Stefan Mileschin

Better than Wall Street predicted

Big Blue beat Wall Street's quarterly earnings estimates, posted its first annual revenue growth since 2011 and forecast a 2019 profit above expectations.

The figures show that Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty’s efforts to turn around the technology services company had legs and they were starting to walk in the right direction.

Rometty, who has been CEO since 2012, has steered the company toward faster-growing segments such as cloud, software and services and away from traditional hardware.

Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh said IBM signed roughly $16 billion worth of contracts in the quarter, its strongest by that measure in a long time.

Underscoring the drive into higher-margin businesses, IBM in October agreed to buy software company Red Hat for $34 billion, the company’s biggest acquisition in its more than 100-year history.

In a nod to investor concerns, Kavanaugh on a post-earnings call with analysts said client response to the Red Hat acquisition has been “overwhelmingly positive”.

IBM’s cloud strategy has focused on helping companies stitch together multiple cloud platforms rather than compete with “hyperscale” cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google.

https://fudzilla.com/news/memory-and...d-and-services