IBM Q3 Profit Meets View, Revenues Beat Street

(RTTNews) - International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) Monday reported an earnings for the third quarter that was in line with estimates, while revenues surpassed Wall Street analysts expectations, driven by growth in cloud sales.

Armonk, New York-based IBM reported third-quarter profit of $1.70 billion or $1.89 per share, up from $1.67 billion or $1.87 per share last year.

Excluding items, IBM's adjusted earnings were $2.58 per share for the period, down from $2.68 per share last year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $2.58 per share. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

IBM's third-quarter revenues fell 2.6 percent to $17.56 billion from $18.03 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $17.54 billion for the quarter.

"The strong performance of our cloud business, led by Red Hat, underscores the growing client adoption of our open hybrid cloud platform," said CEO Arvind Krishna. "Separating the managed infrastructure services business creates a market-leading standalone company and further sharpens our focus on IBM's open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. This will accelerate our growth strategy and better position IBM to seize the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity."

Total cloud revenue was $6.3 billion, up 19 percent.

Earlier this month, IBM announced plans to separate its managed infrastructure services unit of its Global Technology Services division into a new publicly-traded company (NewCo) and focus more on the cloud business.

IBM closed Monday's trading at $125.52, down $0.41 or 0.33%, on the NYSE. The stock further dropped $1.13 or 0.90% in the after-hours trade.