A little more perspective on IBM from the trade press...
IBM REPORT CARD: MUST IMPROVE HARDWARE
IBM Corp's annual report reveals that hardware is far from the
buoyant business that all the talk of a resurgence in mainframe
MIPS would have us believe. Indeed only the oft-maligned
desktop PC group actually showed growth for the year, and that
was only 2%. PC Servers, S/390, AS/400 and RS/6000 all
declined. Poring over the numbers, Merrill lynch & Co analysts
figure sales of client devices as a whole were flat at $13.9bn,
while PC sales, excluding servers, rose 2% to $12.7bn.
Workstation sales declined steeply while server sales were down
4%. They estimate that S/390 sales declined to about $4.8bn,
AS/400 was off at $3.3bn and the RS/6000 declined slightly to
$2.4bn. PC server sales rose to $1.4bn. Storage sales declined
2% as tape sales grew and DASD performed less poorly. Other
peripherals, which include printers and telecom devices, fell
by 8%. OEM hardware sales jumped by 23% and semiconductor sales
are estimated to have risen by 17% to about $2.5bn while disk
drives increased more than 40% to $2.8bn. 40% of software sales
are from distributed products and Notes seats doubled to 20
million. |
