As the world turns to big names in cloud and IT to get through the pandemic, IBM still manages to shrink

IBM on Thursday reported $20.4bn in revenue for its Q4 2020 earnings results, a decline of six per cent, and $73.6bn for the full year, down 4.6 per cent year-on-year. That led to profits plummeting by 42 per cent for the year, even after it experienced cloud growth in certain areas. Financial analysts had anticipated …

[Anonymous Coward]

What's new?

Another quarter/year, another loss of income/profits/EPS by IBM.

[trevorde]

Ginny to the rescue!

Consultancy services at only $20k per day*

* helicopter, office, staff, tea & coffee not included

[AMBxx]

It's time for

more redundancies.

Shrinking to grow, as ever.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: It's time for

I think they're expecting to shed 90,000 people shortly, anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

What is their definition of cloud?

'Cos there reported revenues don't really tie in with market share reported elsewhere.

"Hybrid Cloud" probably includes any mainframe with an internet connection.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The operating environment remains difficult, because of what clients are experiencing at the moment,"

So that would be a shit service for the price customers are paying for the quality of service they *thought* they were going to get?

Never trust an IBM salesperson. It's invariably a loss-lead to get a foot in the door in order to sell more crap.

If the support contract is cheap, its cheap for a reason. It will be a loss-lead. It will automatically mean moving the work to the lowest paid workforce just to try and make the account cost-neutral until the up-selling can begin in earnest. The current climate means a lot of businesses are holding still for now. No up-selling, the accounts remain cost-neutral or at a loss, and the GTS losses mount. If GBS can't make the numbers work for them, it gets chucked over the fence to GTS. I used to see this all the time when I was there.

[Doctor Syntax]

For the last paragraph--->

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic El Reg

"He said other upbeat things about commitment to clients and additional work to be done, though nothing worth reporting."

Came for the snark, leaving satisfied.

[naive]

They did better in 1977

When they had a revenue of 18.1 billion dollar, corrected for inflation of 450% that would be over 80 billion today.

Their profit in that year was 2.71 billion, 13% better than in 1976.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF

is a macro environment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Revenues will be even lower soon

When IBM breaks off the GTS division, it's quarterly revenue will shrink a further 31%. Or 21% of Apple's quarterly revenues. In hindsight Buffett was smart to sell out of IBM and switch to Apple.

[JWLong]

Watch' em

The bean counters that is, as they run a company into the ground.

[Erik4872]

NewCo indeed...

I'm willing to bet a round for the entire Reg staff that within 30 days of NewCo's formation, a "surprise takeover bid" will be submitted by Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Cognizant or HCL. Newish IBM has delusions of being a white-shoe management consultancy like McKinsey or BCG, and having "work-doers" or "thing makers" on staff would sully that image -- they only want thinkfluencers.

I'm shocked that DXC hasn't been completely parted out and the corpse sold to one of the Indian outsourcers yet...but I fully expect NewCo will just re-issue their employees' badges and complete moving all the work to the cheapest possible location. Both will likely end up just making one of the offshore outsourcers slightly larger...it's not like there was a ton of innovative talent left in either of these orgs after the multiple spinoffs and the redundancies.