All eyes on Wall Street will be looking IBMwards tomorrow as analysts wonder nervously whether IBM Corp has made Armonkeys out of them all again: If there’s going to be a surprise, I would opt for it being negative instead of positive, Merrill Lynch analyst Daniel Mandresh told Dow Jones & Co – and he already thinks IBM that could report a loss from operations as high as 50 cents a share, the low end of a range that has Steven Milunovich at Morgan Stanley most exposed with a forecast that IBM will be in the black with 10 cents a share in earnings from operations; most analysts have taken IBM at its word, fixing their fourth-quarter estimates at break-even, although a raft of charges will turn that into a thumping great loss at the net level; Break-even would at least tell us that IBM can forecast its own earnings two weeks before the end of the quarter, says Jay Stevens of Dean Witter; on the hardware front, analysts generally expect overall fourth-quarter hardware sales of $10,000m to $11,000m, down about 20% from a year ago, when IBM was on the crest of the mainframe product cycle.
