Despite record profits IBM cuts jobs
By Shalini Singh

IBM has just posted record profits.  2008 was a great year for IBM.  It had a record revenue of $103.6 billion; Record pre-tax profit of $16.7 billion; Record earnings per share of $8.93; Record free cash flow of $14.3 billion, up $1.9 billion, excluding Global Financing receivables. But this has not prevented layoffs in IBM USA. India will be relatively unaffected.

WRAL is reporting that “Less than 24 hours after IBM reported profits that far exceeded Wall Street expectations, Big Blue began a series of layoffs across the company in North America on Wednesday. IBM confirmed launching a ‘resource action,’ which is how the company refers to layoffs, was launched. However, a spokesperson declined to provide specific numbers or to identify what IBM locations were affected by the cuts except to say the action is for North America only.”

According to the WRAL report: “Especially hard hit was the IBM Software Group. According to IBM workers' posts to the Alliance@IBM union Web site and in e-mails to WRAL.com and Local Tech Wir an unknown number of layoffs were at IBM’s Research Triangle Park campus, which is Big Blue’s largest with more than 11,000 employees. Several workers told WRAL.com and LTW that they or people they worked with were given 30 days' notice to find another job within the company. If the notified workers could not find other positions, they would be terminated. Alliance@IBM, the union that is seeking to represent IBM workers, said 1,400 or more people were affected by the resource action in the software group alone”.

According to the news report the technology group will be hit on Jan 27th.