Technology giants IBM and SAP and industrial companies Dow and 3M will collectively lay off more thanand 11,000 employeescuts that add to those already announced by companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.
In the case of IBM, founded in 1911 and recognized for massively introducing PCs in the 1980s, it will cut 3,900 jobsnearly 1.5% of its global staff.
The cut is not related to financial resultss of 2022 or the outlook for 2023, a company spokesman told the AFP news agency. Last year was the second consecutive year of earnings expansion, after nearly a decade of stagnation, and the company was one of the few in the industry to have its share on the stock market increase (5.4%), according to the agency bloomberg.
For fiscal 2023, meanwhile, IBM, which currently employs 260,000 people, expects profits to rise about 5% and sales to expand by 1.2%.
According to the firm, the cuts are linked to the spin-off of some companiesincluding Kyndril, a company formed from enterprise infrastructure services provided by IBM, and Watson Health, a data and AI company for healthcare.
Despite the layoffs, IBM, like other technology companies that recently announced layoffs, plans to continue hiring in “high-growth” areas, according to the company’s chief financial officer, James Kavanaugh, as it transitions to cloud services, a area whose revenues increased by 11% annually in 2022.
Another of the companies to announce the layoffs was SAPwho communicated the 3,000 job losses, equivalent to about 2.5% of your staff over 120,000 employees worldwide.
The company, of German origin and which offers software and services in the cloud for business management, has declared its intention to build a “specific restructuring programme” to “strengthen its core business” and improve their performance.
This “restructuring”, according to the company, will cost between 270 and 330 million dollars, mainly in the first quarter of this year, but with which it expects to save between $327 million and $382 million annually by 2024.
As with IBM, SAP CEO Christian Klein stated that theThe cuts are related to the company’s strategy that seeks to focus on areas where more growth is expected and not specifically dealing with the economic performance of the company.
Although firms have denied that the cuts were related to a difficult global economic environment or a decline in their benefits, the layoffs coincide with a number of similar measures in other major technology companies.
Alphabet, Google’s parent technology company announced its layoff last week of 12,000 employeesequal to 6% of its global workforce, admitting that in recent years there have been contracts which in the current context are excessive.
Added to this month’s Google layoffs are i 10,000 (5% of its total plant) from Microsoft and 18,000 from e-commerce company Amazon.
Objective -parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp- anticipated in November that it will fire 11,000 workers13% of its workforce.
Similarly, tycoon Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, laid off about 3,700 employees (50% of positions); Y Snapchat and Salesforce did the same with 1,200 (30%) and 7,000 (10%).
In total, 219,132 people were laid off in the technology sector since last year, according to the tracking page Layoffs.fyi, which compiles the various cut ads.
Chemicals too
below, For its part, it is reducing its staff by 5% with the layoff of 2,000 people, including globally, as part of its commitment to achieve savings of US$1,000 million this year. The company currently employs 37,800 workers.
Due to the adjustment, the company will post a one-time charge of between $500 million and $725 million in the first quarter.
Another US company, 3M, announced it was cutting 2,500 jobs (out of a total of 100,000), after reporting results that saw slower-than-expected growth due to a rapid decline in sales of consumer products .
Source: Clarin
