Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news in the morning of November 18, Beijing time, it is reported that the technology giants have set off a wave of large-scale layoffs in the context of economic uncertainty. However, IBM CEO Ivid Krishna (Arvind Krishna) made an optimistic statement about the industry a few days ago.

On Thursday, local time, Krishna attended an event hosted by the New York Economic Club. In his speech, he said that despite a "catastrophic recession" in the United States, corporate spending on science and technology should continue to grow.

Mr Krishna said he spoke with chief executives and chief information officers around the world and found that no company was talking about cutting procurement spending in the technology sector.

But Krishna also points to a key factor worth noting, and that is whether Western Europe can survive this year's massive energy crisis.

Technology stocks have plummeted in US capital markets this year, but IBM stocks have become a "safe haven" in a storm. IBM's closing price on Wednesday was 8.1% higher than that of New Year's Day this year, compared with a 28% drop in the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index over the same period.

Recently, IBM reported third-quarter earnings that exceeded Wall Street analysts' expectations, and the company reiterated its outlook for this year's free cash flow indicator.

Recently, American tech giants have made a series of large-scale layoffs, including e-commerce giant Amazon and social media giant Meta.

Mr Krishna says IBM does not freeze hiring like other tech peers and continues to recruit new staff, although the growth of its workforce has slowed slightly compared with last year. Talent recruitment is mainly focused on emerging areas that can bring breakthrough growth to IBM.

It is reported that after Krishna became CEO of IBM, the company began to adjust its business and began to bet heavily on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, hoping to bring new business growth opportunities in these emerging areas. According to statistics, since April 2020, the company has made a total of 25 mergers and acquisitions.

In addition, according to statistics, by the end of last year, IBM, headquartered in Armonk, New York, employed a total of 280000 people around the world.

On the other hand, as the epidemic eased, many American technology companies began to send their employees back to the office. But Krishna said that while the number of employees returning to the office at IBM is gradually increasing, the company will not issue an order to force it to return to the office.

Mr Krishna says that in the US, IBM employees currently spend about half of their time in the company's offices, which he hopes to increase to 60 per cent in the future. In addition, in Europe, IBM employees spend more time offline, while in Japan and China, IBM employees spend most of their time in the office and have returned to normal.

Generally speaking, telecommuting does not affect work efficiency, but this model will affect the long-term cultural construction of the enterprise, he said.

Krishna also talked about some of the recent turmoil in the global cryptocurrency market. He said that the sharp fall in cryptocurrency prices and the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency companies, including FTX, a well-known cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, did not affect IBM's actual business.

Krishna said that as IBM, it is not interested in entering the blockchain or cryptocurrency market, but IBM is also investing in other uses related to blockchain technology in development zones, such as using blockchain to track location products.

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