New Delhi: US technology giant IBM may not be as American as one thinks. The company employs about 130,000 people in India, nearly one-third of its workforce, and much more than the around 92,000 employed in its country of origin.
“IBM India, in the truest sense, is a microcosm of the IBM company,” Vanitha Narayanan, chairman of the company’s Indian operations said in an interview with The New York Times.
The work in the India offices spans from managing the computing needs of telecommunications conglomerate AT&T and energy, petrochemical group Shell.
IBM India also performs cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars. NYT reports that a team is also working with the produces of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergarten students in Atlanta.
For a company that has reported 21 consecutive quarters of revenue decline, outsourcing is helping IBM lower their costs.
Despite outsourcing being a decade-old story, the tech giant's case is unusual as it employs more people in a single foreign country, as compared to its native nation.
Notably, NYT quotes research firm Glassdoor, which says that the salaries paid to Indian workers are one-half to one-fifth of their American counterparts.
This huge workforce in a foreign country has not gone unnoticed. US President Donald Trump, whose prime rhetoric during his election campaign was to "keep jobs in America", had during a really accused the company of laying off 500 Minnesota employees and moving their jobs to India, a claim denied by the company.
The Armonk-based company had, after Trump's victory, pledged to create 25,000 new jobs and has discussed plans to modernise government technology, while expanding tech training for people without four-year college degrees in the US.
The company had said that it was investing in the United States, including committing $1 billion to training programs and opening new offices.
IBM, which opened its first Indian offices in Mumbai and Delhi in 1951, is now spread across the country, including Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai.
Comments
0 comment