IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty pledged to hire and train workers in the US as she and other technology executives prepared to meet yesterday with US president-elect Donald Trump.
“We have thousands of open positions at any given moment, and we intend to hire about 25,000 professionals in the next four years in the United States,” Rometty wrote in a USA Today article published on Tuesday.
IBM spokesman Adam Pratt declined to say how that hiring might be offset by staff reductions or disclose how many people IBM employs in the US.
“We expect to end 2016 with our US workforce about the same size as it was at the beginning of the year. By 2020, we expect it to be larger than it is today,” Pratt said.
IBM had nearly 378,000 employees at the end of last year, according to the company’s annual report.
While the firm does not break down staff numbers by nation, a review of US government filings suggests IBM’s US workforce declined in each of the five years through last year.
VOCATIONAL WORK
In annual US Department of Labor filings, IBM has reported that the active number of participants in its 401(k) pension plan fell to 84,350 last year from 110,876 in 2010.
When asked why IBM planned to increase its US workforce after those job cuts, company spokesman Ian Colley said in an e-mail that Rometty had laid out the reasons in her USA Today article.
Her article did not acknowledge that IBM had cut its US workforce, although it called on US Congress to quickly update the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act that governs federal support for vocational education.
“We are hiring because the nature of work is evolving,” Rometty said.
“As industries from manufacturing to agriculture are reshaped by data science and cloud computing, jobs are being created that demand new skills — which in turn requires new approaches to education, training and recruiting,” Rometty said.
She said IBM intended to invest US$1 billion in the training and development of its US employees over the next four years.
Pratt declined to say if that represented an increase over spending in the previous four years.
Rometty is one of more than a dozen US executives serving on an advisory council that Trump has formed to consult him on job creation.
With an approval rating of just two percent, Peruvian President Dina Boluarte might be the world’s most unpopular leader, according to pollsters. Protests greeted her rise to power 29 months ago, and have marked her entire term — joined by assorted scandals, investigations, controversies and a surge in gang violence. The 63-year-old is the target of a dozen probes, including for her alleged failure to declare gifts of luxury jewels and watches, a scandal inevitably dubbed “Rolexgate.” She is also under the microscope for a two-week undeclared absence for nose surgery — which she insists was medical, not cosmetic — and is
GROWING CONCERN: Some senior Trump administration officials opposed the UAE expansion over fears that another TSMC project could jeopardize its US investment Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is evaluating building an advanced production facility in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and has discussed the possibility with officials in US President Donald Trump’s administration, people familiar with the matter said, in a potentially major bet on the Middle East that would only come to fruition with Washington’s approval. The company has had multiple meetings in the past few months with US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and officials from MGX, an influential investment vehicle overseen by the UAE president’s brother, the people said. The conversations are a continuation of talks that
CAUTIOUS RECOVERY: While the manufacturing sector returned to growth amid the US-China trade truce, firms remain wary as uncertainty clouds the outlook, the CIER said The local manufacturing sector returned to expansion last month, as the official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose 2.1 points to 51.0, driven by a temporary easing in US-China trade tensions, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The PMI gauges the health of the manufacturing industry, with readings above 50 indicating expansion and those below 50 signaling contraction. “Firms are not as pessimistic as they were in April, but they remain far from optimistic,” CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said at a news conference. The full impact of US tariff decisions is unlikely to become clear until later this month
Nintendo Co hopes to match the runaway success of the Switch when its leveled-up new console hits shelves on Thursday, with strong early sales expected despite the gadget’s high price. Featuring a bigger screen and more processing power, the Switch 2 is an upgrade to its predecessor, which has sold 152 million units since launching in 2017 — making it the third-best-selling video game console of all time. However, despite buzz among fans and robust demand for pre-orders, headwinds for Nintendo include uncertainty over US trade tariffs and whether enough people are willing to shell out. The Switch 2 “is priced relatively high”