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IBM lost nearly a quarter of its value in one session today after pre-announcing a Q2 miss, adjusted EPS of $2.93 vs $3.01 expected, revenue of $17.2 billion vs $17.86 billion forecast. This is a Dow component that people have been parking their investments in all year as a safe, dividend-paying defensive name, and it just dropped 24% in a day. What makes it weird is that the market was actually rallying today thanks to a better-than-expected inflation report. IBM didn't get caught in a selloff, there was no selloff. It collapsed on its own.
The interesting part isn't that IBM missed it's forecast, it's the stated reason. CEO Arvind Krishna told investors that clients shifted their quarterly capital spending toward 'servers, storage, and memory purchases' in the final weeks of June, away from software and mainframes. So, IBM is saying its customers literally reallocated their IT budgets mid-quarter, away from IBM's products, toward AI infrastructure hardware.
This feels like is the first big-cap which has been hit by something that's been building all year. Companies don't have infinite IT budgets, and between the AI buildout and memory prices making servers way more expensive, they have to reduce spending somewhere. And the market didn't read this as just an IBM problem, Workday fell 6%, Salesforce and Autodesk down 3%, while Micron and SK Hynix actually went up on the same news.
To be fair, there's a real counterargument here. IBM has a convenient built-in excuse this quarter, their z17 mainframe launch was apparently the best start to a mainframe program in company history, and management had already told everyone infrastructure revenue would decline as that cycle wound down. Mainframe revenue is lumpy by nature. So the scary industry-wide story might be overblown, this could just be an old mainframe cycle rolling over at a company that's more exposed to legacy enterprise spending than almost anyone else.
But the timing is hard to ignore, Krishna specifically said the shift happened 'in the final weeks of June,' which is exactly when memory prices went vertical and the AI capacity crunch got serious. And if this were purely an IBM problem, Workday, Salesforce, and Autodesk wouldn't have sold off with it.
So, if enterprise IT budgets are getting cannibalized by AI infrastructure spending, who else might be exposed. Legacy software with weak AI stories could be affected, and earnings season is about to test both sides of this. ASML and TSMC report this week, if the AI infrastructure demand that supposedly ate IBM's quarter is real, it should show up in their numbers. Then enterprise software reports over the coming weeks and we find out who else's customers pulled their IT spending in June.
So, is this only IBM-specific or maybe there are more companies to follow.