IBM’s first quarter results are in, and it’s not the lift that Big Blue was hoping for.

The company reported in a statement a revenue of $18.2 billion – down almost 5 percent from the year-ago quarter. It’s also much less than the $18.46 billion expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

It marks the third consecutive quarter of declining revenue year over year.

Immediately following the news, shares of IBM fell as much as 4 percent Tuesday afternoon.

Among the other highlights:

  • IBM’s Global Technology Services segment produced revenue of $6.88 billion, down 7 percent year over year.
  • The Cloud & Cognitive Software segment — which contains cognitive applications, cloud and data platforms and transaction processing platforms — came out to $5.04 billion in revenue, down 1.5 percent.
  • The Global Business Services business segment had $4.12 billion in revenue, which was basically stable. Systems revenue was $1.33 billion, down 11 percent.

Despite the shortfalls, IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty put a positive spin on the results.

“In the first quarter, our cloud revenue growth accelerated, and we again grew in key, high-value areas in Cloud and Cognitive Software and in consulting,” she said in a statement. “IBM’s investments in innovative technologies coupled with our industry expertise and our commitment to trust and security position us well to help clients move to chapter two of their digital reinvention.”

Later this year, IBM is expected to close on a $34 billion deal to acquire Red Hat. Many analysts believe the acquisition could be the boost that IBM needs.

“IBM is winning new, even cloud-native, customers before RHT,” Nomura Instinet analysts led by Jeffrey Kvaal wrote in a note distributed to clients on April 9 as reported by CNBC. “OpenShift [a Red Hat product] should help IBM win new customers and new workloads as enterprises begin to usher mission-critical applications from on-premise to public or private clouds.”

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