3. International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 41
Dividend Yield as of January 27: 4.90%
Winton Capital Management’s Stake Value: $8,716,000
International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM), an American multinational tech company, was lauded at BMO Capital in January due to its fiscal Q4 earnings beat. The firm lifted its price target on the stock to $155, while keeping a Market Perform rating on the shares.
The number of hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey having stakes in International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) stood at 41 in Q3, the same as in the previous quarter. These stakes are valued at over $1.4 billion. Arrowstreet Capital was among the company’s largest shareholders in Q3, owning shares worth roughly $399 million.
In Q3 2021, Winton Capital Management increased its stake in International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) by 17%, holding a stake worth over $8.7 million. The company constituted 0.48% of David Harding’s portfolio. International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) currently pays a quarterly dividend of $1.64 per share, with a dividend yield of 4.90%. The company has been paying dividends since 1916 while increasing its dividend consistently for the past 26 years. Moreover, the dividend payout is around $6 billion a year.
St. James Investment Company mentioned International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) in its Q4 2021 investor letter. Here is what the firm has to say:
“IBM was not the first company to build computers. The distinction belongs to Sperry-Rand’s subsidiary UNIVAC, which introduced the first commercially successful computers in the early 1950s. In this era, IBM did possess the largest research and development department of the business machines industry and quickly caught up, introducing cost-competitive computers a few years after UNIVAC. By the late 1950s, IBM held the dominant market share in computers. IBM also touted a vastly superior sales organization, which used a sales tactic called “paper machines” (the equivalent of today’s “vaporware”). If a competitor’s product was selling well in a market segment that IBM had yet to penetrate, the company would announce a competing product and start taking orders for the “paper machine” long before it was available.
One cannot overstate how powerful IBM was in the computer industry in the 1950s and 1960s. Every competitor rightly worried that if their product worked too well for too long, it was only a matter of
time before an army of IBM salesforce representatives mobilized. In their easily recognizable uniforms of starched white shirts, red ties and blue suits, IBM marketers marched on their customers and offered a more expensive, but much more defensible, choice. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM” was a common phrase. Even competitors acknowledged that the company excelled at sales. As a UNIVAC executive once complained, ‘It doesn’t do much good to build a better mousetrap if the other guy selling mousetraps has five times as many salesmen.’” (Click here to see the full text)
