IBM Shares Plunge More Than 23% in Worst Day in Decades After Q2 Revenue Miss

IBM shares plunged more than 23% in Wall Street trading on Tuesday, July 14, the technology group's steepest one-day drop in decades. The slide followed the company's disclosure that second-quarter revenue came in at about $17.2 billion, short of analyst estimates of roughly $17.9 billion, while adjusted earnings were $2.93 per share versus a forecast of $3.02. The fall erased about $65 billion of the company's market value.

CEO Arvind Krishna attributed the miss to weakness in the software and infrastructure businesses, saying clients had shifted part of their spending away from software toward hardware, including AI servers and memory chips. IBM's collapse triggered a wave of selling in software peers such as Salesforce, Adobe and Intuit, and it was the single heaviest drag on the S&P 500 and the Dow, muting Wall Street's early gains after a softer-than-expected US inflation reading.