14 DAY TRIAL // From time to time companies publish their incomes: net income, operations income and total revenue. This is done on a year long basis, each company sharing with the rest their successes or failures four times a year. To us simple numbers of how rich companies are and how much money they make isn't quite the subject of interest, but most acquisitions between major players take place during structural fluctuations inside the companies, and the best way to find out about that is from their quarterly report.
IBM took home $1.8 billion for the first-quarter of 2007, $100 million more than their operations income from last year, while the total revenues for this quarter added up to $22 billion.
Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer said: "IBM's good results in the quarter demonstrate the breadth of our global capabilities, the advantages of our business model and our focus on profitable growth. We continued to grow in the higher-value products and services that help our clients transform their businesses. We again grew gross profit margins and earnings, and continued to generate significant cash from operations. This gives us considerable financial capability to strengthen our position in the profitable growth segments and create further value for our investors."
Intel's first-quarter revenue was of "just" $8.9 billion, while their operations income was of $1.7 billion, their net income was $1.6 billion, a couple of hundred millions under what IBM had earned. That just goes to show that you might be big, but you are not the biggest.
Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini said: "The strong momentum of our industry-leading Intel Core microarchitecture product family, combined with ongoing structural cost improvements, delivered solid financial results in the first quarter. Our product strength is reflected in the fact that average selling prices for the quarter held up well in a very competitive environment."
Meanwhile, Seagate Technology hasn't been doing as well as they expected, ending up with a $2.8 billion revenue and a $212 million net income. Part of this was due to the "expenses associated with the acquisition of Maxtor", which took them $62 million out of their net income, the true amount being situated at $274 million if things had been different.
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said in an interview: "Profit was down quite a bit. As we got into March, demand slowed down, and it wasn't as big as expected. Our sense is that it is more of a short-term fluctuation (...) [and] that people saw the Intel and AMD cuts and pushed PC purchases into April."