The end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 are bleak for workers in the technology sector. IBM and German giant SAP have joined the list of multinationals cutting workforces. They agreed on both the timing of the announcement and the number of employees to be laid off: 3,900 by IBM and 3,000 by SAP.
Unlike the rest of the sector’s companies, which justified their layoffs after the pandemic due to the decline of their digital business, IBM claims that the latest sales of parts of its business or spin-offs have laid off its entire team of employees. . The multinational spun off its digital infrastructure business in November 2021 to create Kyndryl, a giant born with 90,000 employees and an annual turnover of $19 billion. Already in 2022, he sold his artificial intelligence and medical data business Watson Health, in which he invested heavily from 2015 to 2020.
IBM announced the layoffs during its Q4 2022 financial results presentation. Its revenue exceeded 16.7 billion dollars, which is 6% more compared to the previous period. The 3,900 layoffs equate to 1.5% of its global workforce and will cost $300 million in compensation.
SAP also left a similar figure for its layoff costs, in which it will use between 250 million and 300 million, as reported. With the measure, it expects to save between 300 million and 350 million a year from 2024, “which will help increase investment in strategic growth sectors,” its chief executive said.
The 3,000 jobs it will cut is equivalent to 2.5% of its workforce of about 120,000 employees worldwide. SAP, which specializes in business organization software and is Europe’s second-largest technology company by market value after ASML (semiconductors), is portraying the measure as a contingency plan, given that it faces a big drop in profits in 2022. According to his reports, it is presented. This Thursday, the company earned 2,290 million euros, down 56%.
So far, Amazon has faced the biggest job cuts among tech companies, laying off 18,000 workers. Next, the rest of the multinational companies in the sector were placed: Google with 12,000, Microsoft with 11,800 and Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) with 11,000. The only one of the Big Five tech companies that has yet to announce layoffs is Apple. Overall, the sector has shed nearly 200,000 jobs in recent months, with 150,000 redundancies due to close in 2022.
Source: El Diario
