Lou Gerstner wrote, "People truly do what you inspect, not what you expect." … Lest we forget, "inspection pages" such as these exist because chief executives are "people" too.

Peter E. Greulich, March 27, 2026

Arvind Krishna's Overall Performance: 2020 Through 2025
Date Published: April 11, 2022
​Date Modified: April 2, 2026
As of April 1, 2026, this page and all its associated webpages were updated with Arvind Krishna's six-year key performance metrics (KPIs) from the beginning of 2020 through the end of 2025. ​These web pages cover the overall performance of IBM's tenth Chief Executive Officer, Arvind Krishna, and are updated once each year, as time permits, after the publication of IBM's Annual Report.

​Arvind Krishna's performance in his first one-hundred days is here. Arvind Krishna's first-year's performance is here.
Arvind Krishna’s Overall Performance Numbers: 2020 to 2025
  • Summary of Arvind Krishna's Overall Performance in Critical Areas
    • ​Revenue and Profit Performance
    • Revenue and Profit Growth Performance
    • Revenue and Profit Employee Productivity Performance
    • Market Value Performance
    • Shareholder Risk and Returns Performance
    • Employment Performance​​
Summary of Arvind Krishna's Overall Performance as IBM's CEO
In April 2020, IBM installed its tenth chief executive officer: Arvind Krishna.
​How has Arvind Krishna performed since taking over the corner office? ​At the end of Arvind Krishna’s sixth year as chief executive officer (2020–2025) his performance continues as it started which can be described with one word: unremarkable.

After six years, Arvind Krishna's performance numbers at the end of 2025 were as follows:
  • ​​IBM Yearly Revenue for the last six years has fallen -12.5% to $67.5 billion​

  • IBM Yearly Revenue Growth for the last six years 2020 to 2025 revenue growth has been positive five out of the six years. Unfortunately in four of these five years inflation outpaced revenue growth: in 2021 4% revenue growth was exceeded by an inflation rate of 4.7%, in 2022 6% revenue growth was exceeded by an inflation rate of 8.0%, in 2023 2% revenue growth was exceeded by an inflation rate of 4.1%, and, finally, in 2024 1% revenue growth was exceeded by an inflation rate of 2.9%.
    ​
  • IBM Yearly Profit after dropping for five years from $9.4 billion in 2019 to lows in the $6 billion range, finally overachieved in 2025. In 2025 IBM returned a profit or net income performance of $10.6 billion. Unfortunately, for the years 2020 through 2024 IBM's profits remained suppressed in the $6 to $7 billion dollar range. It will remain to be seen if IBM can maintain this level of profitability.​
This information is from IBM's Annual Reports.
  • IBM Yearly Profit Growth for the last six years has been inconsistent: Down -40.7%, Up 2.7%, 6.5%, and 22.6%, down -19.7%, and up 75.9%. It should be noted that two of the four years of positive profit growth were less than the yearly inflation rates: profits in 2021 were up 2.7% while inflation was up 4.7%, and profits up in 2022 were up by 6.5% while inflation was up 8.0%. 
    ​
  • IBM Employee Sales and Profit Productivity show little significant relationship between employees producing more revenue and improving their profitability. On the revenue side, employees have been constantly improving since hitting a low in 2021 of $186,000 per employee. After every employee achieved $25,000 in net income in 2019, productivity swung for five years between lows in the $15,000 to $25,000 range before achieving a "break out" year in 2025 with $37,000 per employee.

  • IBM Shareholder Returns increased significantly in 2024 and 2025 to surpass large company stock funds but still underachieve an investment in a technology index.
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  • IBM Shareholder Risk remains unaddressed by IBM’s corner office—goodwill and intangible assets are historically very, very high.

  • IBM's Market Value is a bright spot in IBM's performance over the last six years, improving by 134% over the last six years.
    ​
  • IBM Worldwide Full-Time Employment continues to fall. In 2025 the number of full-time employees fell by 2.5% in 2025 and is now down by 25% over the last six years.​
What is provided through the links below are graphs of Arvind Krishna’s 2020 through 2025 key performance indicators (KPIs). ​Charts are also provided for historical context that document (1) the joint performance of Arvind Krishna and Virginia (Ginni) M. Rometty from 2011 through 2025, and (2) IBM's overall twenty-first-century performance from 1999 through 2025 under the leadership of Louis V. Gerstner, Samuel J. Palmisano, Virginia (Ginni) M. Rometty, and Arvind Krishna.
Links to the Details of Arvind Krishna's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Corporations, within a capitalist economy, are worth an investment if they fulfil their main purpose: moving products of competitively higher value off the showroom floor into a customer’s waiting hands while generating enough profits to build, grow and protect a self-sustaining stakeholder ecosystem.
Arvind Krishna Revenue and Profit ​Performance
A corporation needs to generate enough money (revenue and profits) to invest equitably to attract, hold and grow its stakeholder community of customers, employees, shareholders and their supportive societies.
​IBM positions its divestiture and acquisition strategy as moving the corporation into higher-value, higher-margin markets. ​The underlying assumption is that through these strategies the executive team will deliver increased revenues and higher profit margins: revenue and profit growth!

Is this strategy delivering?​
Arvind Krishna ​Revenue and Profit ​Growth Performance
Did it deliver for IBM's twenty-first-century chief executives?
​​In a corporation of 286,800 employees (as of the end of 2025), it is critical that each and every individual employee maximizes their productivity in generating revenue and net income. Some think that employee sales and profit productivity are an "employee" measurement, but in reality they are one of the best measurements to define the performance of a corporation's corner office.​
Arvind Krishna ​Revenue and Profit Productivity Performance
When considering these two metrics, how is Arvind Krishna performing? ​What did he inherit from his predecessors: Rometty, Palmisano, and Gerstner?
In IBM's 1990 Annual Report, Lou Gerstner wrote that market value was the corporation's “most important measure of progress to investors.”

​Louis V. Gerstner used market value as one of his key business metrics to evaluate his success as chief executive officer. Has IBM's market value grown in the twenty-first century? 
Arvind Krishna ​Market Value Performance
How is this "most important measure of progress" for investors performing? ​Using this measurement, how is Arvind Krishna performing?
What were Arvind Krishna's five-year shareholder total returns from 2020 to 2025—including dividends? IBM stock—including dividends—was up 19.57% over the six-years while the Dow Jones Technology Stock Index was up 25.08%. IBM's stock outperformed an investment in a large company stock index fund that returned 15.08%.
Krishna's ​Shareholder Returns Performance
​​But stock investors could have received higher returns with less risk in a Dow Jones Technology stock indexed mutual fund.
It took Thomas J. Watson Sr. his entire forty-two year career at IBM (1914 through 1956) to decrease the amount of goodwill to zero that Charles Randall Flint's "creative thinking" assigned to the C-T-R Company when he merged several companies together to form the company in 1911. Tom Watson Sr. immediately went to work to get goodwill off his books—even reducing it during The Great Depression.
Krishna's ​Shareholder Risk Performance
It was a 2001 accounting change that has allowed 21st Century Chief Executive Officers to carry goodwill effectively … forever. And it doesn't appear that any of IBM's 21st Century Chief Executive Officers have wanted to address this shareholder risk. Instead they prefer to keep "passing the buck ... the risk."
Being of service or caring about stakeholders other than customers—especially when it concerns employees, is sometimes called paternalism.

​When Watson Jr. talked about employment security, he did not view it as paternalistic but as a means of increasing employee loyalty, goodwill, and diligence on the job.
Krishna Employment Security Performance
Employees are less efficient when worried about their employment. Maybe that is why sales and profit productivity keeps dropping when IBM's 2021 Annual Report states, "In response to changing business needs, the company periodically takes workforce reduction actions to improve productivity."

​They should have written "to improve short-term, profits" not "productivity."

Because productivity has been in a freefall for decades.
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