Adjusting for exchange rates? WTF is this even legal? Anyhow IBM Is slowly fading into another in the landfill.
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 …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 20th October 2015 06:07 GMT 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.
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Tuesday 20th October 2015 07:55 GMT 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?
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Tuesday 20th October 2015 14:41 GMT 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.)
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Tuesday 20th October 2015 08:03 GMT 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.
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Tuesday 20th October 2015 08:52 GMT 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!
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Tuesday 20th October 2015 15:11 GMT 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...
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Tuesday 20th October 2015 11:39 GMT 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.
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