Stefan Mileschin

IBM has been selling the family silver but still can’t buy itself out of trouble as its cloud business has not picked up yet.


The outfit reported a bigger-than-expected drop in revenue and cut its full-year profit forecast.

It is the 14th time Biggish Blue’s revenues have fallen and comes after the company sold all its low margin businesses. Unfortunately its cunning plan to move into cloud computing has not paid off yet.

It did badly in China. There were fewer big deals and revenue from that country to fall 17 percent. Sales in Brazil, Russia, India and China combined slumped by 30 percent.

The company was expected problems from the strong US dollar. It gets more than half its business from overseas.

The company's total revenue fell 13.9 percent to $19.28 billion in the quarter, below analysts' average forecast of $19.62 billion.

There were weakness in IBM’s consulting and storage businesses too after taking currency moves and discontinued business into account.

Revenue from what the company calls "strategic imperatives," which include cloud and mobile computing, data analytics, social and security software, rose about 17 percent in the third quarter ended September 30. But this was not enough to make up for all the businesses that IBM flogged off.

IBM's net income from continuing operations fell to $2.96 billion from $3.46 billion a year earlier. Consolidated net income rose to $2.95 billion from $18 million last year.

Last year profit was hurt by non-recurring pre-tax charge of $3.3 billion, net of tax, for discontinued operations.

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