IBM’s Road Show Stops in Knoxville
By Andrew Eder, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Tenn.
Apr. 25–Big Blue journeyed to Knoxville on Tuesday, bringing some stock price-boosting news, a few disgruntled employees and retirees, and a firsthand look at the computing giant’s public face.
International Business Machines Corp. — better known as IBM — chose the Knoxville Convention Center as the site of its annual stockholders meeting. About 150 spectators were on hand Tuesday, not counting the dozens of IBM employees in town for the event.
IBM Chairman and CEO Samuel Palmisano told the audience that the company, which exited the personal-computer business nearly two years ago, has shifted to higher-value market spaces and now earns 60 percent of its revenue outside the United States.
“The combination of all these moves — remixing our business, integrating globally — has turned IBM into a very different company than we were just a few years ago,” Palmisano said.
With more than 355,000 employees, $91.4 billion in revenue last year and a nearly 100-year history, IBM is one of the archetypes of corporate America. According to IBM, the company employs 622 Tennesseans, including 80 combined in Knoxville, Kingsport and Chattanooga.
Knoxville follows previous locations like Tulsa, Okla., Charleston, S.C. and Kansas City as sites of the shareholders meeting. IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., says it moves the meeting around each year to make it accessible to new groups of shareholders.
Lee Conrad, a national coordinator for the IBM employees’ organization Alliance@IBM, suggested another motive for the regional meetings.
“They tend to go to areas without a large amount of employees or retirees,” Conrad said. “There’s a reason for that. They want to keep the uproar to a minimum.”
Conrad was one of more than a dozen protesters who demonstrated before the meeting against pension cutbacks, bloated executive pay and the offshoring of IBM workers.
“IBM’s shifting jobs to India left and right,” Conrad said. “It’s a big issue for a lot of IBMers.”
At the meeting, Palmisano addressed the company’s global operations in response to a shareholder’s question, saying IBM is in 170 countries and has had international operations for 90 years.
“I’m sure in 1917 when IBM opened its first manufacturing operation in Rio de Janeiro, there was some concern about putting a manufacturing plant in Latin America” Palmisano said. “This will always be the case as the world continues to globalize and the world continues to integrate.”
IBM announced Monday that it will supply software to the TVA that will help the federal utility manage and operate its power plants more efficiently. TVA spokesman Gil Francis said the agency will pay about $5 million for the software package.
Before Tuesday’s meeting, IBM’s board of directors approved a 33 percent increase in the quarterly dividend and authorized $15 billion for the company to buy back its stock. IBM shares were up more than 3 percent Tuesday on the news.
IBM and The Nature Conservancy announced a partnership to build a computer-modeling framework that will simulate the behavior of the world’s great river systems. The project is meant to provide information for policy and management decisions.
Palmisano said at the meeting that IBM is working with Google to create a “cloud computing” model, in which users access data and applications from a remotely managed server “cloud” rather than a hard drive. Palmisano said the companies would be collaborating with universities on the effort.
“We think the future of the Internet has great potential for IBM,” he said.
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