Long term investment in IBM

4 feb 2020

A big problem for IBM over the past few years has been its history as a hardware-based, large mainframe type business. But the world is changing. Enterprise customers have been moving to the cloud. Also, competition has gotten more intense over the years as younger upstarts have been built from the ground up on cloud, mobility, virtualization etc. For example, Amazon (AMZN) with its AWS offering and Microsoft's (MSFT) Azure have been very successful in cloud computing and IBM has been trying to play catch up. Investors understand that it's going to take a while for IBM to catch up with its cloud computing rivals. The Red Hat acquisition seems like a great step in that direction, but the full benefit of this combination will take some time to be fully realized. IBM had some big change recently, it named Arvind Krishna as its new CEO, replacing Virginia Rometty. Krishna is currently IBM Senior VP for Cloud and Cognitive Software, and was a principal architect of the company's acquisition of Red Hat. Clearly this choice shows that IBM wants to focus more on the cloud and it seems like a good fit. It is a good investment from here with 4.5% yield. Stop under $120.