IBM Margins Narrow While It Struggles to End Sales Slide
- Revenue slips for 19th quarter, margins shrink for fifth
- Newer businesses still haven’t grown enough to offset costs
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IBM fourth-quarter sales declined and margins narrowed, indicating that revenue in cloud computing and artificial intelligence hasn’t yet offset acquisition costs and other expenses to move the company into new businesses.
Revenue was $21.8 billion, slipping for the 19th consecutive quarter. Operating margins shrank year-over-year for the fifth quarter in a row, to 51 percent, International Business Machines Corp. said Thursday in a statement. Investors and analysts view the margin metric as a key indicator of the company’s health.