IBM: Fiscal 3Q17 Financial Results

IBM Corp. announced 3FQ17 earnings results for the period ended September 30, 2017.

As usual, the company is evasive and revealed only one figure for its storage products: +4% growth Y/Y or third consecutive quarter of growth, compared to 8% and 7% for the former quarters.

This yearly percentage growth was down each quarter since 4Q11 (see table blow), a dramatic trend, but IBM is finally coming back to a relatively small growth since the beginning of the year.

Martin Schroeter, IBM SVP and CFO commented: “Storage hardware was up 4% and as I said earlier, this is the third consecutive quarter of storage revenue growth. We had growth across our major hardware product areas, including in key mid-range and high-end product lines, which grew double digits. Our all-flash array offerings once again grew strong double digits, in line with the high-growth market. And our storage software, which is reported in Cognitive Solutions, also had double-digit growth in software-defined storage, reflecting the shift in value to software.”

Last year we estimate IBM storage products revenue at $464 million for 3Q16. Then +4% means $487 million for its most recent three-month period. For the former period our estimation was $592 million, corresponding to an 18% decrease Q/Q.

Revenue Growth of IBM Storage Products