back to article Your one-minute guide to IBM's financial future – or just imagine a skier tumbling down a slope

Today, IBM is said to be the biggest technology services biz on Earth – and the only way is down. Big Blue's fortunes are continuing in a downward trend: its global revenue has fallen, profit is down, and its share price slipped five per cent in after-hours trading on Monday. The company blamed the strong dollar for bruising …

  1. a_yank_lurker

    Adjusting for exchange rates? WTF is this even legal? Anyhow IBM Is slowly fading into another in the landfill.

    1. Gordon 10
      FAIL

      Not only is it legal its illegal not to do it for USGAAP/IFRS reporting. there are other currencies other than the dollar you know.

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Trollface

        Of course he doesn't know. For any true, red-blooded American the entire world uses the dollar and speaks American, or English in some of those really wierd places.

        1. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

          re: entire world uses the dollar

          This reminds me 90's in Russia, where dollar really was the currency. Also called "bucks" in the common parlance.

          There was a joke circulating about a Russian going to the US and wondering wildly - hey, their dollars look just the same as our bucks!

        2. a_yank_lurker

          Not an accountant, and wondering if some the reporting is bending the rules to make the financials look better. In other words,are they playing games with the numbers to say they are in better shape than they truly are?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Unless the management stops behaving like a bunch of accountants

    This will continue. Watching this from the outside, but with friends within the company, you see them try to pull all sorts of accounting tricks to hit the expected numbers (cancelling leave and training for example) without fixing the underlying problems, and at a cost of de-motivating the staff who are actually earning the money. Any company that makes share price a target is doomed.

    1. ratfox

      Re: Unless the management stops behaving like a bunch of accountants

      IBM has a long history of hiring intelligent people, and I'm sure some of them are staying until retirement. But in the current job market, what intelligent person would take a job at IBM, when much more friendly work environments are available?

      1. ScottME

        Re: Unless the management stops behaving like a bunch of accountants

        These days the intelligent people at IBM are increasingly leaving well before retirement, after using the place to settle on a field of expertise and build their networks -- and it's still probably the best place for that in the whole IT industry. Loyalty is dead there, in either direction. For a couple of decades now it's been no place to rest on your laurels and relax towards retirement - IBM has well-honed and well-practised techniques to target coasters and manage them out of the company. (I'm not saying their targeting is accurate, mind.)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Chickens coming home to roost

    When the only strategy appears be workforce reductions to support share buy backs to artificially inflate the share price its no wonder that they are in trouble.

    Its a real shame that a company that pioneered cloud (back when they called it grid) is slowly becoming irrelevant.

    I'd be tempted to call them another HP but that's an insult too far.

    1. paulf
      Trollface

      Re: Chickens coming home to roost

      "I'd be tempted to call them another HP but that's an insult too far."

      Would that be an insult to HP or IBM?

      From my point of view it's a hard one to call...

      1. theblackhand

        Re: Chickens coming home to roost

        Well, IBM didn't buy Autonomy for almost double what it was worth....

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And what you don't know is...

    ... IBM accounts a lot of hardware and software as a cloud sales. It only has to do anything with a cloud to be counted as a cloud. The same with services. If you sale, for example, storage + servers + TSM + monitoring + implementation services of this system which only will be placed somewhere near the real cloud - BANG! this is also a cloud. IBM doesn't have almost any cloud offering and absolutely can not compete with Goggle/Amazaon/Microsoft. And it shouldn't, by the way, as this is near to zero margin business. IBM became first class financial engineering company, not a first class technical company. Earnings per share or die!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And what you don't know is...

      To explain the down vote:

      - while what IBM accounts as cloud maybe questionable to build a bigger total, they purchased Softlayer to provide cloud services

      - just because Google/Amazon/MS report little to no profit from their cloud services at present, a big chunk of the revenue is being ploughed back into expansion. AWS are starting to win a lot of business from the US government and are starting to report profits...

  5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "or 27 per cent if you take into account ... the missing System x cash"

    So, having sold the business they sort of pretend it's still there for accounting purposes?

    1. DavCrav

      "So, having sold the business they sort of pretend it's still there for accounting purposes?"

      No, but if (say) you split a company into two equal halves, and both report a drop in earnings the next year of 40%, in fact the two businesses together are doing great. Retailers do it all the time when they talk about 'like-for-like' sales, which strips out the effects of opening or closing shops, and allows you to see the underlying trends.

  6. Spookybuz

    Flash = BigData

    XIV = Cloud

    SVC = Cloud

    POWER = Cloud

    Z = Mobile /Cloud

    ...again HW is the bad guy and Cloud figures are + xx% ...how can this be :-)

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like