Axe may fall on 16,000 IBM employees

NEW YORK, USA: In a bid to fight the global economic downturn, global IT giant IBM is planning another round of job cut, and this time the axe may fall on nearly 16,000 employees, some reports said on Tuesday.

According to the employee group Alliance for IBM, the company is going to have a major lay off in the United States and Western Europe due the ongoing global economic recession.

Comments posted on the alliance group site said that 16,000 job cuts may happen on 23rd of this month, or possibly on January 22. Employees from worldwide would be affected but the majority would be in the US, it said.

One comment said this is odd timing since IBM will be reporting its fourth quarter financial results on January 20 after the market closes.

Though it has been IBM's practice in the past several years to do layoffs by the handful in various divisions and product lines and geographies to keep the aggregate numbers low enough to not trigger a reporting requirement to the Securities and Exchange Commission, this time it is different, says the site.

"That is because of the precision of some of the rumors, the magnitude of the financial crisis that IBM is trying to sell gear into, and the company's desire to not repeat its bad experience in May 2005, when it had to whack 13,000 employees when its services business went on the rocks."

The company had two waves of job cuts in 2007, totaling more than 2,000 positions. If the reports are to be believed, this would be the second major lay off by IBM after 13,000 job cuts in the year 2005. So far there is no official statement by the company on the lay off.