IBM confirms another round of layoffs

Another round of layoffs have taken place in IBM, as the company reports its sixteenth straight quarter of declining revenue.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal the job cuts were made last week.

The latest round of cuts impact offices in North Carolina, New York City, Poughkeepsie, and Boulder, Colorado.

While IBM declined to provide the exact number jobs that have most recently been axed, Toni Sacconaghi, a business analyst, told The Wall Street Journal that IBM could cut over 14,000 jobs overall.

The report added as IBM transitions from a software and services business to a cloud company, it is letting go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand.

Martin Schroeter, chief financial officer at IBM said in the report the cuts were intended to “rebalance the skills” of IBM’s staff.

At the same time, he emphasised that the company was still hiring in the areas of cyber security, data analytics and cloud computing.

The company has posted about 7,000 positions online and said there are even more open positions that haven't yet been advertised.

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An IBM executive told WRAL TechWire, the company currently has many as 25,000 job openings in the cloud" and supercomputing sector -  which it says is becoming the future of the company.

"IBM is aggressively transforming its business to lead in a new era of cognitive and cloud computing.  If we meet our hiring targets, we expect our employee numbers to be roughly the same at year-end as they were in 2015."

Despite all the hiring plans, IBM is getting significantly leaner.

IBM employed about 434,000 people when Ginni Rometty took over as CEO in 2011. Its headcount is now below 378,000.

In addition, another shrinking tech company, Intel, has announced its severance package for US workers who had been laid off in April.  As many as 11% of its workforce in the US was cut and the company is giving U.S. workers severance and health benefits beyond what the typical laid off employee receives.

Workers who were notified they would be laid off last month will stay on the payroll until May 31. Then they will each get a minimum of six weeks of pay plus three months of health insurance, Oregonlive reports.

The departing employees will also get additional severance pay based on years of service, additional health insurance coverage, and six months of career transition service if they agree to a “standard release agreement”.

Laid off employees who signed the release will get a choice of six months of health insurance premiums plus US$9,000 or one full year of premiums. Pay for years of service will range from 4 weeks pay for 2 years or less up to 48 weeks of pay for departing employees with 30 years or more years of service.

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