Our second-quarter results are right in line with our expectations and with the view we've been expressing since last October, ... Essentially, we've had three quarters of slow revenue growth, driven by a combination of the Y2K slowdown and a series of actions we've taken to improve our business portfolio. During that time, however, we have been able to produce satisfactory earnings growth. |
Results from these areas more than offset revenue declines in some other segments, most notably our consumer PC business |
Services is clearly the largest and fastest-growing portion of the information technology industry, and we continue to extend our leadership position each quarter, ... Our software business continues to gain momentum. |
The next thing is: we can make IBM even better, ... We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership. |
These results show the ongoing strength of our broad business portfolio, ... We saw very good customer response to our new System/390 servers and continuing strength in services and hard disk drives. |
This was a solid quarter, with earnings per share up 20 percent and an acceleration of revenue growth relative to the first half of the year, |
we are facing a number of significant short-term issues, including an uncertain global economic environment, ongoing weakness in some parts of Asia and Latin America, and continued price pressures in semi conductors. |
We would like to have seen more revenue in the quarter, but we were held back by three items, ... First, demand for our microelectronics products -- from both outside customers and internal IBM customers -- far outstripped our ability to supply components. Second, the upcoming release of our new high-end server slowed demand for the System/390 family of servers. Finally, parts of our software business slowed unexpectedly in September. |