In conversation with the Wall Street Journal, IBM revealed laying off of an undisclosed number of employees across the US.
The struggling tech giant’s CEO Arvind Krishna had warned investors of uncertainty due to COVID-19. He further revealed that the company has made difficult decisions of withdrawing revenue forecasts for the rest of 2020.
The Journal also reported that IBM’s job cuts would be in the thousands, citing an unnamed source familiar with the company’s plans. IBM had close to 352600 employees, worldwide, as of December 31,2019 according to its annual reports. Krishna stated that as of April, more than 95% of them were working from home.
IBM is the latest example of the pandemic impacting the tech industry. The demand for online services and increased computing power to help people work-from-home, learn and entertain themselves, isn’t enough to keep businesses afloat.
This would mark IBM’s first large-scale layoff under Krishna, who replaced Ginni Rometty as CEO on April 16. However, Rometty remains IBM’s executive chairwoman till the end of the year.
IBM shall continue to eliminate software and services that do not align with IBM’s main growth focus areas: AI and cloud computing.
Krishna is optimistic that the 110-year-old company shall power through the pandemic crisis. He believes that this moment shall go down in history as the time businesses and society digitally transformed themselves.