20,000 jobs to go at Dell, IBM and Lenovo

Davey Winder
Thursday, 08 January 2009 19:59

IT Industry - Market

The economic crisis has started to really take aim at the IT market, and the latest companies in the cross-hairs would appear to be Dell, IBM and Lenovo.

Back in June it was being reported that the credit crunch would not impact upon IT spending. What a difference six months makes.

Things started looking bad at the end of 2008 when 17,500 job cuts were reported as hitting BT, Sun and Yahoo! Now Dell, IBM and Lenovo look like shedding more than 20,000 staff between them.

The BBC is reporting that Dell will cut a whopping 1900 of the 3000 jobs at the manufacturing site in Limerick, Ireland as a result of moving production to Poland where staffing costs are cheaper.

Sean Corkery, Dell VP for the EMEA region, called it the decision to cut staff "the right one for Dell to become even more competitive." It is understood that the remaining Limerick staff will focus their attention on supporting overseas manufacturing.

Meanwhile, there are reports that IBM will lay off some 16,000 US-based staff in addition to the 15,000 that have already been cut. One analyst warning that it is "another morbid sign that we’re still in the teeth of this economic hurricane."

Which leaves us with Lenovo, whose shares were suspended from the Hong Kong stock exchange prior to announcing a swathing round of layoffs and a global restructuring plan which includes consolidating the Chinese and Asia Pacific outfits into a single unit.

This will impact both upon staff, some 2500 of whom worldwide are likely to lose their jobs, as well as pay for executives which is expected to be cut by as much as 50 percent.

It works out to around 11 percent of the global Lenovo workforce facing the axe in an attempt to make savings of USD $300 million during the next fiscal year.

Lenovo chairman, Yang Yuanqing, said in a statement that "We are taking these actions now to ensure that in an uncertain economy, our business operates as efficiently as possible..."