Can Krishna’s leadership set IBM’s stock price on a new trajectory, and return it to its historical
perch atop the enterprise tech mountain? That probably depends on two things.
One: Can he make IBM a consistent top-line grower? Because IBM has been around for more than
a century, it has a lot of old, profitable businesses like mainframes that are big and essential but
not growing. They’re great for cash flow, but not for the stock price. How do you keep them
around to fuel the future, but prevent them from defining the company?
Two: Can he solve IBM’s workforce conundrum? IBM had a massive payroll of more than 350,000
full-time employees as of the end of 2019. That’s 2.5 times as many as Apple and 3.5 times as
many as Google. Many of them work in IBM’s services business, doing the kind of nuts-and-bolts
software work customers need to prepare for the move to the cloud. How much does IBM invest
in that business, considering it isn’t growing and that cloud-driven trends threaten to shrink it?
Pay attention to #2.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/arvind-krishna-takes-over-as-ibm-ceo.html