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Our favorite “technology” company IBM “beat” the number last week and saw its stock pop on Thursday after announcing earnings. Bloomberg cheered the results:
“IBM Raises Annual Forecast After Earnings Top Analyst Estimates”
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the largest computer-services company, topped estimates with its second-quarter earnings and raised its forecast for the year after cutting costs and buying back shares.
Excluding a $1 billion restructuring expense, earnings were $3.91 a share, the Armonk, New York-based company said today in a statement. That beat the $3.78 that analysts projected on average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company now expects to earn at least $16.90 a share this year, up from the $16.70 it forecast earlier this year.
IBM has managed to increase profit by shifting away from low-margin businesses, cutting jobs and repurchasing stock — even as revenue slows.
And why not be ebullient? Just look at these results:
- Revenue – down 3%
- Net Profit – down 17%
- EPS – down 13% (with buybacks, outstanding shares are down 4% over the last year)
- Software – up 4%
- Services – down 1%
- Systems and Technology (aka Hardware) – down 12%
Investors and analysts seem to have bought into IBM’s narrative to pay no attention to the the top line and focus only on ever increasing profit forecasts, never mind whether they come from financial engineering or engineering engineering. They’re constantly “transforming” the company and getting rid of unprofitable businesses so even as revenues go down, profits will only go up, up, up (at some point, I will do a projection of where to expect the intersection between ever declining revenue and ever increasing profits). A couple financial notes on this quarter:
- IBM is masterful in obfuscating their results and particularly forward guidance, as they guide to non-GAAP results as “most indicative of operational trajectory”. They sow a lot of confusion with a billion dollar write-off to lay off upwards of 8,000 employees (because companies that are killing it are always doing restructurings of this magnitude…). All this noise turns out to have obscured the fact they actually dropped their sacred future profit forecasts. It took the markets 24 hours to figure this out and IBM’s stock price gave up its initial pop from earnings.
- Without a material drop in their effective tax rate, the results this quarter and last quarter would have been much worse. Pre-tax income was down 20%.
- IBM’s all-important profit forecast previously included an assumption of a major divestiture, presumably the x86 server business, which they have walked back: “a substantial second-half gain that it was expecting in its prior view of earnings per share will not likely be achieved the end of 2013.” Eventually, the cookie jar of one-time profit bumps will be empty as you can only sell off so many of the businesses your describe as crummy.
- It looks like profits are starting to correlate with revenue after a long period of non-correlation (aka the financial engineering years). In the charts below, we see IBM’s revenue looks highly cyclical with the economical downturn in 2008-9 but the recent decline is harder to pin on macroeconomics. Perhaps we are at a technology inflection point? And the once monotonic five year profit trend looks like it is rolling over. We also should credit Sam Palmasaino for having exquisite timing and/or skill, leaving the CEO job at the end of 2012.
IBM Net Income TTM data by YCharts
IBM Revenue TTM data by YCharts
Meaningless Numbers
I love the plum double-digit growth numbers IBM cites for arbitrary slices of their business with no baselines so you have no idea if they contribute $1 or $1 billion. Somehow, they have an incredible growth portfolio that doesn’t move the needle for the company as a whole:
- “Key branded middleware” up 9% – presumably this is things like WebSphere, DB2, Lotus and Tivoli, all brands that are irrelevant in the cloud era. But the “key” modifier implies some other segmentation game is being played.
- “Growth markets revenue flat” – that single line pretty much sums up IBM.
- “Smarter Planet revenue up more than 25% in the first half” – leaving aside any effort to figure out what might constitute Smarter Planet revenue, one might conclude the rest of IBM’s revenue comes from a Dumber Planet™. But as IBM’s revenue continues to decline, there is evidence the Dumber Planet is wising up 😉
- “Cloud revenue up more than 70% in the first half” – given IBM’s paucity of cloud customer references, this may be the most nebulous of the bunch. IBM has said they’ll do $7 billion in cloud revenue by 2015, but their definition of cloud is of course cloudy. The cloud number I’d really like to see from IBM is their capex spend as a proxy for their cloud commitment. Total property, plant and equipment on the balance sheet has actually declined so far this year, while Google and Microsoft spent $3.5 billion on capex between them in the last quarter.
The problem for dinosaurs: if the meteor doesn’t get you, the (dust) cloud will.
