Probably the best thing you can say about IBM’s latest financial results is that they were OK. The company’s revenues are pretty flat, which means it is still losing market position relative to the competition.
IBM just declared annual revenues of $79.59 billion for fiscal 2018, which is roughly the same as the $79.14bn it made in 2017, and the $79.92bn from 2016. In fact, it’s not significantly different from the $81.74bn it declared for 2015.
Of course, stasis is a huge improvement on previous years where revenues sometimes plunged by billions. However, as a company, IBM is still going nowhere fast. Its annual revenues were $81.67bn way back in 1998.
IBM has stopped its decline in revenues, but it’s still losing market position to fast-growing rivals such as Google (above), Microsoft and Amazon’s AWS.
Chart by Jack Schofield
How many computer companies are selling less stuff than they did 20 years ago, before the dot-com boom/bust, the internet market explosion, the arrival of smartphones and tablets, and a huge move to the cloud?