Despite Flat Sales, I.B.M. Earnings Beat Estimates I.B.M. reported earnings that easily surpassed Wall Street's expectations and raised its earnings projections for the year, but its sales were flat in the first quarter. The company added a note of confidence by modestly raising its profit guidance for the year from earnings per share of "at least $14.85" to "at least $15.00." International Business Machines is the largest global supplier of information technology - hardware, software and services - to corporations and governments, so it is seen as a bellwether of technology spending trends. I.B.M."s quarterly performance and outlook for the year may provide some measure of reassurance for a technology sector that is facing the challenges of a weak European economy and an uncertain outlook in the United States. Earlier this month, Gartner, the research firm, cut its forecast for worldwide information technology spending in 2012 to 2.5 percent, down from 3.7 percent. And I.B.M."s failure to deliver revenue growth, analysts say, could confirm the softening of demand. In after-hours trading , I.B.M."s shares fell $4.70 a share, or more than 2 percent, to $202.67 a share. During the regular trading session, the company's shares rose by $4.73 to $207.45 a share. In the last 12 months, the company's shares have gained about 25 percent. The company reported that its net income rose 7 percent, to $3.1 billion. Its operating earnings rose 9 percent to $3.3 billion, and its earnings per share rose 15 percent to $2.78, reflecting I.B.M."s program of purchasing its own stock, so there are fewer shares outstanding than a year ago. The quarterly earnings per share were well above the $2.66 average estimate of Wall Street analysts, as compiled by FactSet Research. I.B.M."s revenue was flat from a year ago, at $24.7 billion, falling short of analysts" forecast of $24.8 billion. This is the first financial quarter in the tenure of Virginia M. Rometty, who became I.B.M."s chief executive at the start of the year, succeeding Samuel J. Palmisano, who was at the corporate helm for the nine previous years. Ms. Rometty, in a statement, noted the "strong profit and earnings per share growth." No major changes in I.B.M."s strategy, analysts say, are likely anytime soon under Ms. Rometty. In recent years, I.B.M. has moved into more profitable niches of the services and software businesses, while shedding hardware businesses where competition was fierce and profits slender, like personal computers and disk drives. The I.B.M. formula has been to pay more attention to earnings than revenue growth, steadily improving profit margins through automation and cost cutting. Major share buyback programs have boosted earnings per share, by reducing the number of shares outstanding. "We're going to see the same playbook from Ginni Rometty as we saw from Sam Palmisano," said A.M. Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. With its shift to higher-margin businesses and aggressive expansion in emerging markets like China and India, I.B.M. has largely escaped the cyclical swings of the technology industry. The company's profits increased throughout the financial crisis and recession. When the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett disclosed last November that he had invested $10.7 billion, for more than 5 percent of I.B.M., he was not betting on technology - a sector he had famously avoided - but on the resilience of the I.B.M. business model. The first quarter displayed how the breadth of the company's business serves to deliver steady profits. The weakness in the hardware business was offset by higher profit margins in services and strong growth in emerging markets. Hardware sales fell 7 percent to $3.7 billion, pulled down by lower sales of mainframe and large Unix data-serving computers, compared with the previous year when new models had recently been introduced. But that falloff was more than offset by modest growth and higher profit margins in I.B.M."s big software and services business.