IBM shares fall 25% after revealing huge revenue shortfall

Preliminary revenue numbers were well short of expectations, which IBM blamed on the tight market for enterprise hardware.

By Tom Krazit

Updated Jul 14, 2026 8:27 PM / Published Jul 14, 2026 5:44 PM 1 min read

IBM shares fall 25% after revealing huge revenue shortfall — Photo by Carson Masterson / Unsplash

Updated at 830pm BST with Krishna's comments to CNBC.

Whenever a company reports financial results a week before it was scheduled to do so, you know it's going to be bad.

IBM said Tuesday that second-quarter revenue would miss analyst estimates by nearly $500 million after customers delayed purchases of mainframes in order to snap up servers and software in hopes of getting out ahead of what's expected to be a tight market for enterprise hardware over the next year. Shares of the company fell nearly 25% in early trading.

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Tom Krazit

Tom Krazit is The Stack's Editor-in-Chief. He has covered the technology industry for over 20 years, focused on enterprise technology during the rise of cloud computing over the last ten years at Gigaom, Structure and Protocol.