IBM laying off thousands, seeking “flexibility” during COVID-19 crisis

Enlarge / Unlike the illustrative man in this stock photo, employees at HPE, IBM, and other firms conducting layoffs at this time may not even be able to gather their effects from offices closed due to coronavirus.

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The COVID-19 crisis is hitting almost every market sector hard, and now the dominos are starting to fall. As other small, medium, and large businesses pare back operations or shutter for good, the tech firms that rely on enterprise clients are themselves taking heavy losses and laying off personnel.

Both Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and IBM this week announced significant cost-cutting measures, including pay cuts and significant job losses.

IBM announced its layoffs late Thursday. In a statement, the company said the “highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly remix high-value skills,” which in this case means deciding you no longer place a high value on the skills a significant number of employees bring to the socially distanced table.

IBM, like many firms now facing cuts and layoffs, was not in the best of financial situations before COVID-19 hit. The company’s CEO, Arvind Krishna, has been with the company for decades but only stepped into the top seat in April, saying at the time he was focused on building up the parts of the company that support cloud computing and artificial intelligence and was willing to move away from the rest.

IBM did not specify how many positions were being cut, but both The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News report thousands of employees

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