[From last week’s IBM earnings announcement]
Revenue up $1.8 billion for the quarter. Hard to tell what organic growth was but probably very low single digits.
Repurchased $14.6 billion in stock and the number of outstanding shares down over 6% in the quarter.
Debt to fund the buyback up $12 billion in the last six months (up 53%).
Most of the earnings release is adjustments and caveats about various acquisitions and divestitures. Lots of churn that muddies the view of the underlying business.
I won’t pretend to know whether this is prudent financial engineering or not, but no doubt they are leveraging up.
Put IBM on the list of companies to watch when the private equity frenzy starts to unwind. That may have started in earnest today…