Alistair Barr

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM is planning to cut thousands more jobs this year and the technology company expects to take about $1 billion in charges from the re-organization effort.

IBM reported lackluster fourth-quarter results late Tuesday that included a 26% slump in hardware revenue and a slight decline in services revenue.

Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter told analysts after the results that the company will take a "workforce re-balancing" charge of about $1 billion this year, roughly in line with what it did in 2013.

IBM shares fell 2.9% to $182.95 in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Most of the new job cuts will likely be in IBM's hardware division, particularly its Unix and storage businesses.

"They hinted at least some of them would be in their hardware business, especially Unix, which they stated would not return to historical levels, and needed to be adjusted accordingly," Tony Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said.

IBM typically re-balances its giant workforce every year, but the job cuts in 2013 and the reductions coming in 2014 are a bit bigger than in the past because the company has been struggling with weak revenue growth, the analyst explained.

It costs IBM about $70,000 to lay an employee off, so if the latest re-organization is mostly related to staff reductions, that suggests the company may be cutting 10,000 to 15,000 workers, Sacconaghi estimated. IBM has about 400,000 employees in total in more than 170 countries.

IBM is the latest established technology company to cut jobs. Intel said Friday it is planning about 5,000 job cuts, while rival semiconductor company Texas Instruments is laying off 1,100 staff.