IBM 2015 Annual Report Download - page 13

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2015 IBM Annual Report 11
in U.S. patents earned, once again breaking
the 7,000 threshold. Even more important than
the total number is the transformation those
patents represent. Consider that when our streak
began more than two decades ago, 27percent
of our patents were in hardware. Last year,
not only did we earn seven times as many total
patents, but 31percent of them were in cloud,
analytics and cognitive.
We also returned $9.5billion to you in
2015, including dividends of nearly $5billion
and $4.6billion in gross share repurchases.
This marks the 20th consecutive year of an
increased dividend, and IBM’s 100th straight
year of providing one.
The Emerging IBM
Because IBM uniquely transforms both tech-
nology and business, our own reinventions
in response to changing eras have been far-
reaching. This is evident again today. As you
have seen, we have transformed our portfolio—
shedding businesses that provided little differ-
entiating value to our clients, shifting our R&D
and making dozens of acquisitions to fuel our
growth businesses. At the same time, we have
also injected new thinking and talent into
IBM’s culture—such as training 60,000 IBMers
in Agile methods and increasing our team
“ As important as ‘becoming
digital’ is to our clients,
it has become clear that
it is not the destination.
Rather, digital business is
converging with a new kind
of digital intelligence. We call
this Cognitive Business.”