New York: American tech icon International Business
Machines (IBM), which is known as “Big Blue”, most likely now employs
more people across India than in the United States – if an internal
document reported by
Computerworld magazine is correct.
According to the document, as reported by
Computerworld (
details here), IBM has 112,000 workers in India, up from just 6,000 in 2002. When contacted by
Firstpost, IBM declined to comment on this document or say anything about the numbers.
IBM is understandably sensitive to criticism that its hiring spree in
India could ratchet up the outsourcing debate at a time when US
unemployment is stuck at 7.9 percent.
“There’s little that is surprising about this data. It has been
widely expected over the past year or two that IBM’s India workforce was
on track to exceed its U.S. workforce,” said
Computerworld.
“Crossing such a threshold is a symbolic shift more than anything
else — a globalization footnote. With a global workforce of 4,30,000,
less than a fourth of IBM’s employees are in the US,” added the US
magazine.
‘Big Blue’ likely employs more Indians than Americans. Reuters
The last time that IBM made a public statement about its US workforce was in Congressional testimony in the fall of 2009 (
here),
when it put its US workforce at 105,000. It was at 121,000 at the end
of 2007, and more in previous years. For the record, IBM no longer
reports where its employees are located.
IBM in recent years has been known for using acquisitions in products
such as cloud computing, analytics and consulting services to spark
growth and improve profitability in a huge, mature company. IBM, which
has an overall successful mix of products, is the company that others
like Hewlett Packard secretly want to be, one where high-margin service
and software businesses support big but slow-growing hardware divisions.
IBM’s rapid acquisitions will continue to hold the key to its growth
strategy at least through 2015. But the firm’s growth also hinges on its
winning formula to have large numbers of engineers and employees
working in India or other low-cost countries, a thinning layer of highly
compensated employees close to their clients, and factory like business
processes. India is a crucial cog in the machine at IBM, which now runs
large software programming and BPO operations in India.
According to the internal IBM document, the average annual wages for
all IBM workers in India was at around $17,000. Although this is much
lower than what American IT workers make, it is in synch with better IT
wages in India.
In 2009, IBM created a buzz by launching a program called “Project
Match” to help laid-off American and Canadian workers find jobs in
India, China and other low-wage countries where it is still hiring (
more here).
American workers who leapt at the vacancies across the Atlantic had to
move for local wages instead of generous expat salaries. Big Blue’s
“Project Match” initiative signalled the flattening of the world. But
predictably, it didn’t go down well with the unions.
“We hear a lot of talk about companies’ offshoring and shifting work,
but this is the first time I’ve seen a company encourage employees to
offshore themselves,” Lee Conrad, national coordinator for Alliance@IBM,
had quipped.
IBM last year reported its full year Americas’ revenues at nearly $45 billion, and total revenues at nearly $107 billion.
Source: Firstpost
