Question:
I noticed the fund has a position in IBM and there have been many questions about Google. They seem to be companies moving in two different directions. Even though IBM screens cheaply on metrics, what is your attraction to the business right now?
Will Pan:
If you go back a little bit, IBM (IBM, Financial) in 2010 put out a plan that it called the 2015 Roadmap. Management said that by 2015 it would be earning $20 per share. That was through a mix of a little bit of revenue growth, a bit of operating margin expansion as the mix moved more towards higher margin software and other higher margin services. And also IBM was going to cut some costs. Then there was a large component that was repurchase of shares. The plan was credible. IBM had hit one before. It seemed doable going forward at the time.
Mike Tyson says everybody has got a plan until they get punched in the face. And IBM got punched in the face a couple times — IBM did not keep its hands up the whole time. So in 2013, the company had some issues with its mid-range UNIX hardware business. Two things happened. One was Intel got more competitive at that range of systems. Then IBM also had been seeing good growth in those types of systems overseas. With Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA installing back doors in western vendors’ hardware, suddenly all those emerging market consumers, customers, got skittish, understandably. So IBM had an issue there. Also management was not able to grow its large software business as much as it thought it might. That is an execution issue on IBM’s part. Management also maybe went a little bit too far in terms of cost cutting. It was not keeping its employees very satisfied.
Finally, the last issue that caused the company to abandon the roadmap came when the dollar strengthened. IBM is an extremely global company — 75% of the sales are outside the United States. With the strong dollar, the company faced a very large headwind. As a result, in the third quarter of last year, IBM decided to give up the roadmap, probably a little bit too late. There were some cracks already showing and you could see them when the company repurchased a huge amount of its stock, $8 billion worth, in the first quarter of 2014. It was also taking increasingly large restructuring charges.
On the other hand, the mainframe turned 50 years old recently and people have been saying it has been dead for 10 − 20 − 30 years. First mini computers came at it and then the PC came at it and now you have got the cloud. This is not lost on CIOs who have mainframes. They have not been sleeping under rocks — they have considered this. But consider what it means for the CIOs. If you are a bank and you run your core banking application on a mainframe and it has been running smoothly for 40 − 50 years. You pay tens of millions of dollars to IBM to maintain all that, but when you do the calculation on whether to replace that, at the end of the day, you get your core banking application on another platform. That is all you get. There is really no big ROI for that. Who would want to risk an entire career and an entire company on something like that?
As part of its roadmap, IBM has repurchased an enormous number of shares. Whether the company repurchased those shares on our behalf at a good price is going to be proven out by whether the company can take advantage of new waves going forward. One of the new waves is cloud. IBM was kind of late to the game there. But it is somewhat hard to blame the company because many enterprises were quite reluctant. IBM really focuses on the global 2000 and if most of those customers were not really receptive, then there is only so much that you can do. You can spend a lot of money trying to force the technology but often it is really about getting the timing right. Apple tried handheld computing once with the Newton twenty years ago and it did not work. Then Microsoft tried a decade later with the tablet PC and it did not work. Only with the iPad did it work.
IBM has got a couple irons in the fire today: It is trying to seize mobile by doing a partnership with Apple and rewriting or adding new enterprise applications that run on iPads. Ginni Rometty, IBM’s CEO, has been on this push for cognitive computing, which is trying to build expert systems like Watson that faced off against the Jeopardy champions. There are some other initiatives around security, which is paramount to IBM’s customers. So we feel that the franchises are not going away. It remains to be seen whether the company is going to be able to capitalize on what it has got going forward. In the meantime, we paid $130 on $11.52 per share of earnings, and right now the stock is at $174 on about $16 per share of earnings.
From Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb Investor Day 2015 Transcript Part II - Sequoia Fund.
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