Key points
- IBM fell 25% on July 14 after pre-announcing its miss, the worst day in its history.
- The stock slid to about $205 Wednesday, down 38% from its June high, at 19x earnings with a 3% dividend.
- Washington proposed a $1B CHIPS award for IBM's new quantum foundry in May. Tonight's 5 p.m. ET call is the reset.
IBM (IBM) reports earnings after the close today and normally I would tell you what Wall Street expects. Not this time. IBM already spoiled it. The company pre-announced its miss on July 14 and the stock lost a quarter of its value in one day. It was the worst day in its history, worse than 1987, with more than $68 billion in market value erased in a single session.
So the earnings themselves are old news. What happens on the 5 p.m. ET call is the whole game. And I think the setup is more interesting than people realize.
How we got here
The short version. IBM said earnings came in around $2.93 a share instead of the $3.01 analysts expected and revenue landed near $17.2 billion instead of $17.86 billion. CEO Arvind Krishna said clients pulled spending away from software and consulting in the last weeks of June and moved it into AI hardware instead. Servers, storage and memory chips.
Think about that for a second. IBM spent two years selling itself as an AI winner and then actual AI spending derailed its quarter.
And the selling still has not stopped. The stock fell more than 2 percent Wednesday to about $205 and pressed against its 52-week low while everyone waited for the call. On June 2, this was a $332 stock. That is a 38 percent haircut in seven weeks for a Dow name that pays a dividend over 3 percent and trades at about 19 times earnings. Nobody wants to hold it through the report. People are losing faith right before the news actually lands, and that is what a washed-out setup looks like. When the last nervous holders sell ahead of the announcement, the bar for a bounce gets even lower.
What I'm watching tonight
Guidance first. IBM didn't just miss. It pulled its full-year outlook and told everyone to wait for tonight. If management puts a real forecast back on the table, the story becomes one bad quarter. If they stay vague, the selling probably isn't done.
The slipped deals second. Krishna says the money moved and didn't vanish. Fair enough. Then tell us when those deals close. A third-quarter answer keeps the recovery story alive.
And the cash. Management already reaffirmed free cash flow growing about $1 billion this year. That number is what pays the dividend. If it holds up tonight, the income crowd has no reason to leave.
One more thing to listen for. Investor law firms say they are digging into what IBM told everyone about its pipeline before July 14. Expect some very careful lawyer-approved wording on that call.
The part everyone forgot: quantum
Here is the piece of this story that got buried under the crash headlines. Two months ago, the federal government put a billion dollars behind IBM's quantum business. In May, the Commerce Department announced $2 billion in proposed awards across nine quantum computing companies, a program in which Washington takes non-controlling equity stakes in return. IBM's slice is the biggest one, a proposed $1 billion CHIPS award to fund a new IBM company called Anderon that will build America's first purpose-built quantum foundry in Albany, New York. IBM is putting a billion of its own in alongside it. And DARPA moved IBM into the second stage of its program to prove out a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2033.
So Washington has real money riding on IBM's quantum future. That business did not crash on July 14. Only the stock did. We dug into the government's quantum bet before all this happened, and the thesis has only gotten stronger.
My take
IBM is starting to look like a valuable play here. You are getting a 3 percent dividend and a 19 multiple and a government-backed quantum business for the price of one ugly quarter. And companies rarely show up to a call like tonight's empty-handed. A restored forecast or a buyback or any kind of sweetener could be the reason the stock finally bounces.
That is a lean and not a promise. If the call goes badly, a stock this beat up can absolutely take another leg down. But risk versus reward at $205 is a whole different conversation than it was at $290, where this stock closed the day before the warning.
For how the crash day played out, our July 14 wrap has the blow-by-blow. The full week's stakes are in our earnings-week preview since Alphabet (GOOGL) and Tesla (TSLA) report the same evening. And yes, Jim Cramer called IBM a buy the day before it crashed. Our Inverse Cramer tracker has it on record.
We will update this piece after the call wraps tonight.
