Earnings Call Excerpt
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)
Q1 2009 Earnings Call
April 20, 2009 4:30 pm ET
Executives
Patricia Murphy – Vice President, Investor Relations
Mark Loughridge – Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
David Grossman – Thomas Weisel Partners
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein
David Bailey – Goldman Sachs
Ben Reitzes – Barclays Capital
Chris Whitmore – Deutsche Bank
Richard Gardner – Citigroup
Keith Bachman – Bank of Montreal
Mark Moskowitz – JP Morgan
Peter Misek – Canaccord Adams
Katie Huberty – Morgan Stanley
Presentation
Operator
Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.
Now, I will turn the meeting over to Ms. Patricia Murphy, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ma’am, you may begin.
Patricia Murphy
Thank you. This is Patricia Murphy, Vice President of Investor Relations for IBM. I’m here with Mark Loughridge, IBM’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Thank you for joining our First Quarter Earnings Presentation.
The prepared remarks will be available in roughly an hour and a replay of this web cast will be posted to our Investor Relations website by this time tomorrow. Our presentation includes certain non-GAAP financial measures in an effort to provide additional information to investors. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to their related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You will find reconciliation charts at the end and in the Form 8K submitted to the SEC.
Let me remind you that certain comments made in this presentation may be characterized as forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in the company’s filings with the SEC. Copies are available from the SEC, from the IBM web site or from us in Investor Relations.
Now, I will turn the call over to Mark Loughridge.
Mark Loughridge
Thank you for joining us today. This quarter we delivered $1.70 of earnings per share, which was up 4% year-to-year. This positions us well to achieve our objective of at least $9.20 of earnings per share for the year. We generated $1 billion of free cash flow, up $450 million. We ended the quarter with over $12 billion of cash on hand and we reduced total debt by $3 billion. We returned another $2.5 billion to shareholders with $700 million in dividends and $1.8 billion of share repurchases.
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