Oh they claim it's because of overseas competition; but it was the American workforce that put them in a pre-eminent spot. I think a lot of these companies are crying "wolf" but bagging ridiculous profits. Funny that those fatcat IBM execs keep their corporate headquarters in the good ol'USA. I think they ought to relocate their headquarters to Calcutta. Think of the savings!
Big Blue Wields the Knife Again
To wrest profits from its ailing IT-services business, IBM is slashing its North American workforce and finding efficiencies overseas
by Steve Hamm
On the surface, IBM seems to be cruising. Its stock is trading near a six-year high, at almost $106, and its overall financial performance has been improving steadily for more than a year. On May 29, the company raised this year's per-share earnings forecast after stepping up a stock repurchase plan.
Yet the company is battling a bugbear that keeps it from breaking out and prevents the stock from really soaring. Ironically, its problem is with the $48 billion-a-year business that saved it from ruin in the 1990s: IT services. What was once IBM's (IBM) growth engine seems to be turning into a chronically slow-growing, low-margin drag on the rest of the company.
Fresh evidence of IBM's trouble with services came May 30, when the company revealed that it had just eliminated 1,573 services jobs, mostly in North America, bringing to 3,023 the total jobs cut in the high-cost region this quarter alone. That's a small percentage of the company's total workforce of more than 355,000. Yet when weighed against rapid growth in low-cost India, where the staff topped 53,000 at the beginning of the year, the cuts underscore the biggest challenge facing Big Blue: the Indian tech industry.
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