IBM is Trying to Turn Debt (Borrowed Money) Into Fake Growth and It'll Worsen Matters
IBM is in trouble. It is also a bubble.
How does IBM keep pretending that there is growth?
Cooking the books.
Another way to accomplish this? Exploit vendor lockin (e.g. mainframes) for price hikes? Tell some stories about costs of components?
As somebody put it a few hours ago: "Tell me one thing that is not overpriced these days at IBM?"
As noted last night, IBM is sharing false or misleading figures about alleged "growth" and the following new comment says:
The key fact is that IBM’s Software revenue grew 5%, while organic Software growth was essentially flat—meaning acquisitions drove nearly all of the increase.Data grew 19%, likely helped heavily by Confluent and DataStax; Automation grew only 4%, including HashiCorp, Apptio and Turbonomic. Meanwhile, Transaction Processing fell 8%, showing continued decline in the legacy mainframe software base.
So the concern is valid: IBM is buying growth faster than it is creating it internally.
Then it ruins it. See the plans for Red Hat.
The same year IBM faces several investigations into securities fraud IBM reports that its "Goodwill" rose 13.86% in "value" in just 12 months.
So they put in their balance sheets a fake "growth" in something that does not even exist.
If IBM is growing, why does it get rid of so many people? █
