International Business Machines Corp, the world's biggest computer maker, plans to hire 5,000 additional workers this year to meet rising technology spending, said a company spokesman.
In October, chief executive officer Sam Palmisano said the company would hire 10,000 workers this year.
The number has been increased to 15,000 because of the company's earnings performance, spokesman John Bukovinsky said on Saturday.
Earlier last week, Armonk, New York-based IBM said fourth-quarter profit more than doubled to a record US$2.7 billion on sales of US$25.9 billion.
Investors said they hadn't heard IBM executives such as chief financial officer John Joyce sound as optimistic about their company's prospects in years.
IBM also plans to move 3,000 jobs from the US to developing countries with lower wages like India and China, Bukovinsky said.
Forrester Research Inc has estimated that 3.3 million services jobs will relocate to developing countries by 2015. The jobs being moved involve work running call centers and computer help desks, Bukovinsky said.
The 15,000 new employees will be hired mostly in the high-growth areas of its software and services businesses, such as Linux, which IBM backs as a less-costly alternative to Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system, Bukovinsky said.
IBM will hire about 4,500 of the workers in the US, he said. Another 3,500 will be in Europe, Canada and Latin America, with the rest coming in Asia.
The Communications Workers Association's Alliance for IBM, an organization seeking to unionize IBM workers, has called IBM's October hiring plan "a smokescreen" to hide thousands of firings in the past two years. Alliance spokesman Lee Conrad couldn't immediately be reached for comment Saturday night.
IBM also will gain new workers by obtaining new contracts for tasks like running computer networks, Bukovinsky said.
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