IBM forecasts upbeat 2022 revenue on cloud strength; flags Russia hit

By Chavi Mehtap

Reuters – IBM said on Tuesday it expects to hit the top end of its revenue growth forecast for 2022 even as it accounted for a hit of a “few hundred million dollars” from the suspension of its business in Russia.

IBM expects the impact from Russia to be less than “half a percent” of total revenue last year, or a little over 200 million, Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Reuters.

Servers from IBM, Dell Technologies Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co top the market in Russia. IBM had generated “a couple hundred million dollars” in profit from the region last year, Kavanaugh said.

The centuryold company said it expects to hit the higher end of its midsingledigit revenue growth forecast for this year, after it trounced firstquarter estimates for revenue, energized by its focus on cloud services amid higher global spending on technology.

IBMs revenue grew 3.9 in 2021. Analysts on average expect annual revenue of 60.69 billion, which implies a 5.8 rise from last year, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Having shed its large and laggard IT managed infrastructure business last year, IBM has placed its bets on highgrowth software and consulting businesses with a focus on the socalled “hybrid cloud” to put an end to its years of stagnating revenue growth.

Hybrid cloud, in which enterprises use a combination of their own data centers and leased computing resources to store and process data, lets IBM take a dip in the lucrative enterprise cloud market without having to directly compete with large providers such as Amazon.com‘s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure.

IBMs cloud revenue grew 14 to 5 billion during the quarter ended March 31.

Revenue from software and consulting segments, which make up over 70 of IBMs business, rose 12 and 13, respectively.

Total revenue rose 8 to 14.20 billion during the quarter, beating estimates of 13.85 billion.