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A three-minute meeting for all employees shut down IBM's R&D business in China.

The fate of more than a thousand people was changed, and an era came to an end.

According to multiple sources, the closure of the China region mainly involves two business lines:

One is the IBM China Development Center (CDL), and the other is the IBM China Systems Center (CSL), which are mainly responsible for R&D and testing.

The relevant employees will receive N+3 compensation.

This weekend, news about IBM's withdrawal from China has caused panic among the public. The reason is that IBM China closed the access rights to its internal network last Friday night, affecting more than a thousand core employees including R&D and testing.

Because the incident happened suddenly, many people were kicked out of the internal group even though they were still working overtime that night.

To this end, IBM China responded to Yicai Global:

IBM will adjust operations as needed to best serve clients, and these changes will not affect our ability to support clients in Greater China.

In other words, it is true that the R&D department is withdrawing from China, but it is also true that they want to continue providing services and making money.

IBM will completely shut down its business in China: N+3 compensation for employees

This morning, Jack Hergenrother, vice president of IBM Global Enterprise Systems Development, announced at a general meeting that it has decided to transfer the research and development work of the China Systems Laboratory to other IBM infrastructure bases overseas.

Currently, IBM is withdrawing from all development businesses in China.

Someone claiming to be an employee said that he braved the heavy rain to attend the general meeting on Monday, but in three minutes he heard a foreigner say "a difficult decision was made" and all research and development was cancelled.

According to China Business News, the statement pointed out that Chinese companies, especially private companies, are increasingly paying attention to seizing the opportunities brought by hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence technologies.

IBM's local strategy in China focuses on leveraging itsTechnology and ConsultingWe have extensive experience in this area and have built a team with the corresponding skills to help Chinese customers co-create solutions that meet their needs.

That is, R&D work is no longer carried out in China, but consulting and sales operations continue.

In addition, IBM also emphasized that in the future it will shift to serving Chinese private enterprises and some multinational companies in China.

In fact, there are signs that IBM is withdrawing from China. In 2021, IBM quietly shut downChina Research Institute CRL。

The reason revealed at the time was internal adjustments, and the research institute itself was also difficult to make a profit.

Now IBM's two major R&D centers, CDL and CSL, have closed. The reason behind this is the decline in China's infrastructure business.

Among them, the China Development Center (CDL) was established in 1999 and is one of IBM's largest software development laboratories in the world.

IBM's "Guangjin" is in progress

In the past period of time, IBM has also carried out a number of layoffs worldwide.

While laying off employees, AI is used to fill the gaps.

In January this year, IBM announced that it had laid off 3,400 employees.

IBM outlined a "workforce rebalancing" during its earnings call, saying it would only affect a "very small percentage of employees."

According to spokesman Michael Cable:

It’s productivity gains that are driving the “rebalancing,” as well as our ongoing efforts to align our workforce with the skills our clients need most.
Especially in areas such as artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud.

In March this year, without any announcement or warning, IBM's marketing and communications department was eliminated in a 7-minute staff meeting.

The company’s CEO Arvind Krishna said earlier,

The company will replace 8,000 jobs with artificial intelligence in the next five years.

At that time, IBM expected that by the end of 2024, the number of employees would remain the same as at the beginning of the year.

Correspondingly, investment in AI has increased. In May last year, IBM announced the launch of WatsonX, which is said to be a development studio for enterprises to "train, adjust and deploy" machine learning models. In November, a venture capital fund called IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund was established with a capital of US$500 million.

Although we don't know whether this round of layoffs is also part of IBM's expansion plan, the closure of IBM's R&D business in China does mark the end of an era.

From the first IBM mid-size computer established in New China to the establishment of offices in Beijing and Shanghai in the mid-to-late 1980s, after decades of development, its business now exists in dozens of cities across China, large and small, covering key areas such as finance and energy.

In September 1995, IBM China Research Institute was established. It is one of the 12 research laboratories established by IBM around the world and the first research center established in a developing country. The research areas include artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cognitive medicine, Internet of Things and blockchain.

They have repeatedly been ahead of the industry in launching cutting-edge products and proposing forward-looking technological concepts.

As early as the beginning of the last wave of AI, IBM had already realized an intelligent question-answering system and became the number one player in the field of NLP and machine learning.Watson, and was introduced to China by IBM. However, it failed in China due to various reasons. In the field of Internet of Things, as early as 2014, IBM China Research Institute also took the lead in proposing the concept of "Internet of Things 3.0".

Researchers who graduated from IBM have now become the backbone of domestic technological innovation.

The blue giant not only influenced an era on a global scale, but also promoted the development of China's science and technology.

But now, the Yangtze River's waves are pushing the old ones out, and the old generation is being replaced by the new generation in the world. The era of IBM has ended first in China, where competition is most intense.

Reference Links:
[1]https://m.yicai.com/news/102246580.html
[2]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/276sQP1FORXWIyxhxEt3NQ