The layoffs represent about 5% of the company's 21,400 employees. Lenovo managers will identify the workers by the end of March, spreading the cuts throughout company offices in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) regions.

The changes make sense in terms of the competitive PC market, analysts said.

"Business desktops are a narrow, narrow margin business; they are almost a commodity. You have to be very efficient in order to make money selling desktops," said Gordon Haff, senior analyst at research company Illuminata Inc.

Lenovo faced a challenge achieving that efficiency because it was still struggling to integrate IBM's PC division into the rest of the company. Lenovo acquired that business in 2005.

IBM's chief financial officer Mark Loughridge said the west European market was performing poorly so jobs would be lost in the UK, Germany, France and Italy.

He gave no figures on how many jobs would be lost in each country.

Answering questions after a conference call with analysts, he said the job cuts were new, and not "bundled" together parts of an ongoing restructuring.