IBM's Debt Ballooned by 8.5 Billion Dollars in Just 3 Months!
Hallmark of a company in a state of disarray, trying to spend its way out of trouble
IBM is "burning money". But the burning is done in the back room, so most people - not even workers - can see it.
A few hours ago (not days, hours) the figure above became public. It always comes out a couple of days after results. Why? Ask Wall Street.
The figure is huge, even by our own prior expectations. If a company borrows money at this rate, and if its profits (not revenue) are lower than the debt it adds, what does that say?
Perhaps we shall consider the cost of severance or the loss of trust (contracts, too) associated with moving workloads to cheaper staff, set aside the damage to reputation or goodwill. Keep an eye on these figures to better understand the debt and whether the mass layoffs incurred a massive hidden cost. IBM wants us to think that its "goodwill" (whatever that even means!) gained about 5.5 billion dollars in "worth" over the past 3 months. Ask employees of IBM if they agree.
They don't.
IBM wants us to think its loss of US government contracts only totalled at somewhere near 100 million dollars, but some IBM contracts are "valued" at about a billion dollars (each!), so the simpler explanation here is, IBM lies to shareholders. And it's getting harder. Blindly trusting what a "reputable brand" like IBM says in official statements only works as long as you don't get repeatedly caught in a lie. See "IBM stock drops 7% after $100m federal contracts suspended" (probably a lot more than $100m, as explained earlier).
IBM's current CEO isn't honest. Watch what insiders are saying:
These people aren't "crazy" or "living in another planet". They see things that the CEO himself does not see and/or will never see (let alone understand; he has not done practical work for decades).
To get workers to resign (so that they don't get paid and don't count as layoffs) IBM is again utilising RTOs. This was verified by Thomas from The Register and yesterday an article cited this, stating: "The hits keep coming for remote work, with two of the biggest tech firms in the world issuing new mandates and ultimatums this week that will force employees back in the office at least three days per week. It turns out that the pandemic was not the paradigm shift we thought it was going to be when it comes to remote work. While companies embraced it with open arms a few years ago, the business world has been swift in demanding employees return to the office with increasing intensity."
Further down it says: "Unlike Google, IBM isn’t as open to being flexible with employees who live 50 miles from a compatible location, and is offering relocation fees for those outside of that range, instead of simply allowing them to continue working from home."
A lot of the sites that write about this aren't news sites but LLM slopfarms (plagiarising other sites' nonsense or even copying/reusing slop from other slopfarms). That's really sad. Earlier on I saw IBM-sponsored sites with glamorous headlines, signalling that IBM is doing great and has never been better. The media says it needs bribes to survive and then moans about how people do not trust the media anymore. Maybe stop writing about companies that pay you to write about them?
About RTOs and forced relocation (similar things, sometimes overlapping), yesterday somebody wrote: "last time they did this it was to get older folks to quit... they are less likely to agree to move."
That's the intention.
IBM can lie all it wants and the boy can cry "wolf!" all he wants. Eventually a real wolf will eat the boy and shareholders will dump IBM. █