there is panic in armonk. the divs like finance and gts that they wanted to pawn off, needed to conflate this qtrs rev numbers, have no buyers. ginni is obsessed with salvaging her legacy - to no avail. bye.
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She wants to sell off GTS? She's the one who bought PWC for $3.5 billion! ITS used to be something, but they killed that, and SO has always been a joke unable to deliver service and losing money.
Who's going to buy that mess?
I believe there are lots of buyers, but the question is at what price. IBM has a history of valuing their divisions at a far higher value than the rest of the world. PC company sold for 1.25 billion plus 500 million of debt vs the 3 billion IBM wanted. Intel server division sold for 2.1 billion vs the 6 billion IBM initially wanted. My guess is IGF is easy to value, and there are plenty of buyers, as it's just debt, vs industry accepted risk. (Eg IGF does a credit score on all of their loans). GTS is a harder thing to value, as IBM most likely wants to keep all things "cloud" / strategic investments within GTS and spin the rest off. If HPE could value their sale to CSC, my guess is some smart guys at HCL, Tata, Wipro, etc etc will be able to value the pieces of GTS that IBM doesn't want. GInni will just have to convince the board that it's in IBM's best interest to accept a lower price. Same goes for HW division, and what is left of SWG. All things non-cloud / and non-strategic investments are on the block and must go. It's IBM's way to realize an IP revenue stream for investments made over the last 20 years. The great shrinkage of IBM continues. The real question is what does IBM want to be once these "legacy" divisions are gone??? I would say approx a 55 billion dollar company remains after the spinoffs. Let's remember EMC was acquired for more than 55 billion. Somebody will want the "new" non-legacy IBM. The question is who and at what price. We are watching the Aikers strategy pulled off just 25 years later