IBM reported its 20th consecutive quarter of revenue declines. The company’s “big bets”—notably in cloud computing, where Amazon dominates—are still not growing fast enough to offset declining sales in its older businesses. Revenue fell 2.8% in the first quarter.
The company’s shares has fallen more than 8% today.
IBM is in the midst of an uneasy transition from its traditional business model to newer bets, like cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
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Still, New York–based company has seen a five-year stretch of year-over-year revenue declines going back to April 2012, when sales were nearly flat from the year-ago period, according to FactSet.
The legacy enterprise technology company, founded over 100 years ago, has reorganized around “strategic imperatives,” which include businesses like cloud, analytics, mobility and security. In 2016, those strategic imperatives grew to represent more than 40 percent of total revenue, CEO Ginni Rometty said earlier this year.
In the first quarter, strategic imperatives revenue grew 12 percent to $7.8 billion, not adjusted for currency, while cloud revenue grew 33 percent to $3.5 billion. Net income was $2.3 billion.
The reality is that nothing is working for IBM. This company could be going down the drain. There is no technology segment where IBM can claim to be a leader. It is not for Cloud. Even its Watson AI may not be better than what Google has when you compare value and price.
That said, it is very likely that IBM may die before 2030 unless it can find a way to begin to grow. The Kodak way awaits this American iconic firm.