NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM will hire 15,000 new employees in 2004, with an additional 4,500 jobs in the United States, a top executive said Saturday.

“We are going to hire more in the U.S. than we shift” overseas, said Randy MacDonald, IBM’s senior vice president for human resources.

Armonk, New York-based International Business Machines Corp. has faced criticism for its plans to shift some U.S. workers to cheaper locations such as India and China.

In total, the move will increase IBM’s workforce by nearly 5 percent to about 330,000 or more depending on attrition. That number is the highest since 1991 when IBM began a decade-long overhaul under former chief executive Louis Gerstner.

More than half of IBM’s employees are outside the United States.

An article in The Wall Street Journal in December said IBM planned to move 4,730 highly skilled software jobs from the United States to India. MacDonald said that figure was incorrect but he declined to say how many jobs were being sent overseas.

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