Revenue falls, profit rises: Cloud business saves IBM's balance sheet

Postponed projects by corporate customers are causing problems for IBM. The fact that the technology giant still does a little better than expected in the third quarter is due to the lucrative cloud business.

The IT veteran IBM suffered further business losses in the third quarter despite booming cloud services. In the three months to the end of September, sales fell by almost three percent year-on-year to 17.6 billion dollars (15.0 billion euros), as the group announced on Monday after the US market closed. The net profit increased nevertheless by two percent to 1.7 billion dollars.

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IBM continued to post strong growth in the lucrative cloud business with IT services and storage space on the Internet. Here, sales climbed a total of 19 percent to $ 6.0 billion. However, this could not compensate for the weaknesses in the traditional core hardware business, such as servers and mainframes.

Although the results were overall in line with market expectations, the share initially reacted with price losses after the trading day. Because of the continued increased uncertainty due to the corona pandemic, IBM did not issue a business outlook. Apparently that didn't go down well with investors. Preliminary quarterly figures were already known.

The group recently announced that it would spin off its IT infrastructure business and go public on its own. In future, the focus will be even more on the cloud business. For years, IBM has been undergoing a profound restructuring of the group towards new, faster-growing business areas. In addition to cloud services, this also includes data analysis and artificial intelligence.

. (tagsToTranslate) Economy (t) IBM (t) Quarterly figures (t) Cloud Computing