$IBM Receives Multiple Downgrades as Earnings Miss Across the Board, All Business Sectors Experience Weakness

“(Reuters) – Three brokerages cut their price targets on IBM Corp shares and warned its weak earnings suggested results would also be disappointing at other hardware technology companies such as EMC Corp, Dell Inc and HP Co.

IBM’s shares were set to open 1.5 percent lower on Friday than their Thursday closing price of $207.15 on the New York Stock Exchange.

IBM posted on Thursday a rare quarterly earnings miss as a sliding yen hurt earnings from Japan and it failed to close a number of major deals, especially in Europe and the United States.

“The IBM miss is a decidedly negative read through for the entire IT hardware segment and we are incrementally more cautious on the sector; particularly those with a March quarter end,” Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore wrote in a note….”

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