It has always looked as if it was going to be that way, and now analysts are openly saying it: IBM Corp is not likely to reach its revenue target for its OEM business of $3,000m this year, Reuter reports. It was IBM itself that left them with that impression when it met them last week. They will probably come up short on the $3,000m target for OEM revenues, said Curt Rohrman, a First Boston analyst. They will probably be in the range of $2,500m in revenues this year, he added, against about $1,400m in 1992. IBM was not happy with the impression left: There was no news, it was just a discussion of strategy, said spokesman Tadashi Okamura. Our objective is $3,000m for this year. As of today, we could not give specific figures. He said 1992 OEM revenues exceeded $1,000m. Analysts said IBM is seeing a shortfall in 1993 OEM revenues due to some pricing pressures, particularly in disk drives. They said that the rest of the meeting was a discussion from IBM on how it plans to emphasise its the OEM business sector. As well as disk drives, IBM’s biggest OEM business, the company has current OEM business on RS/6000 workstations and personal computers, and is also doing some contract manufacturing, but mostly for very small companies. The business carries a low margin, but at least it helps keep the factories loaded and absorbs costs on higher-margin end-user kit.
