IBM Corp senior vice-president Nick Donofrio says he is prepared for another decline in IBM’s mainframe business in 1993, but it is too early yet to tell what the outlook for the year is: he disputes analysts’ estimates that the company’s mainframe business declined by about 12% in 1992, saying that the Enterprise Systems business was down about 8%, including sales of mainframe software – and We were still profitable and still a large piece of IBM’s profits, Donofrio said; overall, the company forecasts that the market for all kinds of large systems will grow by about 7% a year over the next four years to reach $200,000m by 1996 – But the mainframe opportunity doesn’t grow, it probably shrinks over those four years, Donofrio added.
