IBM: Fiscal 1Q13 Financial Results

IBM Corp. announced the financial results for its first quarter of fiscal year 2013 ended March 31,.

Revenues from system storage decreased 11% compared with the year-ago period but, as usual, Big Blue didn’t reveal the exact figures.

But in a chart published by the company, you can see that storage represents 21% of total systems and technology revenue ($3.1 billion for the quarter). Consequently, hardware storage sales is around $651 million 1Q13, a poor figure.

With growth in new midrange products, storage growth profit was up as Storwize products grew over 50% and replaced older OEM products, said Big Blue.

The value in storage continues to shift the software. Tivoli was up 3% driven by security and storage. Tivoli Storage grew 11%.`

Mark Loughridge, IBM’s CFO, commented during the earnings call:
"Finally, there are parts of our business that are in transition or have been underperforming like elements of our Power x and storage product lines that showed disappointing performance in the first quarter.
"(…) in the storage products, we need to take advantage of the flash memory content that we built-up and that we reviewed in Almaden, if you look at the second quarter flash memory could improve that storage growth rate by about 1.5 and by the time we get to the fourth quarter by three to four points, but those elements are going to take more time than I think we would originally have thought.
"We’re going to rebalance our workforce to better align our resources to opportunity. (…) capitalize on our flash technologies and storage node. Clearly [it] will take some time, it’s not going to all prop back in the second quarter, but it should give us a better trajectory as we go through the year."