IBM、Red Hatの契約締結に向けて水を踏む

同社の最新の決算報告によると、システムハードウェア事業の減少により、前年同期比で4％の減収となりました。IBM is banking a lot on its recently closed acquisition of Red Hat, though it will still be a few more days before it provides more color on just how long it will take to glean a return on its $34 billion investment. Speaking with investors following the release of IBM’s second quarter financial results, company CFO Jim Kavanaugh was tight-lipped on specific financial expectations tied to the Red Hat deal, but he did signal that the monetary impact would quickly turn positive. “As you would expect with a highly profitable software business, the non-cash purchase accounting adjustments result in the acquisition being dilutive to full year 2019 earnings per share,” Kavanaugh said in prepared remarks, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “We have said this and also that we continue to expect Red Hat to be accretive to operating earnings per share by the end of the second year, and accretive to free cash flow in the first full year.” Kavanaugh noted that IBM would provide more details on its Red Hat integration plans and the financial impact of those plans on Aug. 2. That impact could be important for IBM, which for its latest financial quarter reported a 4% dip in revenues compared to the same quarter last year. Most of that came from its legacy hardware operations as systems hardware sales dropped 23% due to slower mainframe sales. By comparison, IBM’s cloud and data platforms business surged 7% year over year. The Red Hat deal, which is the largest in IBM’s history, closed earlier this month. The $34 billion purchase price took a significant chunk out of IBM’s balance sheet, which stood at $46 billion in cash before taking into account the Red Hat purchase. However, IBM did take on around $20 billion in additional debt to finance the deal. Kavanaugh repeatedly noted that IBM was maintaining its pace to meet full-year financial expectations outside of the Red Hat deal. However, analysts remain fixated on what the deal will mean for IBM’s financial footing. “Everyone is looking forward to this investor update,” Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk told Bloomberg. “It’s paramount that IBM really nails that.” Analysts have also noted that the deal is important for IBM as it looks to expand its reach into the growing cloud space. “IBM has been under pressure to make a move again to reverse its top-line compression and portray itself as a growth company again,” explained Jay Lyman, principal analyst at 451 Research, when the deal was initially announced last October. “Even though IBM was already a major player in cloud, containers, and Kubernetes, the deal elevates its profile and market share in those areas.” Recent reports have pegged IBM in a close battle with Google for the No. 3 position in the broader cloud market. Both are well behind industry heavyweights Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty underlined the importance of this push during a televised interview with CNN last week. “This is the moment we reset the cloud landscape, and it’s all about being the No. 1 hybrid cloud provider in the world right now,” she said. “It is what clients need right now, and 80% of their workloads still need to move to the cloud.” Red Hat was also central to IBM’s recently signed deal with AT&T. As part of that multi-year agreement AT&T will use Red Hat’s open source platform to manage workloads and collaborate with IBM on multi-cloud capabilities around 5G, edge computing, and IoT.