lower- cost regions like India and keeping its profits aloft at a time when other tech companies’ earnings are tumbling.
An IBM manager knowledgeable about the plans said the cuts will come from the services division and workers will be informed today. The person spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday because he was not authorized to discuss the plan publicly.
The layoffs were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. They will affect about 4 percent of IBM’s U.S.-based workforce, which totaled 115,000 at the end of 2008. IBM employs about 3,400 at its campus in north Boulder.
In a sign of how quickly IBM is staffing up in emerging markets, last year IBM had nearly as many workers in Brazil, China, India and Russia — 113,000 — as it did in the U.S. IBM now has about 400,000 employees worldwide.
