The earnings release speaks for itself (love that typeface – they must still do press releases on a Selectric typewriter in the IBM museum), but a few comments:
A billion dollar (as in $1,000,000,000) miss on the top line. Everything in varying levels of freefall, led by the swan dive of the hardware business (Power Series down 38%!). After a decade of the consistency so prized by Wall Street, that is three misses in a row for IBM and six straight quarters of declining revenue. Yet they beat their EPS number (modulo “other stuff”) and recommitted to the EPS roadmap for the year. Somehow, profits keep going up even as revenue declines (key contributor: a materially lower tax rate).
The earnings release in a nutshell: “Growth markets revenue down 9 percent”.
Cloud is starting to bite IBM and as I have noted, they lack a relevance amidst generational change. The company made some more detailed yet meaningless claims about cloud revenue. As with Q2, “cloud revenue up more than 70 percent year to date” but with no definition of what constitutes cloud (last week they were out making a distinction between “cloud-enabled” and actual cloud services). They did break new ground and say “$460 million is delivered as a cloud service” which presumably is mostly SoftLayer. Most glaring, IBM still doesn’t seem to have any material customer references, either in terms of the cloud technology being consumed or in terms of business impact.
IBM’s fundamental problem: they supply those being disrupted by technology, not those doing the disrupting. Today an IBM dependency can be an existential risk.
