27 April 2015

Why Buy the Hardware When China Is Getting the IP for Free?

APRIL 24, 2015

In Beijing in late March, IBM CEO Virginia Rometty announced that the company’s new strategy in China will be to share its technology to help build the country’s IT industry.

“If you’re a country, as China is, of 1.3 billion people, you would want an IT industry as well,” she told the crowd at the China Development Forum, a government-sponsored event. “I think some firms find that perhaps frightening. We, though, at IBM … find that to be a great opportunity.”

Rometty needs a great opportunity. As the CEO of IBM since 2012, she has spent her more than 30-year career at the company watching it slowly shed the hardware, heft, and influence that earned it the “Big Blue” moniker. Still, IBM is no pipsqueak: With a roughly $160 billion market capitalization andjust under 380,000 employees, the firm remains a massive force in information technology. 

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