Shares of International Business Machines (IBM) Corp. rose in Monday after-hours trading after it reported an upbeat fourth-quarter revenue.
The American computer hardware company gained 2.46% or 3.17 points to $131.99 per share. It reversed its drop of 0.41% or 0.53 points to $128.82 per share in the regular hours.
However, it is still 5.31% or 7.22 points lower since the start of the year.
Last November, IBC completely separated from Kyndryl, a slow-growing managed infrastructure business.
Still, the Q4 and full-year results are on a continuing operations basis.
Its quarterly revenue increased 6.50% to $16.70 billion from the same period a year earlier, outpacing the expected $15.96 billion.
In line with this, the firm marked its fastest revenue growth since the third quarter of 2011.
Accordingly, part of the growth included about 3.50 points from incremental external sales to Kyndryl.
Subsequently, the Software, Consulting, and Infrastructure segments rose 8.00%, 13.00%, and 2.00%, respectively.
Then, the Hybrid Cloud revenue edged up 16.00% to $6.20 billion in the fourth quarter. It significantly jumped 20.00% to $20.20 billion for the full year.
At present, cloud adoption continuously increases across the globe. The IT giant now focuses on a hybrid cloud, a combination of an on-premises data center and a public cloud to store data.
Correspondingly, IBM posted adjusted earnings of $3.35 per share, surpassing the analysts’ average estimate of $3.30.
Likewise, its Q4 net income grew 72.00% year-over-year to $2.33 billion.
Inversely, its gross margin declined to 56.90% from 58.90% last year.
IBM to Sell Watson Health Assets
Moreover, IBM also announced to sell off its Watson Health assets to private equity firm Francisco Partners.
This agreement will allow the company to pivot on its platform-based hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) strategy.
IBM did not publicly disclose the agreement terms, but reports suggested that the transaction has a value of more than $1.00 billion.
Furthermore, the sale of the healthcare data and analytics unit came along with the trend of investments in healthcare technology.
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