IBM profits out-climb sales in Q1 • The Register

A couple interesting IBM perspectives

IBM is mostly a services company with hardware and software pretensions - or a systems company that makes a fortune selling services that ought to be part of the system but are not, depending on how you want to look at it - and the Global Services behemoth accounted for $13.7bn in sales, up 4 per cent as reported in US dollars but down 2 per cent at constant currency.

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Software Group, which sells operating systems, middleware, and other system and application software that is used by companies and ISVs to support their own applications software, grew by 10.6 per cent year-on-year, to a hair over $5bn, and with gross profit margins of 84.6 per cent, this business has IBM feeling downright ecstatic. Nearly all of that extra money does right to the bottom line, which it can use to buy back shares to prop up EPS numbers, which in turn pump up the stock and make IBMers who have lots of stock richer.

IBM profits out-climb sales in Q1 • The Register