IBM Corp has been making things in Berlin ever since 1934, although there was a regrettable break in the early 1940s, and the Berlin plant was the first to be established outside the US, but now IBM Deutschland GmbH says it will end manufacture of high-performance disk drives there by 1995, at the cost of 180 jobs; the plant may still make a few of the automatic teller machines it is noted for after that, but its main role from 1994 will be as a disaster recovery and services base, and headquarters of the subsidiary’s purchasing operation; the plant, which originally made punch cards and mechanical tabulators, currently employs 900 people; its phased demise is in part because the tax breaks for manufacturing in Berlin, offered when the city was a beleaguered outpost in the middle of East Germany, end at the end of 1995.
