Another Lost Year for IBM

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
Another Lost Year for IBM

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International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM | IBM Price Prediction) recently said it will release the world’s largest supercomputer next year. Its stock did not react. IBM is too far behind others in the tech sector. Earnings helped its stock price earlier this year. But, even with the results Wall Street has favored, IBM’s stock has gained only 35% year to date. The S&P 500 is 24% higher. The stock of AI industry leader Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) has risen 177% since the end of 2023.

IBM’s trouble falls into two categories. It is too small to compete with the industry giants. Additionally, it lags far behind them in cloud computing.

As artificial intelligence (AI) moves toward becoming the revenue driver for big tech, the most crucial current measurement is the market share of the massive cloud computing business. According to Synergy Research Group, IBM’s market share is 2%. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), the industry leader, has a share of 31%. Microsoft Inc. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is in second place at 20%, followed by Google at 12%. Industry cloud commuting revenue worldwide was $84 billion in the third quarter, up 23% compared to last year’s quarter.

IBM’s total revenue in the third quarter was $15.1 billion, which was 1% higher than the same quarter the year before. It lost $330 million, compared to a profit of $1.7 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Its revenue is a small fraction of that of companies like Microsoft and Nvidia and is growing much slower.

Another measure of IBM’s trouble is its market cap of $204 billion. Microsoft’s is $3.2 trillion, and Nvidia’s is $3.4 trillion. Finding a better summary to explain IBM’s current problem is hard.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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