By Allison Levitsky – Tech Industry Reporter, Silicon Valley Business Journal
May 21, 2020, 3:11pm PDT Updated May 21, 2020, 3:14pm PDT
IBM Corp. has conducted a round of personnel cuts, two laid-off employees told the Business Journal.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/05/21/ibm-layoffs.html
The New York-based company, which operates its Silicon Valley Lab and IBM Research-Almaden campus in South San Jose, couldn’t be reached for comment Thursday.
But one remote employee who is affiliated with the South San Jose office confirmed being laid off along with others at other locations, and anonymous posts on TheLayoff.com suggest significant layoffs in various parts of the company.
It's not clear what the extent of the layoffs are or which offices are most affected. It appears that there were multiple reasons for the cuts, and a source said there was no companywide announcement or explanation of the layoffs.
The company had not filed a layoff notice with the state of California as of Thursday afternoon.
It's not clear whether the layoffs are related to the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led several IBM competitors to make cuts in recent weeks. Milpitas-based cybersecurity company FireEye laid off 6 percent of its workforce last month. San Jose-based Nutanix Inc., a cloud company, is furloughing 27 percent of its employees for two weeks. Cloudera, based in Palo Alto, is also cutting an undisclosed number of jobs.
IBM laid off 1,700 of its more than 340,000 employees last June, CNBC reported at the time.
IBM Research works on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, security, cloud, systems and other areas for applications in the financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and automotive industries. The company invested 8 percent of its total revenue for research and development last year.
Shares of IBM closed 1.86 percent lower on Thursday at $119.12 per share, down 12.6 percent over the last 12 months.