IBM Q1 revenues fall 2pc to US$22.5bn

17 Apr 2014

Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer

IBM, or ‘Big Blue’ as it is known in the IT industry, reported its first-quarter revenues were down by 2pc compared with last year to US$22.5bn. The drop in performance came as the company makes the adjustment from hardware to the cloud.

IBM’s first-quarter net profits came in at US$2.4bn, down 21pc on last year.

Global Technology Services revenues were down 3pc to US$9.3bn.

Revenues from IBM’s Software group were up 2pc to US$5.7bn, compared to the first quarter of 2013.

Revenues from the Systems and Technology group totalled US$2.4bn for the quarter, down 23pc from the year-ago period.

“In the first quarter, we continued to take actions to transform parts of the business and to shift aggressively to our strategic growth areas, including cloud, big data analytics, social, mobile and security,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer.

“As we move through 2014, we will begin to see the benefits from these actions. Over the long term, they will position us to drive growth and higher value for our clients,” Rometty said.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com