When will IBM get achieve a healthy revenue growth rate? It has been many years since we have had consistent impressive revenue growth. It seems executives are focused on cost cutting and acquisitions to achieve profitability and meager revenue growth.
10 replies (most recent on top)
It is just the Peter principle… most if not all IBM management has risen to their level of incompetence. So, what do you expect? This company is in serious trouble. Time to abandon ship or see if you can ride with the orchestra till the last minute! The Titanic is sinking… lol!
The breakup already stated with Gin_ni and Tonic.
She destroyed innovation, she destroyed revenue, she destroyed the brand, she destroyed cash flow, she destroyed with M&As that either didn't work or she didn't know how to manage, and so it goes.
AK is the perfect "King of Mediocre Moh Ron" Stew P_e D Chief Embarrassment Officer that can follow such a Gin_ni and Tonic class act.
Once you start promoting mediocre, it's like a snowball effect, doesn't stop and more mediocre follows.
you ibmers... always looking for strategic growth. why can't you all just be impressed with kavenbroth's impressive girth growth?
why 2-3 years down the road ? He could start the IBM breakup in year 1, and still have ample time to upskill Krabanaugh.
Either way, AK will announce his retirement within the next 6 months and will be replaced by RT. RT will be even worse and will oversee the breakup of IBM 2-3 years down the road.
IBM is in deep trouble. It no longer makes anything so there is no innovation so there is no revenue growth. Arvind only cares about 2 things: 1. FCF free cash flow that he was told would drive 2. stock price. It is so much easier to cut costs (gut the US and move offshore to low cost countries and get what you pay for) than to grow revenues. And IBM's goto tool for revenue growth going back to the G Man Gerstner (Lotus $3.5B) is to buy software companies. IBM's Consulting has been gutted by RAs and many are saying consulting is dead now with AI doing in 30 minutes what used to take 10 consultants to come up with in a month. IBM's 3 pillars of 1. Infrastructure (got gutted by x86 for on prem and now AWS/Azure/Google for cloud) is lost at sea with no life preserver. 2. Consulting, never great, over priced, will be gutted by AI. 3. Software just a run rate renewal business as there are very few net new IBM software installs.
What I think will happen is what happened to CA Computer Associates once a software high flyer founded in 1976 by Charles Wang. It bought and sold sw co's for decades by flamed out and was bought by Broadcom (also bought VMware and is gutting it) for $19B in 2018.
It is a very ugly picture and has been "mis managed" by arrogant and incompetent people who were promoted to levels way over their heads for 3 decades.
Like many have said here, Q3 results-Q4 projections will determine AK's "tenure" and the trajectory that IBM will take.
If AK stays beyond Q3, the answer is, no hope. If he's replaced, the answer is "it depends (who comes next)". Based on the very poor choices (and I will talk about what I know, Ginni and AK), IBM is very doomed. It will be like Intel 2.0
Ginni was perhaps the worst CEO of her "generation". AK is competing with AT&T's CEO as the very worst. Both of them are ki-ling the very little that is left from what once were two good companies. They both have a team of "executives Moh Rons", one more 'stew p-e d' than the other.
I read something about Ginni in another post, and I agree. Once the board rewarded her with a higher comp package as she was ruining the company probably irreversibly, you knew that something was rotten.
But but but Acquisitions!!!
What a bunch of HorsePucky
YES! *
- assuming negative values count as impressive
Yes, when He-l freezes over.