It is clear that software and services carried the fourth quarter for IBM Corp (CI No 3,581). However many Wall Street brokerages had also looking for hardware revenue to continue to grow. Instead hardware declined by 2%. Merrill Lynch & Co says that servers were the main culprit. The 40% price per mainframe MIP decline more than offset 60% MIPS growth. AS/400 sales were off as customers deferred purchases until new systems are announced later this month and RS/6000 suffered poor execution. Server sales all declined about 10%. PC sales grew 5%, hard disk sales rose 50% while Microelectronics was off 7%. Open storage was flat, the brokerage says, indicating no progress against EMC Corp.
Content from our partners
