IBM Pays GlobalFoundries $1.5 Billion To Shed Its Chip Division

helix2301 writes with word that Big Blue has become slightly smaller: IBM will pay $1.5 billion to GlobalFoundries in order to shed its costly chip division. IBM will make payments to the chipmaker over three years, but it took a $4.7 billion charge for the third quarter when it reported earnings Monday. The company fell short of Wall Street profit expectations and revenue slid 4 percent, sending shares down 8 percent before the opening bell.

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Bigger fuckup than John Akers

[gelfling]

Ginni is a bigger fuckup than John Akers. She and her cronies are fucking pirates running IBM like it's a stolen treasure box and they will personally enrich themselves until there's nothing left. Roadkill 2015 was the plan and everyone knew it was 100% bullshit. At this point all they can do is fire everyone who's not an executive, in the US, re incorporate in a developing nation and sell off the entire company piecemeal. IBM is a poorly run investment fund that simply buys and sells smaller companies to dig as much cash out of them as possible then tossing them away.

Paying someone to take a division off your hands? Are you fucking serious? THAT's better than simply taking that money and investing it into the division? Holy the server division just sold to Lenovo must be happy. They'll have a viable business with actual jobs whereas IBM is too busy borrowing money to buy back stock price with no revenue to pay off the debt.

Re:Bigger fuckup than John Akers

[lucabrasi999]

Ginni learned how to do this from her predecessor. Sam was the 'visionary', Ginni is just following through on his roadmap.

Re:Bigger fuckup than John Akers

[FooAtWFU]

THAT's better than simply taking that money and investing it into the division?

I don't know, that could just be throwing good money after bad. This isn't a software division, it's not even like their server hardware division, it's chipmaking. It's kind of a go-big-or-go-home game where your competitors -- well-funded types like, say, Intel -- can easily pour many billions of dollars into next-generation fabrication processes and equipment which will readily put any half-assed investment to shame. I don't think IBM's chip business has the customer base to make "go big" profitable, or any reasonable plan to acquire new customers, so "go home" makes a lot of sense here.

Now, the wisdom / folly of gutting the rest of IBM's various divisions is left as an exercise to the reader.

Need to remove the M from IBM

[sasparillascott]

Probably need to change the name to IBC and drop the M as they are rapidly on that road to not really building/creating anything anymore - and just being another offshoring consulting firm (once they offshore the managers they could change it to Indian Business Consultants).

Re:How on earth?

[brunes69]

The main reason is it costs A LOT of money to lay people off due to severance payments and things like having to pay out retirement benefits etc.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is in my experience accurate. IBM is one of the larger purveyors of wage arbitrage in the market.

From time to time over the past 15 years I have been subbed into IBM to fix things. Currently I am working as a developer fixing a real mind boggling mess. The code base for this product is almost entirely now sourced from China, with some Indians and a few Brazilians thrown in for good measure. Oh sure, the project is fronted by English speakers from the USA for the purposes of sales, but the actual work is all done for bottom dollar anywhere BUT the USA ... until deadlines are missed, features are forgotten and things start to fall apart.

Then they hire people like me for 200+/hr to rewrite it all again.

It turns out that when you translate requirements through 3 language and cultural filters then pay the developers 4 bucks an hour you get shit code. Who knew right?