Thursday, October 17, 2013

Dinosaur Down: IBM’s Q3 Earnings | Platformonomics

Excerpt from a Charles Fitzgerald review of IBM’s quarterly earnings announcement

Scene: Armonk, New York

“[…] A billion dollar (as in $1,000,000,000) miss on the top line. Everything in varying levels of free-fall, led by the swan dive of the hardware business (Power Series down 38%!). After a decade of the consistency so prized by Wall Street, that is three misses in a row for IBM and six straight quarters of declining revenue. Yet they beat their EPS number (modulo “other stuff”) and recommitted to the EPS roadmap for the year. Somehow, profits keep going up even as revenue declines (key contributor: a materially lower tax rate).

The earnings release in a nutshell: “Growth markets revenue down 9 percent”.

Dinosaur Down: IBM’s Q3 Earnings | Platformonomics

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