Analysts were a little disconcerted on receiving preview copies of IBM’s 1989 annual report to discover that the company increased capital spending a whopping 18% last year at a time when it was avowing that cost-cutting was the order of the day. It was the first major increase in capital investment at IBM since 1985. The highlight of the report is that IBM’s Workstations Division – overwhelmingly PS/2s in 1989 – accounted for 13.1% of the company’s total business of $62,710m, making its personal computers alone an $8,215m – which means that the only entire computer companies bigger than IBM’s PS/2 business are Fujitsu, DEC, Unisys and Hewlett-Packard. The PS business grew 18% last year worldwide, and a whopping 23% in the US, where IBM did much better than the market as a whole.
