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(Bloomberg) -- International Business Machines Corp. shares slipped after executives were tight-lipped about the company’s $34 billion Red Hat acquisition and how it will help growth in cloud computing.
The deal closed last week and IBM reported quarterly results on Wednesday. Analysts tuned into a conference call to glean fresh details on the impact of adding Red Hat’s open-source software to IBM’s current offerings. But Chief Financial Officer Jim Kavanaugh declined to answer any questions on Red Hat, saying the company will share an updated financial forecast at its annual investor briefing on Aug. 2.
“Everyone is looking forward to this investor update," Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk said. “It’s paramount that IBM really nails that."
Second-quarter revenue fell 4.2 percent to $19.2 billion, slightly beating the average analyst estimate. It was the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue declines for the Armonk, New York-based company. The shares declined 1.5% in extended trading.
After lagging in the cloud market for more than a decade, IBM is pegging its future to a hybrid cloud strategy that will allow it to offer services on both private and rival public clouds. Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty paid a rich premium for Red Hat in order to help the 108-year-old company catch up with cloud market leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The deal officially closed last week, so Red Hat’s contribution hasn’t shown up in IBM’s quarterly financial reports yet.
Rometty has touted the Red Hat deal, which was announced in October, as a “game changer” for IBM, claiming it will reset the entire cloud landscape. IBM has estimated only 20% of enterprise applications have made the shift to cloud so far and Rometty believes the company is in prime position to conquer the remaining market.
This quarter’s results are significant because they represent the last clean read of IBM’s trajectory before the integration of Red Hat, Sanford C. Bernstein analysts Toni Sacconaghi and Corry Wang wrote in a note before the results were released.
Revenue in the global technology services unit, which includes cloud infrastructure and technology support, was $6.8 billion, down 6.7%, from a year earlier. The division shrank by the same amount in the previous quarter.
The drop was the result of IBM ending some unprofitable businesses, Kavanaugh said. "We will see improvements of those numbers as we get into the second half," he added. Technology services is IBM’s biggest business unit, pulling in almost 40% of total sales.