In this article Ryan Wibberley, Chief Executive Officer of CIC Wealth, discusses how IBM can get back into the headspace of tomorrow’s leaders. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google are all apart of the FAANG acronym. These five companies and IBM are responsible for the rapid digitization of our economy. At least three of these companies (Amazon, Google, IBM) are heavily involved in the cloud computing market. We are able to see the difference between FAANG and IBM through their price-to-earnings and future PE ratios. FAANG companies trade for an average of about 94 and a future PE of 68. This means you pay 94 times the current earnings for the average FAANG stock. At current prices, this is projected to drop by 28% in only one year due to profit growth. On the other hand, IBM trades for a PE of 13 and a future PE of only 11! From these numbers we know that FAANG is believed to be the future, and IBM the past. FAANG companies also have a highly recognizable brand among youth, the future leaders of tomorrow. So what is IBM to do? Watson. Watson is an artificial Intelligence platform for business, as defined by IBM. Basically, they feed Watson vast amounts of data on different topics so it can learn lessons and enable you to make better decisions. With Watson, IBM has one of the most high profile leads in what is widely considered to be the next big thing. Even IBM’s cloud computing business is solidly in the middle of the pack of market movers. Rometty needs to aggressively rebrand IBM by simply naming it after the one thing in which IBM remains a market leader, Watson. For IBM to get back on track, IBM must figure out a way to make Watson available for mass-market use.
By Ryan Wibberley, Chief Executive Officer of CIC Wealth
July 19, 2017: Can IBM reinvent itself?