IBM Starts Refurbishing Power Systems Machines In China

March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM makes Power Systems machinery in China to sell to customers in certain parts of the globe, and now the company has opened up a refurbishing center that will be taking back machines in trade and refurbishing them for resale in the country.

IBM has opened up a server and PC refurbishing center near one of its factories in Shenzhen, China, which will be run by the company’s Global Asset Recovery Services division, part of its Global Financing group. The facility is starting out modestly and will only represent a tiny portion of the iron that Global Asset Recovery Services handles as it either refurbishes or scraps various equipment with IBM or other labels on them. Last year, according to a source at IBM, the company handled around 2 million pieces of gear. The Shenzhen facility will join other manufacturing, refurbishing, and scrapping operations that Big Blue operates in the United States–which are located outside of Endicott, New York, where the company was founded up in the Finger Lakes region of the state, and in in Raleigh, North Carolina, where IBM’s former PC business and its System x server business is spiritually located. IBM has other refurbishing facilities in Australia, Japan, Brazil, Canada, France, and Germany, too.

IBM expects to refurbish about 100,000 used machines through the Shenzhen facility in 2014. About 10,000 of those machines will be Power Systems, with another 10,000 being PCs of various makes and models and another 80,000 or so being a mix of IBM and other-branded X86 servers.

IBM still makes entry and midrange Power Systems machines in Rochester, Minnesota, the home of the AS/400; this is also where its BlueGene line of Power-based supercomputers are manufactured. High-end Power Systems machines are made in its Poughkeepsie, New York, mainframe factory. In May 2010, IBM moved high-end manufacturing of Power and mainframe systems from a factory outside of Dublin, Ireland, to a new facility in Singapore, and in the fall of 2010 it moved the entry and midrange Power Systems manufacturing operations the Shenzhen facility in China.