IBM has employed over 130,000 people in India currently. (Photo: Reuters)
Multinational technology company, International Business Machines (IBM) which has its headquarters in the United States has more employees in India as compared to any other country where the regional office of the company is situated. This information has been revealed in a report by the New York Times. As the per the same, IBM has employed over 130,000 people in India currently which is about one-third of the total workforce of the company. The report further states that the work spans of its employees ranges from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to performing cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars.
Chairman of the company’s Indian operations, Vanitha Narayanan while talking about it in an interview at IBM’s main campus in Bangalore said, “IBM India, in the truest sense, is a microcosm of the IBM company.” The office towers at IBM’s main campus in Bangalore are named after American golf courses like Peachtree and Pebble Beach. The report further states that the work in India’s IBM office in Bangalore has been vital to keeping down costs at IBM, which has posted 21 consecutive quarters of revenue declines as it has struggled to refashion its main business of supplying tech services to corporations and governments.
An associate professor of public policy at Howard University, Ronil Hira studies globalization and immigration. While talking about IBM’s office in India, he was quoted saying that the range of work done by IBM in India shows that offshoring threatens even the best-paying American tech jobs. He said, “The elites in both parties have had this Apple iPhone narrative, which is, look, it’s O.K. if we offshore the lower-level stuff because we’re just going to move up.” He added, “This is a wake-up call. It’s not just low-level jobs but high-level jobs that are leaving.”
