IBM will disclose earnings for the third quarter of the year after the closing bell on Tuesday. The company will hold a conference call with analysts at 5 p.m. Eastern time.

• EPS: Excluding certain items, analysts expect $3.28 in earnings per share, according to Thomson Reuters.
• Revenue: Analysts are expecting $18.6 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

If that revenue estimate turns out to be correct, then IBM’s revenue would be down by 3.3 percent year over year, marking the company’s 22nd consecutive quarter of revenue declines.

In terms of guidance, analysts are expecting the company to end 2017 with $13.75 in earnings per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

In the third quarter IBM’s Strategic Imperatives — analytics, cloud, mobile and security — may have become even more crucial as legacy areas like systems hardware continue to falter. “We currently project Strategic Imperatives to grow by 10 percent overall in 3Q17 to around 47 percent of revenues,” Cantor Fitzgerald analysts Joseph Foresi and Michael Reid wrote in an Oct. 13 note.

In the third quarter, IBM said it was committing$240 million to back an artificial intelligence research lab in conjunction with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company also announced a collaboration around blockchain technology with Dole, Kroger, Unilever and Walmart, among other companies.

IBM stock is down 11.5 percent since the beginning of the year.

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Source: Tech CNBC
IBM set to report earnings after the bell