Jack Hergenrother, IBM’s vice president of global enterprise system development, announced at the IBM China System Center (CSL) staff meeting this morning that IBM’s infrastructure division has decided to transfer the R&D (research and development) work of the China system lab to other overseas IBM infrastructure bases and is currently withdrawing all R&D work from China. Hergenrother said the company has made the difficult decision to shift its infrastructure business, which has declined in recent years in China, to other countries closer to customers based on market opportunities. This adjustment involves more than 1,000 R&D employees from different cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Dalian. Last Friday, IBM closed the intranet access rights of its China R&D staff. Those IBM employees went to work as usual before the closing of access rights, and some tech staff were still working overtime, an IBM China lab tech employee said. [Jiemian, in Chinese]