IBM: Fiscal 4Q19 Financial Results

IBM Corp. reports 4Q19 financial results ended December 31, 2019.

Global revenue recorded $3.0 billion, up 16% Y/Y, led by IBM Z, up 62%, and driven by accelerated cloud performance, notably with the acquisition of Red Hat.

For storage systems revenue, it’s far from that with a growth of only 3% Y/Y, corresponding to $470 million according to our calculation.

In FY17, we estimated IBM annual storage revenue would reach $2,337 million up 7% from 2016. For 2018 it was approximately $1,730 million and $1,750 million for FY19, an annual increase of no more than 1%, later figure far behind storage leaders like Micron, Dell, WD, Seagate, Kingston, NetApp, Kioxia or HPE, and not so far from Pure Storage in AFAs only ($1,360 million) and Nutanix in HCI ($1,236 million).

In systems, revenue was up 16% for the most recent quarter. Growth in IBM Z and storage was mitigated by a decline in Power business.This better result was led by growth in the high end business, especially new high-end DS8900 releases last November.

James Kavanaugh, IBM’s CFO, commented: “If you look at systems, we’re off to a very good start. That segment has always been predicated based on bringing new innovation and value to market. Our z15 and new high-end storage, which we brought the market, both grew nicely. Value proposition resonating. We expect a very strong first half in both of those. (…) We had a good start to our z15 cycle and growth in high-end storage, resulting in double-digit revenue growth and gross margin expansion in the segment.”

As usual, Big Blue never publishes any figure on storage software

Revenue Growth of IBM Storage Systems

Earnings call transcript