IBM and Microsoft Fake Headcount in Exactly the Same Way (While Mass Layoffs Persist and Real Revenue Falls, Not Just Compared to Inflation Rates)
They convert profits into fake 'growth' instead of cashing in (so debt continues to soar), in effect gaming the system based on misleading metrics
EARLIER this month we said that "Microsoft's Acquisition of Activision (to Fake Revenue Growth by Buying Revenue) Was a Failure", citing what we wrote 1.5 years earlier ("Why Microsoft Was Trying to Buy Activision and 'Look Big' in 2022"). It seems apparent that Microsoft continues to lie about the wellbeing of XBox by pretending it "grew" (because Activision's revenue got added to it). In reality, XBox sales fell by more than 50%, based on Microsoft itself.
But it seems like IBM has resorted to similar tricks by buying some mid-sized company every other month or so, i.e. adding revenue and people from somewhere else. IBM continues to lay off tens of thousands of people, but then it uses what's left of the profits to just buy companies (to fake revenue growth... theirs, not IBM's). Then IBM can pretend headcount is unchanged, as this hours-old article from Nigeria put it: "One of the largest global technology firms, IBM, announced a second round of job cuts targeting senior programmers, sales staff, and support personnel under its “workforce rebalancing” strategy. Although the company aims to downsize a small percentage of its global workforce, it expects to end the year with a workforce size similar to its beginning."
Well, yes, as it keeps buying companies. But its debt grows. It cannot pay back its debt. All that money is used to fake revenue growth and pay interest on the debt. It's a really bad strategy, an unsustainable mess, but Wall Street likes it that way. Incomplete metrics being optimised for will doom a lot of companies, rendering them little but a pile of debt chasing the government for bailouts. They offload all the risk to taxpayers. █