Spokeswoman denies reports of shifting developers' jobs from the U.S. and Europe German electronics and engineering giant Siemens AG plans to hire IT professionals in the growth markets of China, India and Eastern Europe without axing jobs in Western Europe and the U.S., a company spokeswoman said Tuesday.The company has no plans to shift programming or other IT jobs from its traditional markets to budding new markets but aims rather to hire locally and elsewhere to expand operations in these regions, the spokeswoman said.The remarks come after a Siemens official in India was quoted Monday in numerous reports, including a Wall Street Journal article, saying that the Munich-based company had recognized a need to move a chunk of its software-development activity from high-cost countries to low-cost countries. The official spoke of more than 15,000 jobs being moved from Western Europe and the U.S. to China, India and Eastern Europe, according to The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. The Siemens spokeswoman Tuesday, however, declined to put a number on the amount of staff to be hired in developing markets, and denied that the expansion would result in reduction of developers’ jobs in the U.S. and Western Europe.In recent months, numerous companies in Western Europe and the U.S. have shifted software development and back-office jobs to low-labor countries, such as India, where wages are noticeably lower. Software Development