We bought an ungodly amount of stock over last several years.
Can we sell that now and use it to help the employee?
6 replies (most recent on top)
@1rin+141ss3vx, the only difference is that we kinda need airlines but not IBM. A world without IBM would just be fine.
Essentially IBM has been slowly stripping the company to its death by awarding share dividends and exec bonuses whilst selling assets (property, businesses and brands) and aggressively cutting costs to keep the share price up.
Nothing short of criminal destruction of a global company to serve the wealthy. Where others have thrived by continuous investment and innovation, IBM in the hands of Palmisano and Rometty have been chocked and mugged off.
History will show.
This Financial Engineering gimmick was doomed from the start.
All it did was enrich about a 100 Ibm execs.
Our airlines did the same thing.
Truly nauseating..
@1hch speaks wisely - what a failure, gosh...
Technically, they could issue more shares, but it won't happen. Remember, all that money was spent to reduce the number of shares, so that earnings-per-share increased, because that is what the exec bonuses were based on. Under those incentives, management decided it better to spend it that way than, for example, actually investing in the well-being of the business or employees.
IBM's failure is the result of the incentives management was given. They met those incentives, which cost the rest of the company dearly. Imagine a different universe where IBM's incentives were "increase earnings" instead of "increase earnings per share" - IBM in that universe is doing fine.
No. When a company buys back its own stock, that stock gets retired. It cannot be sold again. And, its value gets distributed in the form of an increase in the market value of the remaining shares.