Today IBM is expected to post weak results with revenue more or less flat on the year ago figure of $13,550m – European and Japanese operations are believed to have performed badly although the US market has picked up. In preparation the company has announced internally that 4,500 marketing jobs will go in the US, while this is included in the company’s forecast of 15,000 to 20,000 job losses this year, former IBMers believe that the company will probably cut at least 25,000 jobs this year, reports the Wall Street Journal. The 4,500 jobs being cut will come out of IBM’s 85,000 member US marketing organisation and the 1,500 of these will likely come out of headquarters staff jobs. It is believed that a further 2,000 employees currently in customer support will move into the lines of business of the products they handle – the idea being that each product group will become directly responsible for support costs and will therefore have to find ways to contain these costs.
