IBM Is Still an Awful Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 20, 7:30AM EDT

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IBM Is Still an Awful Company — © DKart / Getty Images

International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM | IBM Price Prediction) has “recovered” from years of decline under CEO Ginni Rometty (2012 to 2020). She presided over quarter after quarter of falling revenue. Under new CEO Arvind Krishna, revenue growth has returned. However, once one of the world’s largest companies and owner of among the world’s greatest brands, IBM has become a third-tier tech company.
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In the most recent quarter, revenue rose 6% to $14.1 billion. IBM lost $3.2 billion. Compare that to Apple, which made $19.4 billion in net income during its most recent quarter, on revenue of $83.0 billion.

IBM always has obscured the size of its cloud revenue, based on how it shows up in the P&L statement by division. It said “hybrid cloud” revenue was $22.2 billion over the past 12 months, or about $5 billion a quarter. Amazon’s AWS cloud operation had almost $20 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter.
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IBM’s current market capitalization is $110 billion, well short of Apple’s $2.31 trillion, Microsoft’s $1.76 trillion and Amazon’s $1.17 trillion.
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In the most recent Kantar Global Brands list (2022), the Apple brand was worth $947 billion. Amazon was worth $706 billion and Microsoft worth $611 billion. But IBM was worth $97 billion, just ahead of Instagram at $92 billion.

In 1970, IBM ranked fifth on the Fortune 500. Last year, it ranked 49th.
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IBM’s stock price has fallen 20% in the past five years. The S&P 500 is up 44%, and Microsoft is 200% higher.

IBM has become an afterthought in the tech world. It does not stand out in any category. Those things will not change.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.