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Tough times at the PC maker
IBM is reportedly planning to sack 111,800 staff. That's 26 per cent of its 430,000-strong workforce.
A Forbes report says the staff will be given their marching orders this week and will be gone by the end of February. The swingeing cuts are reportedly known as "Project Chrome", though it has nothing to do with Google's browser.
It's reportedly IBM's biggest ever lay off, and follows the company's 11th consecutive quarter of declining revenue.
IBM staff in countries all over the world will lose their jobs. "The USA will be hit hard, but so will other locations," writes Forbes' Robert X Cringely.
Mainframe and storage teams will lose a lot of staff, he says, noting that the company has just announced a new Z13 mainframe. He calls the cuts "shortsighted and typical for IBM".
He goes on to say the cuts are for appearance's sake, "designed to make IBM's financials look better for the next few quarters". Which, if true, would indeed be shortsighted.
Then comes a damning indictment of the plan. Cringely says Project Chrome will "traumatise the corporation and put most accounts into immediate crisis."
It's claimed IBM will transform into a cloud storage company, losing its traditional focus on hardware.
Read more: Samsung forecasts sliding profits from Christmas quarter
We've contacted IBM for comment and will update this story if we hear back.
IBM's revenues for 2014 were 6 per cent lower than in 2013. Its revenues for the fourth quarter of 2014 were down 12 per cent to $24.1 billion.
