International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) will report first-quarter results after markets close Monday. The consensus estimates call for earnings per share (EPS) of $2.09 and $18.28 billion in revenue. As of last Friday, shares were up about 10% so far in 2016, and they added another 0.6% on Monday.
Reaction among analysts to the stock’s run-up has been mixed. Last week Credit Suisse maintained its bearish outlook on Big Blue, reiterating its Underperform rating and a very subpar price target of $110. We dug deeper into this call shortly after it was released.
Stifel recently reaffirmed its Buy rating on IBM and raised its target price to $165 from $155. Merrill Lynch’s key monthly RIC Report also named IBM as a winner changing health care via technology. A partnership with Apple is helping to build a comprehensive patient profile to allow individuals, institutions and medical providers to employ specific and sensitive comprehensive data to derive insights to enhance health. Merrill Lynch also sees IBM’s Watson as building the technology to take the massive amount of data available across many sources to run analytics and drive insights.
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For all the enthusiasm over some of IBM’s products and prospects, CEO Virginia Rometty made our recent list of CEOs who have to go. Rometty, who has been the company’s CEO since 2012, has repeatedly told shareholders the company will soon become dominant in cloud computing, mobile and social media. Maybe, but from 2012 through last year the stock had dropped about 25%.
The measure of the company’s first-quarter results could very well be revenues. A miss there would be another in a string of misses dating back to 2012 and further evidence that the focus on “strategic initiatives” remains at least a little blurry.
Shares traded at $152.61 early Monday afternoon, in a 52-week trading range of $116.90 to $176.30. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $136.77.
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