IBM: Fiscal 4Q17 Financial Results

IBM Corp. announced 4FQ17 earnings results for the period ended December 31, 2017.

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

Executive of Big Blue comments: “Storage hardware was up 8%. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of growth, so obviously we’ve got some momentum here. We gained share in a very competitive market, while holding margins stable. We had double-digit growth in our high-end hardware products for the quarter, which reflects the demand for flash, as well as the capacity increase linked to mainframe demand. Our all-flash array offerings once again grew at a strong double-digit rate, and faster than the high-growth all- flash market. And our storage software, which is reported in Cognitive Solutions and a major contributor to our storage business, had strong revenue from our cloud object Storage offerings (…) And then finally, on storage, this is the first year in a long time, for 4 quarters in a row, we’ve grown storage. And that’s been based on the great work our storage team has done about repositioning their portfolio, leveraging and growing share in flash, but it’s also about software-defined and also, more importantly, as we move forward, object storage that will continue to look for growth.“

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

These figures can be compared to recent IDC estimations for IBM for 3CQ17, Worldwide Quarterly Total Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, $508.7 million or 4.3% Y/Y growth with the fourth place behind HPE, Dell EMC and NetApp.

Last year we estimate IBM storage products revenue at $2,184 million. Then estimating the growth at 7% in 2017, annual storage revenue could reach $2,337 million.

Revenue Growth of IBM Storage Products