IBM Blames Almost Everything on Bad Quarterly Earnings

The company maintained guidance for the 2015 full year. It expects EPS to be in the range of $15.75 to $16.50, and that it will have a modest increase in free cash flow. There are consensus estimates for the full year of $15.88 in EPS on $83.55 billion in revenue.

Big Blue noted that it had a services backlog of $122 billion for the second quarter, up over 1% adjusting for currency. At the same time, free cash flow was $4.5 billion, up $0.8 billion year-to-year. Capital returned to shareholders in this quarter totaled $4.7 billion with dividends of $2.4 billion and gross share repurchases of $2.3 billion.

In terms of its segments IBM reported:

• Global Technology Services reported revenues of $8.07 billion with a gross profit margin of 36.6%. This was down 10.5% from the same period last year that had $9.01 billion.
• Global Business Services reported revenues of $4.35 billion with a gross profit margin of 27.4%. This was down 12.0% from the same period last year that had $4.94 billion.
• Software reported revenues of $5.83 billion with a gross profit margin of 87.8%. This was down 10.1% from the same period last year that had $6.49 billion.
• Systems Hardware reported revenues of $2.06 billion with a gross profit margin of 48.2%. This was down 31.7% from the same period last year that had $3.01 billion.
• Global Financing reported revenues of $478 million with a gross profit margin of 44.7%. This was down 5.2% from the same period last year that had $504 million.

Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and CEO of IBM, commented on earnings:

Our results for the first half of 2015 demonstrate that we continue to transform our business to higher value and return value to shareholders. We expanded margins, continued to innovate across our portfolio and delivered strong growth in our strategic imperatives of cloud, analytics and engagement, which are becoming a significant part of our business.

At the end of the quarter, cash and cash equivalents totaled $8.39 billion compared to $8.48 billion at the end of December 2014.

Shares of IBM closed Monday up 0.4% at $173.22 on a 52-week trading range of $149.52 to $196.40. Following the release of the report, shares were down 3.3% at $167.55 in the after-hours trading session. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $160.74.