IBM Is Still Big Tech’s Dog
When IBM posted its latest earnings, its stock did what it usually does after the announcement. It fell.
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When International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM | IBM Price Prediction) posted its latest earnings, its stock did what it usually does after the announcement. It fell. And it fell on a day when the market in general soared. IBM seems to think people should be impressed by 9% revenue growth in a double-digit growth tech world.
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IBM’s revenue reached $15.5 billion, which is extremely small by big tech standards. IBM’s financial reporting is messy and hard to decipher. Often it mentions percentages without dollar amounts, which is a good way to obscure real performance. The quarterly report posted some figures quarter over quarter and others year over year. IBM’s management should be ashamed.
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IBM is most proud of its cloud business. The closest an observer can come to the performance of this division is that “infrastructure” division revenue rose by 19% to $4.2 billion. Some hybrid numbers appear to be rolled into other divisions.
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A good way to look at how poorly IBM is doing is to examine one of the cloud computing leaders. In the most recent quarter, Microsoft had revenue of $49.9 billion, up 18%. “Intelligent cloud” revenue rose to $19.1 billion from $15.1 billion, an increase of 26%.
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A final note. IBM’s market cap is $117 billion. Microsoft’s is $1.8 trillion.
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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.
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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.
