Morgan Stanley reissues Overweight IBM stance

• Citing a shift into new businesses, particularly Watson, and multiple consideration relative to Oracle and Microsoft, analyst Katy Huberty issues a $187 price target (from $179 and factoring turn premium to Oracle's P/FCF multiple) on IBM and offers a bull case as Watson scales to levels of sustainable revenue and profit growth of $237 (from $229 and factoring Microsoft P/FCF multiple of 17.5x).
• Further: "While both Oracle and IBM deliver legacy apps in the cloud, IBM has launched new businesses, like Watson, that can help deliver future growth. Longer-term, we see IBM playing a leading role in cloud-delivered machine learning/artificial intelligence where Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM lead enterprise usage today."
• IBM (NYSE:IBM) -0.70% at $166.57.
• Also today – Stifel raises IBM target to $192.