Overview
- IBM said in a July 14 investor letter that preliminary second‑quarter revenue was about $17.2 billion and adjusted EPS was $2.93, both below Wall Street expectations.
- CEO Arvind Krishna wrote that execution was worse than expected and that the company “did not adapt or move fast enough” to sudden customer buying patterns.
- The firm said many large customers rushed to buy servers, storage and high‑performance memory to build AI data centers before price increases, which reduced budgets for IBM’s mainframes and higher‑margin software.
- Shares fell roughly 24–25% in one session, the biggest one‑day drop since 1987, wiping out tens of billions in market value and dragging down several software and IT peers.
- IBM will release full Q2 results on July 22 and investors will focus on z17 product performance, the size and timing of delayed deals, and whether the revenue weakness is temporary or signals a durable spending shift.