1,248 EMPLOYEES NOW AT RISK

IBM is on the verge of laying-off up to 263 employees in its UK Global Technology Services (GTS) division, placing a total of 1,248 employees at the risk of losing their jobs.

Recently, the company was reported to have held a meeting in which GTS VP for Infrastructure Service Delivery Rudolph Oudeboon, made reference to the 4% decline in GTS revenue during the fourth quarter of 2019. In a bid to fix its revenue figures, IBM is looking to drastically cut costs with plans of reducing Infrastructure and Facilities spending, vendor spend optimization, sub-contractors’ displacement and increased use of automation.

That’s not all, IBM is also proposing to reduce the number of staff in the UK Infrastructure Service (IS) Delivery and T&T by 263 employees. To this end, the company has placed a total of 1,248 GTS employees at risk, as any of them could make the required layoff list of 263.

“Infrastructure Services continue to be challenged by our margin improvement target, with our current trajectory not showing the growth we need, as well as the erosion of existing contracts continuing to challenge us,” said Oudeboon, as noted from the meeting.

“The situation is serious in terms of IBM’s position in the market, our overhead, complexity, and cost that many or most of our competitors do not carry. This is negatively impacting our ability to compete successfully in the market.”

IBM has given the group of 1,248 employees a first option of voluntary redundancy but if the required number of people are not gotten, the company will shift to forced redundancy.

This group of 1,248 employees who are within the scope of losing their jobs is made up of 126 Transition and Transformation staff; 353 from Project Services; 175 working on the Lloyds account; 197 on the Vodafone account and 397 classified as “All other IS Delivery”.

Those who choose voluntary redundancy are expected to leave the company around 26 June, while the forced set will exit Big Blue by 26 August.