IBM suffered a surprisingly significant loss of business at the end of the year. In the final quarter, sales fell year-on-year by a good six percent to 20, 4 billion US dollars, about 16, 8 billion euros, as IBM announced on Thursday after the US market closed. Net income fell 42 percent to $ 1.3 billion due to high corporate restructuring costs.

The numbers were not well received by investors, the share initially fell by more than seven percent after the trading hours. In terms of profit, IBM exceeded market expectations, but significantly higher sales were expected on Wall Street. In the past twelve months the share price has fallen by 16 percent.

Less growth in the cloud business IBM’s lucrative cloud business with IT services and storage space on the Internet recently grew significantly more slowly than in the previous quarter, as can be seen in the IBM annual report. The sales increased here compared to the same period last year by ten percent to 7.5 billion dollars. Because of the weaknesses in the traditional core hardware business, for example with servers and mainframes, overall group-wide sales have been on the downside for a long time anyway.

In the past financial year, sales rose by five percent to 73, $ 6 billion back. Profits dropped 42 percent to $ 5.5 billion. IBM wants to split off its IT infrastructure business and go public on its own. In future, the focus will be on cloud services and business areas such as data analysis and artificial intelligence, which should bring more growth.

Falling share price IBM has not been able to position itself with a stronger growth in recent years, which investors no longer want to accept. In addition, IBM is preparing to split into two publicly traded companies. In the infrastructure division, which is currently being separated, there are job cuts in Europe. Round 10. 000 Jobs should be dropped, in Germany the United Service Union Verdi speaks of around 1000 jobs. Job cuts in order to compensate for general weaknesses are not well received by investors.

This now has a full impact on the company’s share price. Since Thursday evening, the price of an IBM security has only known one direction: down. Over the course of Friday morning, a share lost around 7, 20 percent. On Thursday, an IBM share was still quoted at 107, 90 euros. Now their value is 100, 05 Euro like. (with material from dpa) / (olb)