IBM Corp executives knew last year that the company was losing millions, to hundreds of millions, of dollars annually as a result of its mismanagement of its sell-offs of surplus products, the Washington Post reported: the paper says it has an internal IBM document that revealed that the company had wrestled with the problem for years but as of last year had not come up with a solution – because the company had so many separate operations for handling surplus goods that employees could not keep them straight; IBM officials acknowledged problems with the sales, said to have been made for a fraction of their market value, but said steps had been taken in the last year to cut losses; the Post reckons the surplus problem was a factor in the large losses made by IBM this year.
