The American computer giant IBM announced Thursday a turnover down for the fourth consecutive quarter and a profit in sharp fall, which weighed heavily on the title on Wall Street.
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The group's action fell by nearly 7% in electronic exchanges following the close of the official meeting.
Under the leadership of Arvind Krishna since April 2020, IBM is trying to find a new lease of life with “cloud” or dematerialized computing services.
Revenues from this activity grew 10% in the fourth quarter, 19% over the year, to just over a third of the company's sales.
But this growth does not compensate for the decline in other activities of the company, such as those related to technological services or servers.
IBM's revenue fell 6% to $ 20.4 billion between October and December, 5% to $ 73.6 billion for the year as a whole.
The group's net profit for its part plunged 63% to $ 1.36 billion in the fourth quarter and 40% to $ 5.59 billion in 2020. Reported per share and excluding exceptional items, the benchmark on Wall Street IBM's profit, however, slightly exceeded expectations, reaching $ 2.07 in the fourth quarter (versus $ 1.79 expected) and $ 8.67 in 2020 (versus $ 8.43 expected).
Cloud bet
To focus on the cloud, the group announced in October its intention to separate from its IT infrastructure management activities and make it an independent listed company.
IBM is betting on companies' appetite for the cloud, and in particular the hybrid cloud, a mixture of “private” (own servers) and “public” clouds (servers from a supplier like Amazon or Microsoft, the leaders in the sector).
“We have made progress in 2020 by developing our hybrid cloud platform as the basis for the digital transformation of our customers while facing the wider uncertainty over the macroeconomic environment
,
”
said Arvind Krishna in the press release.
“The actions we are taking to focus on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence will take root, giving us confidence in our ability to return to revenue growth in 2021,”
he added.
Since October, the company has announced the acquisition of seven companies specializing in hybrid cloud or artificial intelligence.