https://finbox.com/NYSE:IBM/explorer/total_debt/
12 replies (most recent on top)
LOL love this. I hate the management and leadership. Absolutely BS of a company.
@bn Agree. Reminds me of the C.A. model, Inovation by Assimilation.
GREAT post!
@bj yes Alvind hasn't got a clue what he is doing.
and the current situation reminds me of the joke about the 3 envelopes :
A new CEO was hired to take over a struggling company. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. “Open these if you run into serious trouble,” he said.
Well, three months later sales and profits were still way down and the new CEO was catching a lot of heat. He began to panic but then he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, “Blame your predecessor.” The new CEO called a press conference and explained that the previous CEO had left him with a real mess and it was taking a bit longer to clean it up than expected, but everything was on the right track. Satisfied with his comments, the press – and Wall Street – responded positively.
Another quarter went by and the company continued to struggle. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, “Reorganize.” So he fired key people, consolidated divisions and cut costs everywhere he could. This he did and Wall Street, and the press, applauded his efforts.
Three months passed and the company was still short on sales and profits. The CEO would have to figure out how to get through another tough earnings call. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope. The message said, “Prepare three envelopes.”
There are acquisitions and there are acquisitions. EVERYONE does it. Look at Salesforce, for example, that's 100% them.
What is going on at IBM right now seems to be throwing "stuff" (s@#t) at the wall to see what sticks.
Same behavior, but doing the same thing doesn't equal to "because we buy, we have a plan behind it" - no, not always. Sometimes it is just for "Wall Street messaging" purposes and/or lack of "knowing what we are doing" (Alvind and the Gang, we had some bad ones before, he takes the prize for the worst).
Without acquisitions, there is no IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM
Just have a look at the major SW acquisitions over the last 6 years. Datastax, Hashicorp, Aptio, Turbonomic, Instana, Red Hat. What would IBM SW revenue be without them? Peanuts.
IBM Consulting itself was an acquisition (PWC, 2002) and they acquire more consultancies every year.
Why? The core business is shrinking. Organic growth is negative. IBM has to constantly "buy revenue" to survive. The flipside of this is selling businesses to generate cash to pursue this strategy. Kyndryl, Weather, Watson Health, Lotus to HCL, etc. This is why people say IBM is not a tech company but a financial engineering company.
I have a different theory, but I may be wrong.
He really has no idea what he's doing, BUT needs to show that he actually does have an idea, so acquisitions are like a marketing tool. He's trying to attempt to show that he is doing things and has a plan and a clue - with the hope that the trick may work, at least for a while. It's not his money, so what's. a few millions here and there?
He's just buying time....
"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time" - Abe Lincoln
Is Alvind trying to intentionally load this company up with so much debt it’ll need a buyout ?
Overpaying for these nickel and dime companies is a giant waste of money and rank and file employees pay the price while Alvind and The PipMunks get rewarded
$6.4B of that was Hashicorp. Datastax was over $1B. Most of the rest was a half dozen smaller acquisitions.
IBM - Too big, bloated and bureaucratic to succeed in the USA.
Made for India by Alvind and the Pipmunks.
If there is a CEO that needs to go NOW, it is ALVIND. The C-Suite is a lot to be desired....
What was once a great company....
Sounds like Alvind and the Pipmunks have been running the company into the ground while Krabanaugh cooks the books.
Cuts have to start somewhere - maybe with these low cost countries with too many employees. And of course Krabanaugh's F&O organization with too many managers, BS artists and big chiefs who talk with with strange accents and sit around twiddling their fingers and generating ZERO income and revenue for IBM. Plenty of room at the top to start the cutting - just think of the savings and keep on cutting and gutting F&O. Hire contractors as they're easy to blame for the messes that the obese Krabanaugh makes.