Shares of International Business Machines Corp. rose 1.8% in premarket trading Tuesday after analysts at Barclays upgraded the stock to overweight from underweight. The firm now has a $192 price target on IBM shares. “We think that the narrative can favorably shift for shares of IBM,” wrote the analysts, led by Mark Moskowitz. He thinks that after years of declining revenue, the company could be on the verge of showing stabilized sales or even returning to top-line growth. He’s optimistic about the mainframe cycle and its ability to serve as a “buffer” while IBM progresses on newer initiatives. “IBM could emerge as the next important cloud vendor after Amazon and [Microsoft’s ] Azure over time as customers seek a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in or technology complacency,” he wrote. IBM’s stock has fallen 2.4% in the past 12 months, compared with a 22% gain for the S&P 500 over that time.
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