Shares in Big Blue rallied some 10 percent Wednesday after IBM said Tuesday evening that earnings and revenues both top Wall Street expectations for the most recent quarter.
Shares closed up 8.9 percent on the dat, up $12.99 to close at $159.53.
However, revenue did drop year-over-year for the 22nd straight quarter (barely). The year-over-year drop was minor: 0.4 percent.
Shares climbed to above $160 from Tuesday’s close of $146.54 after IBM reported $19.15 billion in quarterly revenue. Expectations were $18.6 billion.
By Wednesday afternoon, shares had soared as high as $161.09 in heavy trading. More than 30 million shares had been traded, eight times the daily average.
Earnings of $550 million delivered adjusted earnings of $3.30 a share, which topped expectations by 2 cents.
“In the third quarter we achieved double-digit growth in our strategic imperatives, extended our enterprise cloud leadership, and expanded our cognitive solutions business,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer. “There was enthusiastic adoption of IBM’s new z Systems mainframe, which delivers breakthrough security capabilities to our clients.”
IBM stressed that its “strategic imperatives” such as artificial intelligence and analytics produced revenue of $34.9 billion over the last year, an increase of 10 percent. These initiatives now make up 45 percent of IBM revenue. In the most recent quarter, revenuers were up 11 percent.
Meanwhile, cloud revenue has climbed 25 percent over the last 12 months to $15.8 billion, an increase of 25 percent.
IBM operates one of its largest corporate campuses in RTP.
