After running IBM Corp’s first quarter through its spreadsheet, Merrill Lynch & Co says the 17% growth in hardware was driven by PC growth of 50% from $2.4bn to $3.6bn. The PC business loss was around $89m it estimates, down from $458m a year ago. With sales growth out of the channel of 25% and a doubling of Netfinity server sales year over year it looks as if most of the brokerages will stop asking for the PC business’ scalp. S/390 revenue was up 5% (or closer to 10% excluding rental revenue). MIPS growth was over 80% with 25% of MIPS shipped going to new workloads, the brokerage observes. Services and software generated 60% of gross profit.
