Thursday, April 20, 2000 | 11:33 a.m.
IBM said sales slumped 5 percent in the first quarter amid a broad decline in products ranging from desktop computers to mainframes to hard disk drives.
The company posted a 3 percent increase in first-quarter profit on Tuesday that beat Wall Street forecasts, earning $1.52 billion, or 83 cents a share, in the three months ended March 31. That was up from a profit of $1.47 billion, or 78 cents a share, in the year-ago period.
IBM pushed profits higher partly by slashing costs by 6 percent. And the per-share profit benefited from the company's repurchase of $2.1 billion in outstanding shares during the recent quarter, which boosted the value of remaining stock.
The profit beat the 78 cents forecast by analysts surveyed by First Call/Thomson Financial.
But revenues unexpectedly dropped to $19.35 billion from $20.32 billion amid a discouraging 12 percent slide in sales of hardware products and weak demand for other IBM products and services.
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