IBM (International Business Machines, in case you're wondering) is a company you hear very little about these days and yet, growing up, it was the talk of the town.
'Big Blue' was the share to hold and considered to be the high flying tech company of its age. Although in my view, it's one company that missed the digital boat. However, it has a 20 billion usd war chest for acquisitions.
Interested (and surprised) to see that new figures on Q3 show revenues falling by a billion usd largely due to a fall in hardware sales. They also point out a slowing of emerging markets, notably China.
Although I was surprised that the 9 month revenues were 72 billion usd - only a 4% decrease - nothing to be sneezed at. They expect to be in profit in 2014.
The figures were however, below expectations.
The fall in hardware sales is driven by the switch to the cloud where data storage is cheaper and probably, more effective through easier access. Indeed, probably more secure. IBM is also in that space to be fair and in these numbers, their cloud division exceeded 1 billion usd revenue for the first time.
But the once giant has fallen off the news pages without a high profile CEO or indeed, high profile products. You don't see a lot of it about. But clearly they're still doing some very good business and will achieve profitability.
In fact, it surprised the hell out of me. Strong business here from a sleeping giant.
Possibly, it's their lack of Social credentials.
Possibly, it's a lack of PR and Advertising.
They seem to have their business fixed, just the profile needs work.
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