Ginni Rometty

great R&D and manufacturing, but it is a game of volume.

And so when I came on, we were still manufacturing R&D and manufacturing our own chips.

We were losing a lot of money.

Yet here we had to fight a war on cloud and AI.

And so, okay, now shareholders would say, fine, shut it down.

Okay, those chips also power some of the most important systems that power the banks of today.

If I just shut it down, well, what would that do?

And so, okay, the answer wasn't just stop it.

The answer wasn't just keep putting money into it.

The answer was, and we had to kind of sit in an uncomfortable spot till we found a way.

I mean, it's going to sound so basic, but you as an engineer understand it.

We had to separate – it was a very integrated process of research, development, and manufacturing.

And you'd also – you'd be perfecting things in manufacturing.

And these were very high-performance chips.

We had to be able to separate those.

We eventually found a way to do that so that we could take the manufacturing elsewhere and we would maintain the R&D.

I think it's a great example of the question you just asked because people would have applauded.

Others would have been, this was horrible.

Or we had a financial roadmap that had been put in place that said, I'll make this amount of EPS by this date.

There came a time we couldn't honor it because we had to invest.