Size of the text
Bloomberg/Andreas Arnold
IBM
The stock is trading substantially lower on Friday after IBM revealed a management overhaul that includes IBM President and former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s surprising resignation. Whitehurst “has been instrumental in articulating IBM’s strategy, but also in ensuring that IBM and Red Hat work well together and that our technology platforms and innovations provide more value to our clients,” according to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. Whitehurst will remain a “senior advisor” to IBM’s executive team.
Whitehurst’s departure was not attributed to any specific reason by the corporation. Bridget van Kralingen, Senior VP of Global Markets at IBM, is also stepping down from her current position. She will serve as Senior Vice President, Special Projects for a year before retiring from IBM. Rob Thomas, currently Senior VP of Cloud and Data Platform, will take her place in her prior position. Whitehurst is a “well-regarded executive” who has been “instrumental to the company,” according to Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani, who adds that the announcements “caught investors off guard,” given that Whitehurst had been expected to stay with IBM after the pending spin of Kyndryl, the new name for the company. Despite the fact that this is a negative headline, he writes, “we believe IBM has a broad senior leadership bench that should enable the business to navigate through major executive transitions.” IBM is down 4.3 percent to $140.54 per share. Eric J. Savitz can be reached at eric.savitz@barrons.com./n
Read More
