A spokesperson for the global tech heavyweight told ZDNet Australia on Wednesday afternoon that senior executives including Philip Bullock, IBM's chief executive in Australia and New Zealand and Alan Munro, IBM's general manager of the personal computing division, were meeting with employees to explain the ramifications of the proposed transaction.
The planned deal -- whereby Lenovo would acquire IBM's personal computing division to form the world's third largest personal computing company -- is expected to be finalised in the second quarter next year, pending regulatory reviews and the approval of Lenovo shareholders.
Munro is expected to head Lenovo's Australian and New Zealand operations once the deal is completed.
The spokesperson confirmed that "everyone who works in the PC division" was expected to transition over, indicating no redundancies were planned as a result of the deal.
He said the conditions for the employees who shift to Lenovo were at this stage expected to be comparable to those under which they worked at Big Blue. However, he added, "obviously the deal will be finalised in [the second quarter] next year, so there's time to go before Lenovo makes offers to employees".
The spokesperson said clients could expect "business as usual as the deal is finalised". He pointed out that Lenovo was taking on the entire current capabilities of Big Blue's personal computing business, including research and development, marketing and customer care, while adding its own capabilities such as increased scale and customer expertise.
Also ensuring a smooth transition was a five-year agreement between the two companies, whereby Lenovo will be IBM's preferred supplier and IBM will provide warranty, financing and services support to customers through its IBM Global Financing and IBM Global Services arms.
The spokesperson added that the product roadmap was expected to remain the same for at least the next 18 months.
A Gartner's Asia-Pacific research analyst, John Roberts, predicted this week that three of the top 10 personal computing vendors would exit the market by 2007, driven largely by a lean three-year period for the global personal computer market after 2005.
He also said at least three Chinese information technology companies would become significant global competitors by 2010.
Will IBM's ThinkPad and ThinkVision models be heading off to China? Most PC experts would argue that technologies and the intellectual property embedded in IBM's PC division are hardly commodities. Isn't this the IBM PC company who recently developed finger print readers on its portable computers? Techies may present a very different scenario, that IBM's technologies, customers lists, and technical employee's should receive more than a cursory
review by the Committee on Foreign Investment.
I beg our readers to evaluate the unspoken effects on the 2000 IBM employees in No. Carolina. Let's ask Senator Elizabeth Dole's opionion on these No. Carolina jobs. IBM is famous for making promises on benefits and then erasing them like a computer virus. The Lenovo sale even includes IBM's employee's on Leaves of Absence and those receiving Sickness and Accident benefits.
In the end, this is not a simple Walmart deal, more complex than cutting the meatcutters job, more involving than processing a money order, this is about the sale of rights to data, of the transfer of knowledge based products to a Communist country.
This will also be another poster child for the outsourcing of jobs to China. Soon we will see IBM's PC's sold at the area Christmas Tree Shops.