SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM's successful recent quarter is good news for several companies that supply Big Blue with components and assemblies.

Among the big winners: Avnet and Arrow. IBM outsources an estimated $3 billion of manufacturing to the EMS industry and sells roughly $2.5 billion annually of hardware through Arrow and Avnet, according to Deutsche Bank.
In its latest quarter, IBM's hardware sales (excluding PCs) were up 7% year-over-year. Growth of its iSeries servers rose from 10% yoy in the June quarter to 25% year-on-year in the September quarter. Storage was up 11%, mainframes fell 4% and xSeries servers were up 11% year-on-year, DB said.

Avnet's sales to IBM are worth some $2 billion a year -- about 15% of Avnet's sales, DB said. IBM represents roughly 5% of Arrow's sales, DB estimated.

Among EMS firms, Celestica and Sanmina-SCI have the most exposure to IBM. Celestica generates 10-15% of its sales from IBM servers and storage products. Following the sale of IBM's PC division to Lenovo, Sanmina-SCI generates about 10% of its sales from IBM's xSeries servers. Jabil and Solectron generate roughly 5% and 3% of sales from IBM, respectively, DB said.

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