Biggest corporate lay-off in history? IBM could cut 110,000 jobs - including 5,000 here within days

• Thousands of British jobs at risk as IBM prepares to cut its workforce
• More than 110,000 jobs could disappear worldwide, including 5,000 here 
• IBM is being restructured in ‘desperate’ attempt to revamp its business
• Struggled in move from manufacturing computers to cloud computing

Thousands of British jobs are at risk as technology giant IBM is reported to be preparing to cut a quarter of its workforce in the biggest corporate staff cull in history.

More than 110,000 jobs could disappear worldwide in a major restructuring at the once-dominant computing goliath – nicknamed ‘Big Blue’.

Some 20,000 are employed by the company in the UK across 24 offices, including sites in Portsmouth, London, Manchester and Edinburgh.

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Thousands of British jobs are at risk as technology giant IBM is reported to be preparing to cut a quarter of its workforce in the biggest corporate staff cull in history 

There are fears that up to 5,000 roles could be at risk if the expected rate of redundancies is applied to Britain.

The jobs will be cut as IBM undergoes a massive restructuring in a ‘desperate’ attempt to revamp its business, according to a report on the US Forbes website.

But IBM poured cold water on the article, calling the reported scale of the job cuts ‘ridiculous’ and ‘baseless’.

The website said the company was preparing to merge its three main arms – hardware, software and support – into a single operating business. It will break down the ‘Chinese walls’ between the divisions and reorganise staff into teams based on their jobs, such as sales or research.

This is because of the growing demand from businesses to use companies such as IBM as a ‘one-stop shop’ for technology needs. It is expected to restructure its entire global workforce – some 430,000 people – under a programme known as Project Chrome.

IBM has struggled to shift from its traditional strength of making computers to offering IT services and information storage.

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Last week, Ginni Rometty, chief executive since 2012 and who joined the company at 24 in 1981 as a systems engineer, reported quarterly profits below analysts' forecasts and an 11th straight quarter of falling revenues

IBM shares fall at the New York Stock Exchange

The company set aside £400million for redundancies last week, which it described as ‘workforce rebalancing’, after three-month sales figures came in £444million lower than expected.

If it axes one in four staff, as reported, it will be the largest corporate layoff in history. The previous largest redundancy programme was also from IBM, when it cut 60,000 staff in 1993.

Robert Cringley, from Forbes, said: ‘To fix its business problems and speed up its “transformation,” next week about 26 per cent of IBM’s employees will be getting phone calls from their managers.

‘Project Chrome will hit many of the worldwide services operations. The USA will be hit hard, but so will other locations.’

An IBM spokesman said: ‘IBM does not comment on rumours, even ridiculous or baseless ones.

‘IBM has already announced the company has just taken a $600million [£400million] charge for workforce rebalancing. This equates to several thousand people, a mere fraction of what’s been reported.’

 

BP will freeze salaries across the company this year as a way of cutting costs in the face of the falling oil price.

All of the company’s 15,000 UK staff will see their basic pay frozen at 2014 levels. The firm said it would look at increasing them again in 2016. 

IBM: THE COMPANY BEHIND THE FLOPPY DISK AND FIRST MODERN ATM

The computer company was founded in 1911 and was a merger of four earlier companies. 

When it started out, it focused on technological advances such as the computing scale (a weighing scale which gave the prices of the different items it weighed) and the time clock (which allowed workers to record the times they started and finished work each day).

IBM played a key role in Franklin D Roosevelt's Social Security Act of 1935, which included the issuing of social security numbers to 26 million American workers. 

From the 1950s to the 1980s, it produced the first hard and floppy disks, the supermarket checkout and an early ATM. In 1981, it released its own personal computer, the IBM PC. 

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In 1990, the company was the second most profitable enterprise in the world and was believed to be set to benefit from the continued growth of the IT industry.

But the following year the company's earnings dropped as it outsourced its software and hardware and between 1991 and 1993 the company posted a $16billion loss. Hundreds of thousands of employees lost their jobs. 

However, a new CEO Louis V Gerstner Jr, turned the fortunes of the company around during the 1990s, coinciding with the rise of the internet. It focused on business software and specialist microchip production. By 1994 the company was showing a $3 billion profit once more.

Gerstner retired in 2002, with the company once again one of the top computing firms in the world. 

However, in recent years IBM has struggled to make the move from manufacturing computers and microchips to the world of cloud computing.

Last week it reported quarterly profits below analysts' forecasts and an 11th straight quarter of falling revenues.