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Julie Bhusal Sharma

Julie Bhusal Sharma is an equity analyst for Morningstar.

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Despite significant market demand for digital transformation tech and services, IBM’s third-quarter results didn’t live up to our expectations, even when omitting its poor-performing Kyndryl business to be spun off soon.

In IBM’s second quarter, the company dealt with continued headwinds to its managed infrastructure business because of the option to now have public cloud providers manage workloads, while also benefiting from cloud tailwinds in its software and business services portfolio.

Market volatility and security concerns increased mainframe capacity needs, leading to nearly 50% year-over-year growth in the seventh quarter since the z15 model’s launch.

IBM reported fourth-quarter results that beat CapIQ earnings consensus expectations--but top line performance weighed on overall results, as the company’s revenue came behind CapIQ consensus estimates. We maintain our fair value estimate of $125 per share for the narrow-moat name.

IBM continued to refrain from publishing an outlook for the quarter or full year, but we expect the final quarter will see strong sequential growth due to IBM’s seasonality despite another expected quarter of annual declines. We’ve also increased our expectations for the year, leading us to raise our fair value estimate for the narrow-moat name to $125 per share from $120.

The company's ability to retain customers causes us to upgrade our rating.

More About Julie Bhusal Sharma

Julie Bhusal Sharma is an equity analyst for Morningstar Research Services LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. She covers technology, media, and telecommunications companies.

Before joining Morningstar in 2017, Bhusal Sharma freelanced for the Chicago Tribune, writing about tech and startups. She also was acting associate editor for Columbus CEO, and her column for that magazine won the Alliance of Area Business Publishers’ national award for “Best Recurring Feature” in 2017.

Bhusal Sharma holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy with a minor in mathematics from Kenyon College.

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