IBM’s share price dropped by 6% to $175.56 in after-hours trading as Wall Street took revenge for the company missing its expectations and posting a 4% dip in revenue for its third quarter.
Big Blue reported total revenues for the quarter of $23,7-billion.
Third-quarter net income was $4-billion compared with $3,8-billion in the third-quarter of 2012, an increase of 6%. Operating (non-GAAP) net income was $4,4-billion, compared with $4,2-billion in the third-quarter of 2012 – again, an increase of 6%.
“In the third-quarter we continued to expand operating margins and increased earnings per share, but fell short on revenue,” says Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and CEO.
“Where we had identified high growth opportunities and pursued them aggressively – cloud, mobile, business analytics, and security – we continued to show strong growth. This underscores our strategy to continuously transform the company to high value.
“We are taking action to improve execution in our growth markets unit and in the elements of our hardware businesses that are under performing,” Rometty adds.
“Given these actions, our strategic initiatives and the strength of our model, we are maintaining our view for the full year and remain confident in our ability to achieve at least $20 operating EPS in 2015.”