IBM has stunned its Greenock workforce with a ‘bombshell’ announcement that ALL local jobs connected to the £1.4 billion sale of a server business will be lost, it was claimed today.

The computer giant — which has been established in the town since 1951 — is today refusing to comment in any way on the matter.

Global bosses are said to have hit staff with ‘devastating’ news that work related to the server deal is to be moved to China.

It had been hoped that local jobs would transfer to new server business owner Lenovo — but that has now been dashed, according to IBM Greenock insiders.

One worker told the Telegraph: “All that will be left here is a storage division, but everyone reckons that this will eventually go too.

“They are effectively doing away with a manufacturing support plant in Greenock, so there would be little point in having a storage division.

“In reality this will affect everyone currently employed at IBM locally. It’s devastating.” The staff member said that the plan was to move all operations relating to the x-86 server business to China during the second quarter of this year.

We told earlier this month how workers feared up to 200 local jobs could go as a result of the deal with Lenovo — the world’s biggest PC maker.

IBM said then that redundancies among its 7,500 affected workers around the world — including those in Greenock — were ‘not anticipated’.

But another of the company’s Inverclyde-based staff said: “This is a progressive rundown of Greenock — it’s just one bombshell announcement after another right now. And it seems that the only sure thing is that there are more of them in the pipeline.

“We were told that we would know within 30 days whether we will transfer to Lenovo or not and the deadline for that is the end of the week.

“Everything is so up in the air right now that even the management in Greenock don’t know the full picture.

“We knew that Lenovo would not take on all 7,500 employees worldwide and that the actual figure would be around 3,500 to 4,000.

“We haven’t been given any real details and were just told to contact our managers with any questions — but they don’t have any answers.” The Telegraph put a series of questions to IBM on the matter but the company refused to provide any comment.