https://www.ft.com/content/bb996cec-94bb-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b
"At $19.2bn, revenues at the US IT company were only $54m lower in the third quarter than a year before, and ahead of the $19bn most analysts had been expecting. Earnings also topped Wall Street forecasts.
But after stripping out a 2 percentage point benefit from acquisitions and 1 point gain from foreign currency changes, IBM experienced an underlying revenue decline of about 3 per cent that was in line with recent quarters and pointed to continuing falls in its legacy operations.
IBM’s revenues were also padded in the latest quarter by a jump in income from intellectual property licensing, which added nearly 2 percentage points to the corporate total. Mr Schroeter said the improvement followed a rethink on how the company handles its IP licensing and should point to a sustainable improvement, rather than a one-off jump."
So more financial engineering to the tune of buoying the results with $5B+ of acquisitions, a surprise big bump due to IP licensing spurred by some sort of "rethink on how the company handles its IP licensing," (I mean what's the "rethink": sell the keys to the kingdom?), & a clearly unsustainable tax rate. Gee, I wonder how Big Bleu plans to shore-up 4Q16, given in reading other similar articles it's been noted that Big Bleu gave guidance to meet their EPS (so some simple math says that they'll need to post $4.30(?!) EPS for 4Q to meet their $13.50 target)? Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how they'll achieve this??