Kyndryl Holdings, Inc. (KD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Global Head of Investor Relations, Lori Chaitman.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us at Kyndryl's first Post-spin Investor Day. So a couple of things before we get started. We will be making forward-looking statements throughout today's event. These statements speak only to our expectations as of today and are subject to risk factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from expressed or implied. For more details on some of these risks, please see the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2024. We'll also be referring to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. These non-GAAP metrics have been reconciled to the most comparable GAAP metrics for historical periods in our quarterly earnings press releases available on our website at investors.kyndryl.com and in the presentation for today's event. With that covered, let's get into our agenda for this morning. We'll start with our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Martin Schroeter; followed by our Group President, Elly Keinan. We'll double click on the growth opportunities we see stemming from Kyndryl Bridge, Kyndryl Consult and Kyndryl Modernization. We'll then open the floor for Q&A related to our growth strategy. After a short break, our Chief Financial Officer, David Wyshner, will discuss our financial outlook. And then Martin and David will take additional questions before we close out the morning. With that, I'll turn the stage over to Martin. Martin?

Thank you, Lori. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. No, no stop. Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to see everybody here. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for those joining on the webcast as well. We appreciate the time, and we appreciate that you're spending the morning with us. So we've got a lot to cover, as Lori said, but let me just talk a little bit about what you're going to hear from us today. It's really, let's call it, 4 key messages. And it's not just me, and obviously as Lori said, Elly is going to talk, and we have a whole lineup of senior leadership from Kyndryl. First, we've laid out a very clear, I think, and detailed strategy on how we're going to get Kyndryl back to growth. We've called it the 3As and the Plus Plus. And we have consistently executed on what we said we would get done. Secondly, we have, and I believe we are probably either the only, or certainly the most, who's invested in the infrastructure space. We have invested in our people and we've invested in the capabilities that have advanced our leadership and solidified our place in the role we play with our customers and the role we play with the world. Third, given all of that, we're now accelerating. We're very close, as we've said before, we're going to grow next quarter. So we're accelerating as we get to growth and driving sustained revenue growth and obviously margin expansion that goes with it. And fourth, as you saw, hopefully, from our press release this morning, a number of you mentioned it to me, so you did see it. We're initiating capital returns with a $300 million stock buyback which obviously will be funded by significant free cash flow generation. So for context, especially for those who may be a little bit newer to Kyndryl, newer to the story, I'll start with just a brief overview of what we do. I think most would know this, but I'm going to start with a brief overview of what we do. I'm going to start with why our work is so essential to the way the world works and the world in which we live, and why our customers place such a high value on our relationship and on the services we provide. Look, we're a services business, right? So we're a services business. We design -- as the video said, we design, build, manage and modernize mission-critical IT, hybrid IT environments. Those are the systems that the world depends on every day. And I could give you a boatload of examples, every one of those examples would have a B at the end of it in terms of how many transactions it runs on a daily basis or a monthly basis or an annual basis. But we run and transform the operations of the world's biggest banks, airlines, telcos, manufacturers, insurers, day in, day out, health care providers. We do it for their security, their resiliency, their regulatory compliance, and all of that with the optimization built in. Most of the Fortune 100 are Kyndryl customers. We manage more than 60% of the world's outsourced mainframes. And because our services are so vital to the role that our customers need to play in the world, we have very little customer churn. I'd say north of 95% of our customers, we keep. Most of those relationships are long term, on average over 10 years. And we have scale, we operate in over 60 countries. Our engineers, I would argue best engineers on the planet for doing what we do running infrastructure. Our engineers have more than 77,000 technical credentials. And when we look at the path we're on -- we talked about acceleration, we look at the path we're on, that's more than 50% increase in just the last 2 years. So the depth and the breadth and the scope of our expertise, our long-standing customer relationships with the companies that make the world work, they're starting points for how we've been able to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace for IT services. So when we launched 3 years ago, we did have scale. We did have scale. That was certainly a good thing. We ran a global delivery platform, also a good thing. And on the heels of that, we outlined a strategy. We said alliances, advanced delivery and focused accounts. Those are our 3As, and then the Plus Plus, consult and getting ourselves a little bit more efficient as well. And we've executed that strategy ahead of the pace that we've laid out. For alliances, as an example, after becoming independent, we used our freedom of action very quickly. Very quickly. You'll remember within a week, we had a very deep and meaningful relationship with Microsoft. A month later, it was Google, then AWS. And since then, it's SAP and Oracle and ServiceNow and Cisco and Dell and HP and Lenovo, NVIDIA, others. These are the companies that matter in enterprise tech. Given our relationships, each of them was really keen, really eager to partner with us. And we're going to hear from one of our partners via video later. And in that process, of moving into the ecosystem that mattered, getting out of the narrowly defined IBM ecosystem, we doubled our addressable market. And now we're tracking, as we said in our previous guidance, we will deliver $1 billion of revenue just in the hyperscaler-related revenue streams this year. So after 3 years, we have $1 billion just from alliances. In advanced delivery -- and you're going to hear from Jamie Rutledge later, who runs delivery for us globally. In advanced delivery, we have invested heavily in IP. We've invested and developed our own Bridge platform, which drives automation. It enables upskilling. And we've freed up to date nearly 12,000 of our own technologists. Some we've moved to higher-value revenue streams, some are now in the consulting business and some are backfilling attrition. But our cumulative savings of wiring our delivery network this way is $750 million at this fiscal year-end. So a very successful initiative. And as I said, Jamie is going to talk a bit more about how Bridge works and how it helps contribute to all that. Importantly, I think really importantly, and going back to the role we play in our customers' environments, it's a win-win for us, it's a win for our customers. Because they have greater automation, which means greater reliability and higher service levels. So our customers are completely and fully behind our use of Bridge. And then the third A that we've talked about was accounts, focus accounts. And that was centered around bringing more of our value to our customers, and at the same time, working our way through and eliminating either the no-margin or the low-margin or in many cases negative-margin third-party content that was in those customer contracts. And that also has generated substantial benefits for us. We've been very successful at rescoping, reshaping and reimagining these contracts. They have more automation. They have more consult work in them. They have more end-to-end higher-value services. And so $8 billion that we started with, 40% of our revenue at spin that we had substandard margins, we're about 70% of the way through that as we stand here. And there's still more opportunity ahead for that. I would say that by the end of the sort of the medium term, which was the original time frame we used to talk about this, this is going to turn out to be $850 million of profit this year on its way to more than $1 billion. We originally said $800 million. We're ahead of the pace. I think we get -- this could would be worth $1 billion for us in the time frames. And then in addition to those 3As, we talked about investing and building Kyndryl Consult, which is our advisory services business. As you've seen, as we provide every quarter, you can see consistent double-digit signings and revenue growth. You'll hear from our global Consult leader, Ismail Amla, about why our Consult business is differentiated, why we're being successful in the marketplace and how much our customers value what we do. Customer -- Consult for us, when we were spun, was under 10% of our revenue. And now -- and we knew at the time that if we invested, if we brought the right skills, and if we engaged with our customers a little bit differently, it was an untapped opportunity for us. And so we did. We invested in our people. We invested in our technology. We invested in our capabilities. And so now we have a $2.5 billion-plus revenue stream, it's almost 20% of our revenue already, on its way to a bigger number. And again, growing well above the market. And then finally, core to our growth core to how Kyndryl runs is Kyndryl Bridge, which I mentioned earlier, is our AI-enabled open integration platform. Bridge is a very powerful resource for customers. It creates substantial value with unprecedented observability into the health of each customer's IT operations, real-time insights, actionable insights, saves them a lot of money. It reduces their risk and it helps them drive their own productivity. For us, Bridge is helping us open doors with our existing customers, where we've had an opportunity to increase Kyndryl Consult engagements and expand the scope of the work of infrastructure what we do for them. You'll hear more about Bridge from both Elly as well as from Jamie shortly. Across all of this, though, across all of this, the key is this. Over the last 3 years, we've laid out a very clear and powerful strategy to expand our margins and get back to growth and particularly grow in the areas we've targeted in the 3As initiatives, consult and alliances. And we've consistently executed, consistently executed on what we said we would do ahead of schedule. So in our view, the what we do versus what we said ratio is very, very high. And importantly, our operational progress gives us the opportunity to tackle a growing and addressable market. There are powerful secular trends that are shaping and the evolution of IT and fueling growth in our customer base. The adoption of AI, cloud migration and management, modernizing complex hybrid IT environment, cybersecurity, and of course industry-wide skill shortages are pervasive. So no matter where I go, London, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto, Delhi, Lima, Washington, it doesn't matter. These are the trends that CEOs are talking about. These are the trends that regulators and government's talking about. And these are the trends that our customer base, the CIOs, the C-suite, is talking about. And we sit at the heart of those trends. We have repositioned this business to being about our customers' future, not just about their past. So when our customers want to deploy AI, they look to us to help them with their data foundation work and their data architecture. When customers are struggling with security requirements or new regulatory requirements about resilience, they look to us to help them prioritize and to invest and to deal with the operational risks and the cyber threats that are out there. And as customers modernize their infrastructure and as they address their tech debt, we're the ones who get the call. We're the ones who can ensure that they have the right workload on the right platform. And being independent, obviously, enables all of that for us. And you'll hear more about that modernization trend and how we play into it and why our customers want us to do it from Petra, who's our global practice -- one of our global practice leaders, because she's going to tell you a bit about how we meet the growing, the relentlessly growing demand really, for modernizing and updating core technologies. Further, when we started Kyndryl, when we created what Kyndryl was, we organized ourselves, obviously, around countries, which is how we release our results. And we also created practices. And those practices are aligned around our expertise, they're aligned around our customers' requirements, and they're aligned around those secular trends that I just outlined. And as you can see, core enterprise and cloud today, each are about 1/3 of our revenue. And as we continue expanding our scope with existing customers -- and we bring new customers in, we do bring new customers in as well. We don't spend a lot of time talking about it, but we do. We'll have more revenue from the other 4 practices as well because we've built out now the capabilities. I would expect -- I think we expect to see very strong growth across applications in data and AI, around security and resiliency, and around the modernization efforts that we have underway with our hyperscalers. So we look at our opportunity kind of in 2 ways. First, total addressable market. It's a highly fragmented market. Total addressable market more than $575 billion and more than double now what we could play in pre-spin. So when we were captive, we could play in just less than half of that. So we've already unlocked an incredible opportunity that we can now capture with the investments we've made. You can also see that our total -- so that's our total. You can also see that our total market, $300 billion, is accessible because that's what our customers spend today. And we've talked -- as everybody knows, we spend a lot of time talking about growing wallet share, not so much about new customers. Again, plenty of new customers. And $85 billion of that comes from our top 250 customers. So we have an opportunity to grow share. We have an opportunity also to move into new customers. And that is there's plenty of room for us to grow, existing customers, new customers. Second way we look at this is our 6 global practices. In 3 of our practices, cloud apps, data, AI and security and resiliency, are each of markets of over $100 billion already, and that's where we're smallest. And they're growing double digit. This is where our customers are investing. Network and edge and digital workplace are also large markets, growing kind of mid-single digits. And the growth in all of these markets still is driven by the need to modernize, to optimize and to secure increasingly complex IT systems. In other words, these secular trends are driving demand for all of our practices, for all of our services. And our core enterprise practice, which includes our mainframe service, it's a stable market. Stable for us is okay. It's okay. And as everybody knows, these hybrid IT estates are here to stay. And so our mainframe expertise, it's hard to come by. We have more than anybody. We have -- again, we run 60% of the world's outsourced mainframes. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of deep mainframe technical expertise. And because we have scale, we have an ability to invest in that to create career paths. So we are the go-to place when our customers need those skills. So we now have an opportunity, again, to take advantage of all the -- everything we've invested in to move into where the world is growing. Now let's see where we see Kyndryl in the next few years. At a high level, the expectation we have for Kyndryl is we continue to evolve and focus on profitable growth and free cash flow. David is going to share more about those models. Our strategic flywheel, though, for us, at a high level, starts with our leadership in running and transforming operating systems at scale. That's what we do. We operate at scale and we transform. Because of our leadership and our capabilities and because our customers trust us and they love what we do, they allow us to manage their most critical mission-critical systems. Our large blue chip customer base in turn has allowed us to has allowed us and encouraged us to form and expand alliances with all the other leading technology providers. I went through the list, there's more, which makes us an integral part now of the ecosystem that's relevant to our customer base and our prospect base. And our scale and our focus on infrastructure, completely focused on infrastructure and our ability to leverage technology from multiple sources allows us to leverage operational insights into developing state of the art solutions for our customers. That then further advances our leadership, creating that flywheel effect. The flywheel. Look, it's working in our favor, and we will continue to gain momentum. So when I said earlier we are accelerating, this is part of why we are accelerating because we are well positioned, we've invested and now this flywheel will start to take effect. The mission-critical infrastructure services is also a foundation for our profitable growth. So they give us credibility and they give us access to move into more consulting engagements. They expand our presence throughout our customers' tech stacks. And with our efforts to step away from the empty calorie revenue largely behind us, largely behind us, that positions us now to return to growth. As David will say later, we still see growth starting next quarter and then continuous growth increasing over time. And driven by Consult, which again, has been a double-digit grower for us. So higher-value services offerings, automation and AI, we've expanded our margin profile, all with the goal, as we've shared every quarter, of putting high single-digit adjusted PTI margins into the backlog. Those high single-digit PTI margins generate very well into cash flow. And the strength in our earnings and our cash flow trajectory is what's giving us the flexibility to initiate capital returns through share repurchase while maintaining investment grade, very important to our customers, very important to us. So we've always said that we would reach this point. We've always said that this is a business that has attributes that would allow us to return -- regularly return capital to shareholders. And I will tell you it is very exciting after 3 years, only 3 years, to be in a position to have the Board support a share repurchase authorization. So when we started this journey, our path to sustained profitable growth, our path to here, maybe not obvious, maybe not easy. So it does feel pretty good. And I think what you're going to feel from each of the people who speaks today is an energy because of the track record we've developed because of our ability to execute, we are ready. This is a firm ready and positioned to grow. And each of us has been working so get to this spot so that we can now talk about growth, continued margin expansion. We'll be talking about share gains hopefully at some point. But we've moved from a team running someone else's mission pre-spin to a company, yes, we're large, yes, we have scale, but we are restless and we are flat and we are fast and we're focused. And you can see how that is showing up in our results. And based on that, I am very confident that the ambitious goals that David is going to take you through are very achievable. And you'll hear -- again, you'll hear that same confidence from the way we're going to get there. You'll hear from Elly and the others as well. So I feel great about where we are. I feel great about what this team has accomplished. We've worked hard to get to a spot which is really, in many ways, just the beginning because now we're back to -- poised for growth. Now we're back to generating substantial cash flow. And to help you understand the how in all of that, Elly is going to start off to share a little bit more about our growth strategy. So our Group President, Elly Keinan.

Thank you, Martin, and good morning, everybody. It's great to have the opportunity to be here with you to discuss our success over the past 3 years and our direction going forward. And as Martin said, we've made wonderful progress. Today, the team and I will focus on our -- first, our differentiation and advantages. We'll focus on what customers need and expect from Kyndryl and the opportunities to accelerate our growth. Okay. So to do this, I want to begin by focusing on our customers. Kyndryl has over 30 years' experience supporting very large global household name brand companies in very diverse industries. And you can see some of those customer logos on the chart. Now for example, over half of the largest banks by total assets, like Caixa and MUFG, including 6 of the top 10, are Kyndryl customers. We support 3 of the world's top telecommunications companies measured by mobile connections, like Verizon. Furthermore, over 30 of the top airlines, such as Delta and Air Canada, including 4 of the top 5, are Kyndryl customers. In addition, we run the mission-critical systems for 8 of the top 10 global automotive companies by revenue, including BMW and Honda Motors. In other words, most of the largest corporations rely on Kyndryl to operate their mission-critical systems that run their businesses. Now we also help our customers modernize their IT systems for efficiency and resiliency as well as in regulatory compliance that Martin talked about and the deployment of new applications and new capabilities. That's what we do, 24/7, 365 days per year globally. We are the largest -- the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider. We're proud of the work that we do. It matters to the world. It matters to the world economy and to people's lives, their daily lives. It's also important to understand that we've built our company organically, so not through M&A. And as a result, we have a single worldwide delivery platform that is at scale. This enables us, for example, to see an issue once in one part of the world or in a particular industry. And then we're able to determine whether it will impact another enterprise anywhere else in the world. In addition, how we deliver enables our customers to shorten the cycle time that it takes them to modernize their systems, to get these new systems into production and then to continue to modernize. This effectively increases our customers' business agility, meaning the pace of their own innovation. Having a single delivery platform like ours is unique and is a significant advantage when running and modernizing mission-critical systems of the world's largest enterprises. So with this in mind, our customers, I'd like to share what our customers are asking of Kyndryl and why we're well positioned to address their most critical business needs. So first, customers are asking us to help them see, which means they want to leverage our worldwide delivery platform that I mentioned and our actionable insights using Kyndryl Bridge to make better business decisions. Now Kyndryl Bridge is our AI-powered open integration digital platform that combines our data, our AI and our expertise. And actionable insights are our recommended actions that we've built over time and are continuing to build in real time. Second, customers are saying, "Help us execute." Here, Kyndryl Consult enables customers to execute by running -- by turning our actionable insights into business value. Third, customers are saying, "Help us balance." Here, we're utilizing our expertise to optimize their existing systems, ensuring business continuity, performance, et cetera, and simultaneously working to modernize to transform their systems. Now remember, these are core mission-critical, very complex systems. They include on-prem systems, multi-cloud, both public and private, operating in multiple locations across the world with many diverse IT providers. To do all this, deep expertise and technical skills are required. And as a result, there is substantial demand for our capabilities. So with our deep industry and technical expertise and our scale, we engage our customers in a very differentiated manner. We learn, based on the patterns that we observe globally, from running over 1,200 customers' mission-critical systems using Kindel Bridge. Our operational data, as I mentioned earlier, is getting updated in real time. So new patterns and new actionable insights are being built continuously. In fact, we'll be in this meeting for about 3 hours. In that time period, we will gain, we will build approximately 50,000 new actionable insights. And I should stress, building insights is difficult to do, right? Because there are a substantial number of variables, including our customers' inventory of hardware and software, multiple versions of hardware and software, log files, IT monitoring alerts, configuration data, multiple cloud infrastructures, et cetera, et cetera. We apply AI to identify anomalies from this vast amount of data based on patterns we've learned and our experience. Our actionable insights are used to inform our customers through Kyndryl Consult, how to, for example, more effectively run core operations, safeguard against cybersecurity attacks, ensure regulatory compliance, et cetera. And our single worldwide delivery platform that I mentioned a few minutes ago, is a key advantage here. It provides us greater visibility to capture and deploy new capabilities faster than anyone else, resulting in an ever-improving service and an ability to engage with our customers on new investment areas. So we can see across our customers' IT environment with precise insight that no one else has. And these actionable insights, our customers are prioritizing their investments. So as I've said, we engaged with our customers on their largest investment priorities with highly differentiated value. Now to summarize how all this works and to set up the agenda that follows. We begin with extensive industry and technical expertise coupled with vast amounts of data and Kyndryl Bridge. We use these to generate a large number of automations and actionable insights that we're continuously growing. And I should note that automations reduce workload, which has enabled us, as Martin had mentioned, to free up resources. Freeing up resources is important for backfilling attrition and addressing new consult capabilities and opportunities. Actionable insights generate consulting pipeline that yield revenue growth. By combining these actionable insights with Kyndryl Consult, we turn insights into value for our customers and growth opportunities for Kyndryl. My colleagues, of course, will talk more about this in a few moments. All this enables us to create value in a very unique way in the biggest and fastest-growing investment areas of our customers, namely cloud, security and AI. Now in addition to our customers, we also strive for shared success with our alliance partners. And Martin had mentioned this earlier as well. When we spun, we very quickly formed alliances with hyperscalers and other top-tier technology leaders. They know that we have unique capabilities that our customers rely on to modernize and innovate using their technology. And these alliances underpin our ability to increase our share of wallet in existing customers and win new customers. So to underscore these points, let's hear from Microsoft's Chief Commercial Officer, Judson Althoff. So can we play the video?

Good morning to those of you gathered in New York City today. And good afternoon and good evening to those joining from around the world. Microsoft has partnered with Kyndryl since their earliest days as a company. Our global strategic alliance brings together the strength of Microsoft solutions and services with Kyndryl's deep expertise in managing and transforming mission-critical IT systems. Together, we are committed to accelerating cloud adoption and delivering innovative solutions at scale. Over the last 2 years, we've helped hundreds of organizations around the world, like Dow, Kantar, UK Power Networks and BT Group, to transform their business and achieve their digital ambitions. In today's era of AI, organizations need a trusted partner to help navigate increasingly complex IT environments. We believe Kyndryl is uniquely positioned to help companies modernize and optimize their IT estates to enable greater opportunity and accelerate their AI transformation. I'm sincerely grateful for the work our teams have delivered to serve our customers and I look forward to our continued partnership. Thank you.

So trusted partner for our alliance partners as well as our customers, and innovation at scale, right? Okay. So with all that said, our next 3 speakers will provide more detail of our -- 3 of our growth accelerators. First, you'll hear from Jamie, our Global Head of Delivery, who will discuss the insights that we gain through Kyndryl Bridge and how they lead to better outcomes for our customers and opportunities for Kyndryl. Then you'll hear, following Jamie, from Ismail, our Global Head of Kyndryl Consult, who will discuss how we're investing in our advisory capabilities and using Kyndryl Bridge insights to help our customers execute critical initiatives. And third, you'll hear from Petra, one of our global practice leaders, who'll discuss how we run customers' mission-critical systems while at the same time transforming them. So with all that said, Jamie, I'll turn it over to you.

Good morning. Hello, everyone, Elly. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Kyndryl plays an integral role for our customers. And today, I want to share how our investment in innovation and Kyndryl Bridge is helping us serve our customers, differentiating us in the marketplace and unlocking new growth opportunities. From our work, we know that 92% of organizations consider enterprise-wide observability, okay, via an integrated platform to be a must-have, okay? Observability means being able to see apps, databases, mainframe, network storage, the whole thing, the entire infrastructure, to understand what's happening at any one moment. okay? Seeing the status of an application environment real time is one of the most powerful tools available to a company and Kyndryl Bridge makes Kyndryl uniquely, uniquely effective in addressing or preventing customer pain points. Kyndryl Bridge is our secret sauce, okay? We fuse together 3 ingredients, okay? IT operational data experts and AI, okay, to create proprietary insights for our customers and ourselves that no one else has. The number of insights in Kyndryl Bridge is multiplying rapidly, okay? As our scale as the leading provider of IT infrastructure services gives us an inherent advantage in the market. Because we've invested in our platform, our global delivery teams have continuous access to these proprietary insights. Importantly, you can't get Kyndryl Bridge without a broader Kyndryl relationship. We have the data and the experience, and Kyndryl Bridge can be deployed and scaled fast, okay? The platform, it's powerful, okay? It's sticky, it's differentiating, okay? It's very valuable to our customers, okay? We've invested in Kyndryl Bridge. As a result, the volume of automation has skyrocketed. It's skyrocketed. By running delivery in Kyndryl Bridge, we've gone from having 0 AI-generated insights, the platform didn't exist, to producing more than 12 million every month. And you can see how automations and insights generated by Kyndryl Bridge are driving significant value for us, and even more importantly, valuable business outcomes for our customers. Thanks to Kyndryl Bridge, our average Net Promoter Score, NPS, has increased by 11 points. When a service provider like Kyndryl can increase NPS, customers, they notice. They notice. They want to do more work with us. And those who aren't our customers, they look to partner with Kyndryl so they can experience similar business outcomes and they don't get left behind. Let's look at a specific customer example. This is a large multinational bank. I know them. They're in Europe. They recently acquired another bank. Post merger, they handle more than 40% of all the financial insurance transactions in their home country. Most of their millions of customers use rely on online banking, ATMs, lending, insurance, all the core banking services. Kyndryl manages their IT and has helped them keep their post-merger cost to just 10% while scaling to serve a customer base 40% bigger, okay? This screenshot is from Kyndryl Bridge. I'm highlighting the number of 0.19 because it relates to the number of monthly incidents per device for the customer, okay? It's a proxy. It's a proxy to measure customer service experience. When operations were first consolidated, the [ 0.9 ] was 1.55, well above the industry best practice. The bank's ambition is to be the best in their industry when it comes to IT, engineering and operations. Kyndryl's mission, super clear: Need to help the bank shrink that 1.55 down to 0.4 or below. Insights from Kyndryl Bridge showed us the path to get this customer to top tier, okay, and at an accelerated pace. Our experts in Kyndryl Bridge took the following actions. First, we fixed a number of software bugs and applied best practices, only things we knew. We eliminated unnecessary interdependencies and noise in the environment, right? And we resolved software currency issues across the overall environment. Kyndryl Bridge also identified significant growth opportunities for Kyndryl. These include prioritizing IT investments, such as cloud and network modernization, infrastructure consolidation, data center consolidation and security. Okay. Kyndryl Bridge continuously initiates complex decisions and services. It's important. The starting point is IT data from multiple sources from our customers. Today, we have thousands of data source integrations across hundreds of technologies. This is possible because of the interoperability of the open architecture. Kyndryl Bridge identifies patterns, anomalies, sales opportunities, programmed from learning events. Learning events. There are many, many types of learning events. When a project completes, we learn. Okay? When there are infrastructure hiccups, we learn. When security experts identify new risks or technology providers find bugs, we learn, okay? Our experts assess each learning event and teach Kyndryl Bridge that pattern, the anomaly, that sales opportunity. We call it an insight, okay? Kyndryl Bridge can finally apply that insight anywhere, okay? This allows us to be proactive, predictive, and prescriptive. Based on the IT data from multiple sources and the insights from learning events, Kyndryl Bridge assesses the implications real time. It addresses current and future issues altogether, okay? Now we use different variations of AI technology in Kyndryl Bridge. Classical AI is used for automated recommendations of the next-best actions. For example, automated incident remediation. We use machine learning for anomaly detection. For example, technical change risk assessment that helps reduce human factor events, a big deal for us. We use GenAI to comb our knowledge base, right, give our experts that edge up in real time for faster resolution. There is a lot to the AI that is powering Kyndryl Bridge. There's a lot there. To net it out, Kyndryl Bridge does real work. Kyndryl Bridge does real work. In summary, the learning at scale and value of AI that Kyndryl Bridge delivers is a powerful differentiator that manifests across our entire business by unlocking new opportunities for Kyndryl. When we've integrated Bridge into a customer's operations, as Elly highlighted before, we see across their hybrid estates and garner insights no one else has. We take these insights, we collaborate with our consult team. We get to work. We get to work. We've turn these insights into business value. All the while, we're continuing to run our customers' mission-critical systems and modernize at an accelerated pace. You'll hear more from Ismail and Petra on specifics on how we get from an insight to driving growth across our services. Ismail, my friend, I'll hand over the stage to you.

Thanks, good morning, everybody. Thank you, Jamie. Thanks for joining us today. As the newest member of the leadership team, I have to tell you how excited I am to be here today. We have had significant success with Kyndryl Consult. And I want to share with you why our differentiated approach is resonating with our customers, how we're adding significant value to our customers, and the growth opportunities that we see ahead. Like Jamie, let me start with some findings from some of our key research, our latest key research. Firstly 3 points. Firstly, only 29% of C-suite executives feel that they are ready to manage future IT risks. So these are risks such as cybersecurity, complex and evolving regulations, the speed of technological innovation. Second point, nearly 2/3 of C-suite executives are looking for advice on how best to align the investments they're making in technology with business objectives, so that better collaboration between IT and other departments can ensure that the alignment between technology modernization programs that we talk about and business imperatives. And finally, businesses are struggling with a skills gap in IT, especially in the new technology areas. And our research would say that 75% of these skill gaps are addressed by an external firm. So if you think about this, and there's plenty of other insights to share, what you see is that the areas where we have deep technology expertise aligns with our customer-specific talent demands. And our ability to run and transform our customers' technology footprints while managing risk and ensuring alignment with the business strategy are some of the reasons why our customers choose Kyndryl Consult. In fact, 3 of the fastest-growth areas in the IT consulting world, which we would see as our core capabilities, our research would say that the talent is at a premium. These would be around -- and Martin mentioned. These will be around cloud, GenAI and data security and resilience. So this specific demand has translated into strong performance for Kyndryl Consult. In fact, the spiel that Martin said earlier, we were 10% of Kyndryl revenue. We're now close to 20%. Our in-demand talent, combined with our strategic investments in our partnerships and Kyndryl Bridge have all been huge drivers for us. So the consulting proposition is we start with the foundation of Kyndryl Bridge that Jamie talked about. What does that mean? It means, for our Kyndryl customers, the consulting engagement starts with data and insights specific to their environment. By the way, Kyndryl Bridge is also the platform that allows us to deliver AI-powered consulting, bringing speed and cost benefits to our customers. We then have a whole cadre of deep technologists in the areas where our customers have the biggest demand. We can run and transform mission-critical systems using our AI-powered consulting and deep industry knowledge. Actually, that's a really powerful combination for our customers. If you combine this expertise with our strategic partnership, it drives Consult value and allows us to broaden our penetration in our customers, allowing us to deliver resilient, secure mission-critical systems, which is actually what our customers have been asking for. In fact, 97% of our top 250 customers have been engaged with Kyndryl Consult. If you look on the right-hand side, what you see is that this has translated into strong performance in terms of our signings over the last 3 years, we see a 30% CAGR and a book-to-bill of well over 1. So let me maybe bring this a little bit to life with a customer engagement -- with a customer story. And what you see here is the evolution of a relationship we've had with a customer over an 18-month period. The customer in question is a $30 billion U.S. client, one of the largest capital infrastructure investors operating for nearly 100 years. And our initial engagement was an assessment for a complex data center migration. And with Kyndryl Bridge and the data insights we get from that with our experts, we were able to provide optics into an aging infrastructure and look at the applications and the systems that could provide risks to the business operations. And with the advisory, given the advisory and the expertise, what started off as an initial assessment actually turned to multiple infrastructure and architecture modernization programs, and actually a request to do a holistic technology strategy for the enterprise, aligning it to the business strategy. And not only will we be able to deliver technology milestones that you'd expect, but we actually were able to deliver 50% improvement in productivity for business milestones and 40% improvement in quality measures. For Kyndryl Consult, what that meant is that we were able to recognize a larger initial project scope of work, but actually 3x that initial project scope of work across multiple Kyndryl practices as a result of the work that we did. One great example, actually. But as you can imagine, we have multiple examples like that going on. And what we're really excited about is the opportunities that we see ahead. So if we start to size our addressable market and think about the runway for growth, what this chart shows you on the left-hand side is that, for our top 250 customers, we have an IT consulting spend of roughly $40 billion, which means today, while we are outperforming the market, there is still plenty of scope for additional wallet share with our existing customers. We're really only scratching the surface of the consulting spend. If you think about our entire customer base, and in fact the entire broader global market, alongside our powerful value proposition, you can see why and how there is plenty, ample opportunity for growth. If you turn to the right-hand side and more specifically the key drivers for growth. We know the key drivers around mainframe modernization, cloud, security, resilience, data, GenAI. Those are all areas in which we specialize. And in fact, the market research will tell you that for every $1 of cloud consumption with the hyperscalers, there is a $7 opportunity with service providers like ourselves. And for most of our Executive Board, I'm sure you'll agree, GenAI is something that is a strategic investment going into the future. It's a big growth area. If you combine that with the growth around the need to stay regulatory-compliant and the cloud modernization, all of these things will drive the need for cyber skills. Again, an area where we have proven success and solid credibility. Our revenue outlook of double-digit growth over the next 3 years, outpacing the market, is attributed to our still underpenetrated position in advisory; our unique position at the heart of our customers' mission-critical systems; and the key spending areas that I've just talked about, in which our expertise in infrastructure, in cloud, in GenAI, data, security, business process, organizational change, differentiates us and positions us for growth. Now you can see why I'm excited to continue the strong growth and become -- and be the customers' -- our customers' consult partner of choice, rooted in our understanding of our customers' business, in our deep talent in the areas where the customers need the talent, in data and insights from Kyndryl Bridge, our strategic partnerships and our modern ways of working. This further solidifies our vision of driving above-market double-digit growth over the next 3 years. Now I'd like to pass the floor to our global practice leader, Petra Goude, to speak to how our base in mission-critical services will grow.

Thank you, and good morning to everyone. So what is next? Organizations around the world need mission-critical IT services to help them modernize their hybrid IT estate, to help them address technical debt, and to be efficiently meeting business change. So I'm going to anchor my discussion in the bold moves we've made to advance our mission-critical IT business, what we're hearing from customers and why there is a growing need for our services. So let me start with why customers trust Kyndryl. So as you've been hearing this morning, the world is coming increasingly complex and fast-changing. So there's no surprise that there -- all the studies show there's a need for modernization. So in our recent survey, 94% of respondents say that modernizing their IT was top priority to mitigate risk and to take advantage of new technologies. And some of you and some people still ask me, "Isn't mainframe and other legacy systems going away?" The answer is still no. They are not, in fact, our recent surveys say that 89% of enterprises that does run mainframe say it remain essential. So the IT world is and will remain truly hybrid. And to further underscore this point, our Kyndryl data says that almost half of customers' IT systems are at or near end of life. And that increases risk and hinders need of change. This is where Kyndryl comes in. Customers need a trusted partner that knows how to run, transform, and keep running their mission-critical IT systems. Our customer system can never have a bad day, a bad hour or a bad minute. They have to work all the time. And there is no one that understands these systems better than we do. So let me spend a few minutes on how we've been transforming this business since we became an independent company. So we have truly unleashed the power and expertise of our people, taking full advantage of the freedom of action with our alliance partners and developed our AI-powered Kyndryl Bridge. This gives us a completely unique and differentiated way to deliver our services, and we can clearly see it's working. As a matter of fact, as of now, 94% of our top 250 customers are leveraging services from 4 or more of our practices, showcasing how we're expanding our scope and delivering comprehensive services to our customers. So in parallel to building these growth capabilities, we've also, as you're all aware, made the strong move to shed the low- to no-margin revenue. This effort has been valuable, but it has also masked the advancement and the momentum we've had. So our unique capability and approach has driven the 20% compound annual growth in our total Kyndryl signings compared to fiscal '23. But in fact, our infrastructure services signing, which is everything outside Consult, has accelerated to 32% year-on-year growth in the last 12 months. And we now have a book-to-bill of 1 for this part of the business. So looking ahead. Looking ahead, we have a solid pipeline which makes us confident that the positive signings momentum will continue. There's fundamentally 2 ways to drive growth in this business, grow scope with existing customers and win new customers, and we have been and are successful with both. So let me take you through 2 examples, starting with how we first grew one of our largest existing customers. So as Martin highlighted in our last earnings call a few weeks ago, we recently won our largest contract since we became an independent company. This with a health care customer that serves 120 million people. This deal will be generating over $2 billion in the coming 5 years. But what I find most remarkable here is that we've been partnering with this customer for 2 decades. And thanks to the new value that we bring in as Kyndryl, we've expanded our scope and increased our annual revenue by 35%. So what did we do to achieve this? First, we partnered with them on their modernization journey. We coupled our Kyndryl Consult expertise, our Kyndryl Bridge insights, the 2 decades of running their mission-critical systems, and came up with what is the right workload and the right platform? Once we had that, we helped them move -- modernize and move their systems and mission-critical workload from their on-prem data centers to public and hybrid cloud in partnership with Microsoft. And of course, once you've moved your system to cloud, they still need to be managed. So now as we move the workload, we are running this expanded scope and we are continuing to do additional modernization. Secondly, we leveraged our Kyndryl Consult to advise and implement new cybersecurity capabilities. And again, similar, once they were implemented, we now run and manage this expanded scope and enhanced security capabilities. So we have been and will continue to accelerate the work around reducing their technical debt, increasing security, enhance agility and enable them to take full advantage of their data. This provide business value and consequently requires and will gain more services from Kyndryl. All of this whilst we were running their mission-critical systems with no tolerance for failure. They center around patient care with urgent needs. Now let me move to my second example of winning a new customer. So this large regional bank awarded us their business to manage and modernize their end-to-end IT estate a little over a year ago with us displacing their incumbent provider since 15-plus years. So why did we win this customer? The bank's key priority was to have strong business continuity and to derisk their operation. They serve about 130 million people and they run 1 billion transactions monthly, an environment very similar to my health care example that has no room for failure. So as I'm sure you would all agree, if you prioritize business continuity and want to derisk your operation, you don't really want to make change unless you really have to. But this customer chose us because we were -- had better capabilities to take them into the future. They selected Kyndryl for our deep technical skills and our expertise in running, transforming and running their mission-critical systems and mission-critical system for large banks around the globe. Again, following this initial contract signings, seamless transition, successful go-live. We've already increased our scope, and consequently revenue, with 30% in just 1 year, across several of our practices, which to me showcase how we win and grow our revenues. So in fact, I see this being the case in many other customer situations as well, especially if you think about the dynamic that large enterprises, where virtually all their system are mission critical. And they have a great need for our unmatched capabilities. So let me now turn to the addressable market and our 3-year revenue trajectory. So on the left, you can see there's plenty of room for us to grow in managed services, especially as we leverage the investments we've made in mission-critical skills, capabilities, partnerships, and IP. We can increase our share of wallet with our top 250 customers and our entire customer base and with new customers, just like the 2 examples I took you through. These investments and the strong approach are why we continue to play an increasingly essential role in our customers' current and future digital transformation. So in the financial view on the right, as I noted earlier, we've been engineering a decline in low- to no-margin revenue streams, an effort that's now largely behind us. And at the same time, we've executed the right strategy to reposition our business for growth and market share gains. So to net this out, our higher level of signings, our solid pipeline we see ahead, will stabilize the revenue and allow us to return our mission-critical services revenue to sustainable growth in fiscal 2028 and beyond. Yes, I know I said a lot, so let me summarize. It has never been more exciting to be the largest mission-critical IT service provider. All enterprises are, and quite frankly, have to be in a journey to modernize their IT applications and infrastructure. They are all driven to meet their new business demand, to adopt to changing regulations and secure their enterprise. And our services and expertise sits right in the center of that digital transformation. To me, this is us being the standard of care for our customers, the service providers that help CIOs and Board sleep well every night. I am very confident that we have a unique capability in the way we approach and help our customers run, transform and run their workloads. This drives better outcome for them and consequently generate more work for Kyndryl, all as part of a long-term mutually beneficial relationship between us and our customers. With that, Martin, Elly, I think it's time for Q&A. So let me welcome my colleagues back on stage. Thank you.

Thank you, Petra. Did you finish exactly at 0? Or did it just stop at 0, 10 minutes.

I don't know. I tried.

You're in the middle. Ismail, please. Thank you. All right. Where'd Lori go?

I'm right here.

All right. So we ask that when you ask the question, please state your name and the fund and firm that you're with, please, for the webcast purposes. Thank you. Who would like to go first? Ian.

It's Ian Zaffino from Oppenheimer. And question would be on the consult side. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the contract terms that you're seeing, maybe the length also, maybe the PTI margins you're seeing on the Consult side? And then maybe as a follow-up, how much of that is actually the migration piece of it? And then how do we think about the Consult business once the migration is complete, and the services you provide?

Yes. I'll let us Ismail comment as well in a second. The signings profile of consult and managed as -- they've been pretty stable. And Consult typically are 2-, 2.5-year kinds of engagements; and manage typically 4-, 5-, 6-year engagements. And that has not shifted much at all. Now obviously, because we're mixing more consult in, the duration, if you will, of a signing is shortening a little bit. But it's purely driven by mix, not by any other customer behaviors. The other thing I'd say is, as you would expect, that in consult, because of the nature of that, the gross profit dollars show up much, much faster than they do in managed, right? We'll wind up getting roughly 2/3 of the gross profit dollars from a signing in 18 to 20 months on the Consult side, and we would get that, take us about 2.5 to almost 3 years to get it 2/3 out of the managed side. So the dynamics of the business are stable, it's just that our mix is shifting. And then Ismail, do you want to talk a little bit about the advisory side on the -- sorry, the transition side?

Yes. The opportunity we're seeing is actually not on just the lift and shift, but on the lift, transform and shift. And the $7 spend that I talked about $1 -- for every $1 of consumption, there's $7 opportunity. And most of that $7 is in the transformation itself. And we are increasingly seeing us go up the stack to do that work.

It's Tien-Tsin Huang from JPMorgan. Appreciate the early presentation here. Just thinking about, as you're transitioning to this new era or next era of profitable growth and the hard work you've done so far. What does the Kyndryl employee population or the delivery look like as you go into that? How is it going to change? Or is it going to be -- should we expect headcount growth, would be more retraining or new hiring? And maybe offshore, onshore delivery? Just a better understanding of how you're going to approach the population.

Sure. Sure. Let me start, Tien-Tsin, and then Jamie can talk a little bit about what he sees on the ground. So and I'll try to hit some of these pieces, maybe not in the order you started with. We've been able to deliver higher quality with fewer people in the way. As we've talked about it, we've wired this in a way so that we're really -- there is attrition in every company, and we've been able to retrain, if you will, the people we free up. And we put them, as I said earlier, either in higher-value contracts. Ismail has taken some. Not everyone can be consultant, but there are some who can. And so as our -- as we've engineered the decline in revenue that Petra noted, as we've engineered the account focus work, we have netted down, but we've got it wired in a way that we can use, retrain the people were freeing up. And we'll continue with that process. I think I'll ask Jamie to comment on sort of the idea of free-ups going forward. But we don't really see an end to the idea of us freeing up. Now what drives the overall is, as we get back to growth, there's more work, right? So even though we're freeing up people and even though we can use those people in new opportunities and Consult, it is unlikely we see the kinds of overall reductions. Because as we get back to growth, there's more for everybody to do. So let me ask Jamie to talk a little bit what happens on the ground. And then I'll come back to the onshore/offshore mix.

Our people are our most valuable asset. Yes. And they have a passion to learn sort of built into the DNA of the delivery team. The delivery team wants to work on intelligent work. And the definition of what intelligent work is, that's a moving target, right, as AI comes in and automation. And we get better, we improve. But the success we've had on advanced delivery, I expect that to continue. The new AI technologies that are coming out, I think that gives us a long road there in terms of what we can do. But that passion for learning and people being our most valuable asset in the firm, I think that's foundational to the success.

So on onshore -- thank you, Jamie. on onshore/offshore. We are not mixed as heavily as some others in this space in terms of offshore. A lot of that is driven by our customers' need, given what they trust us to do to see our teams every day. And so while we run -- as Elly said, well, Jamie said, we run a global delivery platform, so that means we have mainframe skills in a few different places around the world and we have network skills in a few different places around the world. And we'll continuously -- Jamie will continuously find those pockets of skills and create capabilities to support that digital -- that global delivery platform. I don't see some big move from onshore to offshore, offshore to onshore. Recognizing, again, that we also want to make sure that we are responsive to and recognize the need to have supply chain, in our case, supply chains that are unbreakable and so we can keep doing what we're doing. So we'll always respond to the macro world, whether it's a regulatory, government, whether it's skill, pockets of skills and where we can build them. But I don't see some big shift for us coming from offshore to onshore or vice versa.

Divya Goyal with Scotiabank. Thanks a lot for the presentation today. I was curious to understand Kyndryl's underlying proposition with respect to infrastructure managed services. Everyone across the world is talking about core modernization. How is Kyndryl as a company currently differentiating and will continue to differentiate themselves from the global IT services companies when it comes to core modernization? And just as a follow-up to that question, do you see any broadening competitive pressures and pricing pressures on that front?

So a couple of things. And then I'll ask actually a number of my colleagues to comment on what they're seeing as well. And look, when we think back to what we talked about this morning in terms of how do we differentiate in front of our customers. First and foremost, because we're the biggest because we're the only ones who have Bridge, we're the only ones who have the amount of data that we have. We show up on already understanding more about our customer base and already understanding more about how they run. And it allows us to put their challenges, their risks, their opportunities, into a business context for them. And the read-through that you should assume there is that's part of why Ismail and his team are so successful, is because they're able to solve customer problems in a business context, not to show up with an idea. Today, for instance, the world is -- the European banking world is going through DORA. Everyone's got to get ready for DORA. And I will tell you, there are a number of -- sometimes, not always. There are a number of customers there -- sorry, competitors who show up in the lobby, who are there saying, "Hey, we can help with DORA. Well, okay, what do you need?" We don't show up saying, "What do you need for DORA?" We show up saying, "You have these 25 servers that are exposed. You have the endpoints that you need to fix. These are end of life, these aren't running, et cetera." So we show up with the business context for the challenges they face, first and foremost. Biggest -- more data, no one is catching us in data. No one's catching us in insights at this point. Additionally, because of the investments we've made in our capabilities, we have the scale and the single delivery platform to bring the deep engineering talent that, in a world that is increasingly hybrid, in a world that is increasingly complex, we have the engineering talent to make this stuff work. That's part of why the trust is so high for what Kyndryl does. And we are the only one who is solely focused on infrastructure. And yes, there are -- I see a few. I think part of our success has attracted a few hobbyists into the infrastructure world. But hobbyists aren't really going to stay in there. They're in there for a different reason. They're in there to try to grow in other spaces, and that's just not how we show up. And then finally, before I ask, again, my colleagues to comment. What our customers see from us is an ability to automate, which reduces risk. And really, it's -- Jamie said it well, it's AI and people, but it's not just going in to try to land more people in their account. In fact, the opposite is better for our economic model, the more we can do in an automated way. And I think most of the customer base knows that when other service providers show up, it really is to land one of their 800 -- or another 10 of their 800,000 that they have to employ every day, or 650,000, or whatever the number is. And that's just not our model. So the ability to automate, the ability of more insights, is already puts us in advantage. The ability to take all of that context into the business challenge that the customer is facing certainly helps. And then the business model advantage of not being there just to try to land more people is, I would say, pretty welcome as well. Petra, you do this globally with customers and you talk about modernization. And maybe you can share a little bit, either another example or share a little bit about how is it that we win? I should have mentioned -- I mentioned this a couple of times. Even though we don't spend a lot of time talking about new customers, as Petra said, she gave an example. But since we spun out, even though our focus has been on growing our own wallet share within our customer base, and I think the data is pretty compelling why we made that decision, right? Because we're such a small part. In what Ismail has, we're such a small part of their spend today. In what we have in total, we're a very small part in a fragmented market. So the decision to focus on growing wallet share while we were fixing, if you will, the business was very logical. But it doesn't mean we didn't -- we haven't focused on it, it doesn't mean we haven't won new business. We have probably over 300 new customers since we spun out. And that's pretty broadly based. That's some -- a few dozen mainframe customers, a bunch of Consult customers, a lot of new customers. You heard Judson talk about the work we do with Microsoft. So some new customers coming from the alliance activity. So pretty broad-based new customer, even though we haven't focused on it. And maybe, Petra, you can talk a little bit about either how we got in and why we got in and why it is we keep winning.

Yes. So great point, right? I think -- the way I think about it, in addition to what Martin said, is this is where our sweet spot starts. Everything that needs to transform today is the difficult things. The easy thing is kind of done. Difficult things is what is not done. And there are no one better at doing the difficult things in us. So when you want to transform the difficult things, and it's really the right workload in the right platform approach that we take, I like to call as a pragmatist. And customer really likes that because they've heard firms come in and say, "I'm going to do this, and it takes 3 years." No one has 3 years to do anything today, right? They want to have things done every day and transform -- continue to transform and continue to modernize. And that's where I think we have a complete uniqueness. And so to your other peg-out, right, on new customers, I have the great pleasure to be with customer almost every day and be really tightly integrated in new customers we win. And the feedback I get back is -- because I asked all of them, why did you ultimately choose us? They all say to this day, they've said, "For your people, your skills." The people is actually behind the keyboards that's going to deliver my systems. The way you think about modernization, you don't think about us just doing the same thing. You want us to transform and become better and the way we think about bringing them to the future. They have all said the same thing. And then the final thing they underscore with is, this is my most mission-critical crown jewels. They can never fail. I need somewhat that understand what that is. So those are the 3 themes that I see both in modernization and new logos.

More questions.

Ben Nahum from Neuberger Berman. Maybe, Martin, the question that I bounced off of you earlier privately, we can get some of your teammates' insights. And that the question was about data center upgrades, the ability for data center modernization to start running AI-related workloads. Is that a long-term opportunity for you with your customer set?

Yes. So thank you, Ben. So let me just make a couple of comments, and then I'll ask Elly to comment on what we just announced in Japan. And then I'll ask Jamie to talk about our readiness other things than what we have today. So first, for everyone's -- just for the baseline. When we were spun out, we were spun out with about 420 data centers. And each of them was subscale. So subscale for power, subscale for space, and it had customer constraints, et cetera, et cetera. So we've been working our way through that data center footprint to make it more economically viable over the long term. But that -- it is unlikely that much of that is really going to be useful in a GenAI sense. Now that means it's still an opportunity for us. And I'll ask Elly to talk about what we did again with just recently in Japan. And then Jamie talked about, even though the bulk, the substantial majority of our 420 is subscale, and we do have a couple of opportunities still as well. So Elly, you want to go first?

Yes. So I think the whole -- I mean, obviously, GenAI is a huge opportunity for us. It's in some respects, a new generation of workloads that's going to be added on to the current very complicated, to your question, I mean, hybrid multi-cloud environments, right? So it's a big opportunity. What we've just done in Japan with NVIDIA and Dell is set up an environment within our data center to enable customers to begin experimenting with their GenAI applications that they're developing, do proof of concepts, et cetera. So we've got capability for them to run it in our data centers in Japan. And this provides a very secure environment for them to do that, which they want. And they also like the proximity of this capability, of this compute capability, being close to their mission -- their current mission-critical systems because of the data is in the same location. Data proximity, which is very important for these applications to really scale. So it's a start for us. We think there is a big opportunity. And we believe that we'll see that getting deployed more broadly.

I think the data centers overall, there's an obvious opportunity on cost consolidation, right? But the -- if you think about where infrastructure is going, the technology is changing. It needs a different power footprint, they need the whole different architecture of the data center. Not to go too deep, but it's different than today. What that means is, yes, there's definitely a cost advantage on consolidation, but it's actually much more of a sales opportunity for us. It's a business opportunity, as what Petra talking, on the modernization to put the customer into an architecture, a foundational architecture for the data center that prepares for the technology of tomorrow that's happening right now, that has a very different power, very different configuration that's needed. So there's kind of a double-edged sword on this one, the 2 stories. There's the cost, but there's also a pretty significant growth opportunity for us.

It's Jamie Friedman from Susquehanna. A lot of very detailed information and use cases this morning. It's been 3 years since the separation. I was hoping, Martin, you could just give us a summary of progress report of what you've accomplished. And you detailed some of this, but if you could just simplify of what you've accomplished, what surprised you? Clearly, the margin on post-spin signings and the growth of Kyndryl have -- of Kyndryl Consult have surprised to the upside. But if you could just summarize at a high level, what's different now than then, that would be helpful.

Sure. Sure. Thanks, Jamie. So a few things I think that we've been able to prove, and I think we had a lot to prove from when we were spun out. So first, we had to prove, I think that we could get paid for the work we do, right? We could create value, the work we did created value when our customers were willing to pay for us. And that was why it's so important for us each quarter to show the margin profile of what's going in the backlog. And so I think we've proven that the work we do is valuable and we can get paid for it. Critical. I think we also had to prove that the biggest tech companies in the world that really matter to the ecosystem wanted to work with us because you got to show up arm-in-arm, and it's much more effective, our customers love it more. But you also have to convince them that you play a role that's important enough for them to even spend any time with you. And I think we've proven, again, I mean, Judson's testimonial was quite supportive. But we do this with AWS. We do this with Google. We do it with Oracle. We're doing it now with SAP. We are these SAP RISE partners. So we had to prove that the work we did was valuable. We get paid for it. We did that. We had to prove that others in the industry saw us as important and would work with us, and I think we did that. We had to prove, I think, that the customers would come on this journey with us. We knew they love our people. They do. They love the engineers they see every day. But they also knew that the prior owner put us in a somewhat challenging economic situation with regard to the relationship they had. And while -- when we created the focus account initiative, I was confident. I think we're all confident that the work we do matters. We do it great. Yes, there it's going to take a little time. But they will engage with us, and they will reimagine these relationships, and they won't all go somewhere else. And I think we've proven. We've -- again, we've gone through the customer retention statistics. We've proven that the work we do does matter. It's really important. They're not looking for a change. And I would argue that nobody, nobody else in this industry could have followed the strategy if you weren't us. So we've proven that we can get paid for the work. We've proven that we can reimagine our view with our customer base, reimagine the relationships. We've proven that others in the industry want to work with us. And then I think, finally, we had to prove that the space in which we sit is a growing space. And we've been sharing, obviously, gross profit dollar book-to-bill for many, many months because we were so intently focused on fixing the profitability, and that's been north of 1 since -- basically since we spun out. But we also had to prove that, after we got through this engineered decline, that the spaces in which we sat had additional opportunity and that we can grow. And again, we were focused on growing share of wallet, not so much on new customers, even though we have new customers. And I think with growth now in the last 4 quarters and signings and a book-to-bill north of one, it says that, yes, this is a business that has built capabilities with great partners who want to work with them. They can get paid for their work and there's a path to growth. And you put those 4 proof points together, and I think we proved then the most important thing, which was that there's an investable thesis for infrastructure services, where I would argue it wasn't obvious 3 years ago when we were spun. So that's my -- I have a longer answer for you, Jamie, but that's my short answer.

We have 2 questions in the front.

Thank you for the presentation, very thoughtful. Victoria Li from Morgan Stanley Investment Management. My question, I suppose, is more for you, Petra. In one of your slides, you talked about new customers, and one of the verticals is in public and health care. Government of Canada was listed on the slide. As we think about the United States, it's widely the consensus that its IT stack, broadly speaking, needs a lot of updates. And obviously, there are a lot of entrenched players in that space here in the U.S. But postelection, with Mr. Musk being a towering figure and with a lot of ideas becoming or being an important stakeholder now for the next -- for the foreseeable future, how are you thinking about the competitive landscape and in the public space? And what are some of the opportunities for Kyndryl here?

So well, first example that we used was not a public customer. It actually is a it's a U.S.-based health care company. Yes. So look, we'll -- I think we're all trying to interpret what we read about what's happening in Washington and how the next administration is going to deal with it and the role that the new department plays, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But in any instance, in any instance, because health care still has to work, it still has to be resilient, right? Yes, it could attract some new players. We're pretty sticky, right? And to the extent that they're using Bridge today, for an example, there's no replacement. So I mean, you have to figure out some other way to do that. So again, I think that, with my long list of proof points, I think we are going to attract new players into infrastructure space because there is an investable thesis. We've proven it's growing, and I think we will get some new. But it takes a lot of investment, it takes a lot of skill and engineering talent, and it takes a lot of know-how. And we're so far ahead in that race that we're ready to compete. We're ready to compete. We're winning now, we're growing signings, and I feel very good about our ability to take on a newcomer here. We would encourage them. We like the company.

This question's for you too, Petra. Rathin Yagnik from Adage Capital. You talked about mainframes and how 89% don't have an intent of going away. My question is actually the opposite. Like, are you seeing growth in terms of MIPS usage and things like that? And I guess, specifically, what I'm getting at is on z16 series, now with z17 on-chip inference with Tellum, Tellum II, in terms of where AI is going, right? Like all of those transactional stuff that needs to happen in the mainframe work, people aren't going to take that data out. So in a really perverse way, I guess I'm asking, is mainframes being an AI beneficiary?

Well, I'll ask Petra to comment as well. Mainframes are really good at transactions, like they're really good at it, right? And I think -- I'm doing this from memory, but I think from the time the first mainframe is dead story was published 30 years ago to today, I think mainframe capacity is up 50x in the world or something because it's so good at what it does. Now in a deterministic computer system, which are really good at transactions, the step to becoming really good at probabilistic, that's a big step, and that's why other architectures were invented. Now does it need the data? Yes. It needs -- it could need the data. But we're a long way from figuring out, I think our customer base is a long way from figuring out, for this transactional data, can I really send it up to an LLM? These are things that have 17 billion parameters. And can I get it back in time with a decision and still interact with my customer? We're a long way from figuring that out. So anything that drives transactions, I would say, probably helps the mainframe. But mainframe capacity has been growing pretty steadily because it's just so darn good at what it does. How AI plays into that? I think we're a bit further away yet to figure that out. Petra, do you have...

Great.Yes. Well, it definitely is growing, and it's proven out there in terms of more work coming on, more work needs to be done more efficiently. We do start seeing -- we put out there in May, I think was, a very big statement around what we do on AI with the mainframes. And we are investing 5,000 of our 7,500 mainframers on AI because this is a space we were very determined to lead in. I see them in 2 parts. One is how do you leverage the data that sits on these mainframes with your AI endeavors? And that is happening. We're doing work around that. But yes, it needs to be secure because this is the core banking systems of the world, right, by and large. So that lever is one piece that we'll see create more work, more Consult work, how we help customers do that. And the other part is how do you use AI or GenAI to modernize your mainframe and make it into a more hybrid world? And that's definitely another space, it's a little bit more early. The world has started with the cloud world for logical reasons, and the companies that run these, this is crown jewels. They don't really want anyone to tamper with them. So there will be a different pace at which it goes, but there's a lot of things that we're doing in this space together with our customers.

Let's see one more question. I know, Phil, you had a question.

We have another Q&A session coming up. I don't know -- does anybody even like to hear from the CFO at one of these things? I don't know. David with the numbers.

Numbers don't matter.

Phil McClain with McClain Value. Just what can upset the apple cart? What are the risks you worry about? Government policy changes are coming. Can they affect you or your customers materially? Is there a chance that a couple of fixed price contracts just blow up for reasons I can't figure out? Can you always find the right people? Or are there people poaching your people? Is the cost getting higher? Anything like that.

Yes, look top of the list is always we have to be perfect every day, right? I mean Jamie talked about it, Elly mentioned it, Petra talked about it as well. These are the systems that matter, and it turns out that countries get really cranky if the banking system doesn't work, right? So we, collectively, we pay 45 million Italians their pensions. We pay -- we run the systems that move goods around the EU to make sure that they can collect their duties. We open and close the turnstyles when you land in Australia. So each of these things always has to work. So top of mind, I mean, I got to tell you, like Jamie has been sitting here, I guess we should all be calm because the world is okay. But everything he does every day, it has to work, right? It has to work, has to work, has to work, which means that we always have to stay ahead of the bad guys. We always have to stay ahead of the regulations. We always have to stay ahead of where the world is going. And nobody should underestimate what that takes. It takes continued investment, it takes really good people, it takes investment in IP, et cetera. So Bridge has made this better, but it has not taken away the like top of the list. You got to deliver every day at the level that every one of these systems needs to be delivered. Now are we fighting for talent? Yes, of course, of course. But we got a great story. In fact, I would argue that it's easier for us now to attract talent. When I look at the data that -- of the acceptance rates that we have, given the jobs we're posting and the number of applications we get, our acceptance rate is somewhere between 0 and MIT. So it's pretty good, right? So people love to do work that matters, and we got a great strong brand there, and we're investing. So do we need access to talent? Yes. Do we have a few, still, contract structures -- we're 70% through the focus accounts. Do we have a few contract structures we still got to get our way through so that we don't have -- we're not subject to any -- yes, of course, we've got to get through that. But we've been doing a great job. Elly and the team have been doing that for 3 years, and we'll keep making our way. So staying ahead of delivering every day, finding great talent, investing. That's kind of the game for us. Our customers love what we do, and they love what we do because we're great at it. We just got to stay great at what we do.

Now with add Martin also, I mean, the opportunity ahead, right, as you do all this. I mean, the opportunity ahead is substantial, right? And just staring at my colleagues here, right? The insights we get from Bridge and the opportunity that, that brings to us, all our customers are modernizing and they're at the early stages. The Consult -- I mean, we are in the first days of Consult, right? I mean, the opportunity we have, the share that we can go after, I mean, it's substantial.

And then one other point on you raised administrations change, et cetera, et cetera, which is fair. I'd say 2 things relative to us. One, to the extent, let's say there's a push to deregulate things, I would argue that, that's probably an opportunity for us. Deregulation can mean consolidation in industries and mergers and things, and all of that creates new work for us. So there's a tailwind that comes with deregulation. And then the likelihood that the things that we work on, security, resiliency, they're not going to be deregulated. They tend to be led mostly by industry anyway. Security -- your security posture, nobody is waiting around for the government to tell you to have your secure banking system. Yes, they have regulators in there to help them to make sure that everybody understands where they are. But the things we work on with regard to architecture, security and resiliency, other things are always going to be sort of front of mind even if other things deregulate. We sit in an industry where technology, you go to any CEO, anybody in the C-suite, and they list what they're trying to get done. I need to reach new customers. I need a better experience for my employees. I need a better experience for my customers. I need to grow faster. I need to be resilient. I need to be secure. You list any of those things, and technology is always on the list as part of the answer. Sometimes it's a big part, sometimes it's a smaller part, but it is always on the list. And that all -- since all problems, all challenges, all opportunities point to tech, all tech points to infrastructure, and then you get to Kyndryl. So I don't -- again, other than we have to keep being great at what we do every day. I think we have a real way to take advantage of the things we see in the market. I think it represents more of a tailwind than a concern, if you will.

All right, great. So thanks for those questions. We're going to take a 20-minute break. Our executives will be around to talk to you even more, and then we'll come back in and then we'll have David Wyshner and then more questions. So we'll give you a signal when it's time to come back in. Thank you. [Break]

Please welcome Chief Financial Officer, David Wyshner.

Hello, and thank you again for joining us today, either in person or on our webcast. I really hope that hearing from our team this morning, shed light on the critical role we play in the management and evolution of our customers' IT infrastructures. We're proud of the role we play in the world and excited by the prospects we have to drive profitable growth for Kyndryl. It's important and highly valuable that the capabilities we bring to bear from our scale to our investment in technology to our expertise, differentiate us in the marketplace. These capabilities have given us the opportunity for Kyndryl to be the benchmark, the gold standard in our space, which in turn creates the opportunity for us to grow our share of wallet in existing accounts and in the market overall. And the financial implications associated with this opportunity are exceptional. As a company and as a management team, we are committed to driving continued substantial powerful progress in our earnings and our cash flow. In the shorthand for the outlook we're sharing today is simply triple, double, single. Here's what I mean by this. Our adjusted free cash flow will triple over the next 3 years. Our adjusted pretax income will more than double in that time frame. And to achieve these targets by the end of the 3-year period, we'll be delivering sustainable mid-single-digit annual revenue growth. I'll discuss in more detail how we plan to achieve these targets but the mnemonic to remember for cash flow, earnings and revenue growth is simply triple, double, single. As you'll see, we're tremendously enthusiastic about the path we're on and our ability to deliver strong results. To provide context around just how achievable these targets are, today, I want to highlight our strategic execution over the last 3 years, and provide new detail around the positive impact our diversified revenue streams will have on our earnings and cash flow over the next 3 years. Because we established a compelling strategic plan, it has been maniacal about executing it, we're already on an upward margin in earnings trajectory. And as Martin mentioned, our 3As initiatives have been a powerful source of momentum for us, driving more than 400 basis points of margin expansion from fiscal '23 to this year or more than $670 million of growth in adjusted pretax earnings that we expect over that 2-year period. Just as importantly, over the last 2.5 years, we've been consistently signing customer contracts that are projected to have gross margins in the mid-20s and pretax margins in the high single digits, which demonstrates the value of what we do. By reshaping contracts with new scope and higher value services, including consult and hyperscaler related content, we've been consistently adding more gross profit dollars to our contracted book of business than what our backlog has been throwing off into our P&L. In other words, we've been adding higher octane fuel to the tank. And what this means is that we've been building embedded value into our contracted backlog in unrecognized asset that will propel our earnings in coming -- in the coming years. At the same time, we're at an inflection point for top line growth. We've successfully exited most of our empty calorie revenue, like equipment sales and software pass-throughs that had no low, no or negative margins. We've turned Kyndryl Consult into an objective, highly trusted adviser that is outpacing market growth. As a $2.5 billion-plus revenue stream that's growing double digits and generating strong margins, Kyndryl Consult is becoming a valuable and inextricable asset within our portfolio. In our 6 global practices and Kyndryl Bridge are delivering insights that give us opportunities to grow our share of wallet with existing customers and to win infrastructure services and consult business with new customers. And the inflection in our revenues back toward growth is evident in our comps this fiscal year with Q1 down 8% in constant currency, but Q2 a point better, Q3 expected to be several points better than that, and with us returning to positive revenue growth in Q4. Because of the predictable and diversified revenue streams we have, this turning point to positive growth is particularly important for Kyndryl. We think about and talk about our $15 billion of annual revenues through a number of different lenses. This can sometimes be a bit tricky for folks not living it every day. So let me provide some additional background on this since it may help you understand our multiyear growth algorithm. We track and report our revenues each quarter based on our 4 geographic segments. Operating in roughly 60 countries around the world, we have a strikingly global footprint. 1/4 of our revenue comes from the U.S., 15% from Japan, 1/3 from our 7 next largest markets and 1/4 from the rest of the world. The range of verticals we serve also covers the gamut. Our largest concentration is in financial services, broadly defined. But as Elly highlighted, we play a major role in numerous other industries with the consistent theme being the mission-critical work we do for our customers and on which the world depends. We also find it useful to track the fields of expertise we're bringing to bear on behalf of our customers, which we call our practices. Since this is an important part of how we manage and develop the talent and technology that are at the core of our services. About 1/3 of our revenue is related to cloud, 1/3 related to core enterprise, including mainframe-related work and 1/3 comes from our security network, workplace and apps data and AI practices. Two things to note. First, even though we run more than half of the outsourced mainframes in the world, core enterprise represents only 1/3 of our revenues. And second, our practices have different growth trajectories, which I'll talk about more in a few moments. A fourth axis for looking at our $15 billion of annual revenue is split simply between advisory and implementation services through Kyndryl Consult and mission-critical services. Consult has grown from roughly 10% of our revenue at the time of our spin to 17% over the last 12 months and 19% in the most recent quarter, and that percentage will continue to expand. The point here is that each dollar of revenue we generate can be categorized by country, by vertical, by practice and by consult versus infrastructure services. And the reason that matters is that there is value and visibility in our revenues being diversified along a number of different dimensions, while sharing the attributes of being mission-critical to our customers, value-added and predictable. An important feature that most of our revenue share is their sustainable annuity-like nature generally stemming from multiyear contracts that are part of even longer-term relationships. We frequently sign 3- to 5-year contracts for our services, and we have long had customer retention rate above 95%. When you do the complement and reciprocal math associated with that, you'll see that our typical customer relationship lasts for more than 20 years. As a result, unlike some companies that start the year and say, we're back at 0 we start each year knowing which already signed contracts about 80% to 85% of our revenues are going to come from. And with us having reported four consecutive quarters of year-over-year signings growth, our revenue book-to-bill ratio is now at one, and our go-forward game plan is for it to be above one each year in order to drive our future revenue growth. In fact, my key message today is that Kyndryl is entering a new era of profitable growth. And I want to share with you the multiyear algorithm we see powering this growth. We're going to build on the foundation that we've established over the last 3 years, the 3As, healthy margins on signings, Kyndryl Consult, Kyndryl Bridge, top-tier customer satisfaction, a strong balance sheet, the Kyndryl way and outstanding execution. Those core valuable elements of who we are, are not changing. But we will use this foundation as a springboard to become an even better version of Kyndryl. Our leadership position in IT infrastructure services, our alliances with leading technology providers, our large addressable market and being situated at the nexus of secular trends will enable us to deliver sustained revenue growth. We will realize incremental benefits from the 3As that have been a key source of the margin expansion we've already delivered. Kyndryl Consult will grow to be more than 25% of our revenue and will contribute to margin expansion. Kyndryl Bridge will drive further efficiencies in delivery and provide operational insights that differentiate us in the marketplace and give rise to new revenue opportunities. And we expect to deliver significant increases in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted pretax margins over the next 3 years and to generate substantial free cash flow over that period, enabling us to continue to invest in our business and to provide capital returns to shareholders. Internally, we speak about making progress on these various fronts and doing so with accelerated pace, operating with a mindset to be better, stronger, faster and in our words, growth year. I and we, as a management team, are incredibly enthusiastic about the clear, impactful value-creating path in front of us. For starters, I want to reaffirm the fiscal 2025 outlook we previously provided, revenues of $15.2 billion to $15.5 billion based on recent exchange rates. An adjusted EBITDA margin that's up at least 160 basis points year-over-year. Adjusted pretax income of at least $460 million, representing a year-over-year increase of at least $295 million and roughly $300 million of adjusted free cash flow, driven by strong conversion of our adjusted pretax income less cash taxes to cash flow. These targets are consistent with what we shared 2 weeks ago and our outlook for earnings is $25 million higher than where we began the year. And as many of you know, our 3As initiatives have been the principal driver of our earnings growth. Now, 2.5 years after we first laid out our aggressive plan to generate $2 billion of annual benefits from the 3As plus over the medium term, we're now positioned to exceed those targets on the time line we originally laid out, fully realizing $2.4 billion of annual benefits from our 3As by fiscal 2028. The 3As will continue to be a core part of how we're delivering earnings and cash flow growth. Through the 3As, by expanding our scope as Elly, Jamie, Ismail and Petra discussed, and by signing contracts with attractive margins, as I discussed, we will power strong financial results over the next 3 years, the triple, double, single. With adjusted free cash flow that will triple from current levels, with adjusted pretax income that will more than double and with our annual revenue growth reaching the mid-single digits. Digging a bit deeper, let me start with the centerpiece, the double in our adjusted pretax earnings. Our revenue progression combined with our evolving business mix will drive our continued outsized earnings growth. We'll move from about half of our revenue this year coming from signings that have occurred subsequent to our spin-off and have higher margins to substantially all of our revenue coming from post-spin signings. And because of the consistent high single-digit margins on the signings we've been executing, our aggregate margins will reach the high single digits in fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2028. In the math associated with high single-digit margins and growing revenue is adjusted pretax income of at least $1.2 billion in fiscal 2028, more than 2.5 -- more than 2.5x our current year outlook. To achieve this, we expect our go-to-market efforts to power our signings growth. We expect our advanced delivery initiative to continue driving efficiencies and gross margin expansion and we expect SG&A expense to decline as a percentage of revenue. And I'm sure that many of you have already calculated that this means our stock is currently trading at only about 5x what we expect our adjusted pretax earnings to be in 3 years. And the impact that our earnings growth will have on our cash flows is even greater since our cash taxes won't increase as quickly as our pretax earnings. In particular, we see our adjusted free cash flow being in the $1 billion range in fiscal 2028 with continued strong conversion of adjusted pretax income less cash taxes to cash flow. This triple related to cash flow is a big deal. It will create opportunities for us to accelerate capital returns to shareholders, even as we continue to invest in innovation and eminence in our business. On the revenue front, I mentioned earlier that our different practices have somewhat different growth opportunities for us. When we look at our projected growth over the next 3 years, we see apps data in AI and security and resiliency having the potential to deliver double-digit growth, whereas other practices are more likely to land in the single digits. The aggregate impact is a projected compound annual growth rate measured in constant currency of 2% to 4% over the next 3 years. With our growth rate accelerating throughout the 3-year period to reach the mid-single digits. With no changes in exchange rates, this would take our revenues to $16 billion to $17 billion in fiscal 2028 but the global nature of our business makes it useful to look at revenue growth in constant currency. Within our practices, we expect Kyndryl Consult to power our growth by continuing to outpace the market, and we expect mission-critical services to inflect to growth so that we exit the period with a significant portion of our aggregate mid-single-digit revenue growth coming from consult and a significant portion coming from mission-critical services. We expect our constant currency revenue growth to be sustainably in the mid-single digits in fiscal 2028 and beyond, driven by our leadership position in infrastructure services by the technology alliances we have by our large addressable market and by our relentless focus on execution. Four things that we believe we've demonstrated during our time as an independent company. This outlook and our confidence in our ability to deliver is driving our ability to begin returning capital to shareholders. Something that we've always said, our predictable cash flowing business would be able to do once we've made some meaningful progress on our margins. As we announced this morning, we and our board have authorized a $300 million share repurchase program, an amount that is equal to our projected free cash flow this year. To me, this represents a next step in a capital allocation strategy that has been consistent over time, focused on maintaining investment-grade ratings, which are commercially important to us, continuing to target net leverage below 1x, investing appropriately in our business, taking a very prudent approach to M&A and thereby positioning us to be regularly returning capital to shareholders. Being able to buy back shares using cash flow that's coming from our earnings is an important step for us and speaks to the enthusiasm we have about our prospects and the confidence we have in our execution. I want to be clear about the metrics that we intend to use to measure our progress with a particular eye on a 3-year horizon. We're looking for our adjusted free cash flow to triple to roughly $1 billion in fiscal 2028. Its growth in adjusted pretax margins that will power the increase in cash flow with adjusted pretax income moving up to more than double current levels to at least $1.2 billion. As our adjusted pretax margins move up to the high single digits, we will have a similar uptick in our adjusted EBITDA margin, which we see increasing 370 to 570 basis points to 20% to 22% in fiscal 2028. And to achieve these earnings and cash flow targets, we're expecting revenue growth to accelerate over the period so that it's growing in the mid-single digits in fiscal 2028 and beyond. Reading from left to right, that's the triple, double, single I highlighted earlier, as the strong financial metrics we expect to deliver. All while we continually position our business for sustainable long-term growth and returning capital to shareholders. In closing, we intend to continue to deliver results to leverage our leadership and investments in IT infrastructure services, to drive revenue growth and margin expansion contemporaneously and to generate earnings and cash flows that will fund capital returns to shareholders. I hope that our enthusiasm for the opportunities in front of us and our commitment to realizing those opportunities have been evident today. And with that, Martin and I would be pleased to take your questions.

All right. So let's get started. Divya, do you want to kick us off?

David Goyal again from Scotiabank. So David, this is a question. I want to understand -- so I'll ask 2-part question here. The numbers that you provide, obviously, are pretty convincing and great job on how far Kyndryl has come over the last 3 years. Could you help us understand what are the potential risks to this pretax number and the free cash flow guidance that you're providing for fiscal 2028? And could there be a potential upside to these numbers? And my second question would be for the return of capital to shareholders, alongside this buyback, could there be potential M&A in the pipeline as the company starts to stabilize, say, potentially next year onwards?

I do see significant opportunities here, right? The risk, I guess, associated with any business is one of execution. But the predictable nature of what we do, the visibility that we have, the amount of increased profit that sort of will waterfall or cascade into our -- in our earnings from what's in our backlog, I would say, it gives us a lot of confidence, a lot of visibility in this. And what we need to do is to continue to execute, continue driving progress on the 3As, continue remediating the focus accounts that haven't been yet and continuing to deliver for our customers as we continue to develop additional skills and scope and technology that are relevant to them. So it's not that we need to do something different. We need to keep doing what we're doing and executing against the opportunities in front of us and delivering the value that's increasingly inherent in our backlog. So I think that's really exciting. And it does give us upside as we're seeing some of the things we're doing generate more and more interest both from existing customers where we expand share of wallet and with new customers. One of the points we made on M&A is expected to be limited to tuck-in -- we expect it to be limited to tuck-in acquisitions only. We've done one small transaction, the Skytap acquisition, which is really nice for us. It's helping us with existing customers. We've got dozens of new customers already. New logos for Kyndryl as a result of these increased capabilities. And so we will look at tuck-ins, but I expect our acquisition activity to be really prudent and limited to that. And do you want to touch on capital return evolution?

So -- sure. So Look, I think what you're seeing in our view has got -- I'll stick with the what first. I think the what tripling cash is a really meaningful goal to the company because it gives us a lot of flexibility. As David said, we have a view that we'll continue to invest, tuck-in acquisitions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that's all on top of what you would have seen here. So we're not -- we don't need to do something in order to hit these numbers. But the meaningful position that we put ourselves in, in 3 years with $1 billion of cash flow gives us flexibility to both invest and to continue to return capital to shareholders. So I feel like the goal we set ourselves here, the tripling is a really meaningful goal for us.

Thank you. Martin, before we take another question from the room, I just want to give you a question that came from online from one of our participants, which is, can you talk a little bit more about the difference in growth opportunities you're seeing here in the states versus international markets?

Sure. Thank you. So a couple of things. As you heard from us today, the drivers of investment by our customer base around modernization, around security and resilience and around AI, those are global phenomena. And so every company is on some journey. And I would say that their starting point tends to drive where they lean in more versus another. So as an example, the preparedness of the European banking system. I mentioned before they're going through DORA, the preparedness of the European banking system, plus the regulatory environment says they have to have their thumb on the scale for investing in resiliency. And again, we're helping them. It's a great tailwind for us. The opportunity for AI and Gen AI, it's certainly here in the U.S., I wouldn't say it's the only place. As Elly mentioned, we have some investments going on in Japan to try to start that as well. But that, I would say, is a little bit heavier in the U.S. So the things we're working on, the growth factors that we've identified are global. Our customer base, by the way, is global. So -- Elly showed the logo. So if you -- BMW builds cars in Europe, they build cars here. They're doing the same thing everywhere. So that sort of flattens if you will, the big differences. But our research, our studies are very consistent. The growth drivers, security and resiliency, modernization and AI are consistent globally. Some places has a little bit more of the thumb on the scale on one versus the other, but every one of our bits of research and Ismail noted this research earlier, every customer puts technology at the top of the list for what they have to invest in to solve whatever the problem is fill in the blank. And therefore, everyone is sort of on the journey, they are early in their journey, but they all have a lot of work to do. So I think there's not a -- other than, again, the starting point, not a substantial difference by geography that we see.

Okay. Ian Zaffino from Oppenheimer. Can we just talk about the buyback for a second a little bit longer. How did you arrive at the $300 million number? I mean, I'm just looking at kind of the cash flow and you can exhaust that within less than a year, if you need to. So what's the purpose here? Is it to defend the stock? Just return cash? Again, how do you arrive at that number? And then also when I look at some of the margin numbers, just given the higher margin profile of consult, given how much larger the mix is going to become, are we being conservative when we look at kind of '28 and the PTI margins you're outlining?

I'll go first, and I'll let you jump in. So let me start with the second piece, right? Let me start with the margins. Look, what the data David shared is like 6 minutes old. They're selling Sushi older than our guidance right now in this building. So I'm not going to recharacterize or refresh the guidance. As I said, it's a meaningful number, right? It's $1 billion of cash over time. It's a really meaningful number. That's the what. And at the same time, I think it's important to recognize that -- and you guys know this better than me. We see a world where some companies are raising their guidance by 10%, some are going to say they're at the bottom of the guidance, some are withdrawing guidance. In that world, I would say a triple is a pretty worthy goal, right? So we have a goal of what that is meaningful to us and a worthy goal. Then, there's the how. And we said we would more than double profit and we grow revenue single digit. And I think we've been clear about the underpinnings for that confidence. 3As continue to work, great momentum in consult, great momentum in the alliance activity with another one, we're revving up the SAP rise activity now. So I feel really good about the what. It's a meaningful and a worthy goal. I feel really good about the achievability of the how for all the reasons we've talked about. So to me, the guide rather than try to recharacterize it, the guide is a meaningful worthy achievable goal. It's really good. On the share repurchase, look, we've always said that we wanted to have meaningful margin improvement in order to be comfortable that we could bring our high-quality balance sheet with us and make sure that all of the capital providers to Kyndryl felt the same way, including those who watch out for the bondholders, right, investment-grade rating, we've always said it's very important. And so I wouldn't read too much into this year's -- this authorization relative to this year. Again, because we're going to grow pretty quickly and we're going to triple cash flow. So we're not sending a signal that it's going to be this percentage every year. We're not sending a signal. But we're going to have a lot of flexibility when we get to 3 years out. We're $1 billion a year. We are trying to make sure that our investors know as we've been telling them that we know it's their money. We know it's important that they -- that we treat it well. And when we see an opportunity to give it back to them, we'll do that. So that's kind of how I think about it. I mean that's a lot of words around the sort of a straightforward topic, but I'd ask if you had anything to add?

No.

The sushi though is okay. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the sushi.

Brendan Biles from JPMorgan. And congratulations on the success so far. A critical piece of all this is achieving, obviously, as you guys have laid out the margin targets. And like to my understanding, thus far, the realization of the margins on the signings, the post-spin signings has been like basically within basis points of your projections at the time of signing the business. So can you just walk us through kind of how you're able to have such accurate forecasting of these margins? And then like any -- the major puts and takes that drive it, if there is a couple of basis points of differentiation between your expectations when you book the business versus when it's realized?

You're right. The predictability that we've had in terms of margins realized versus what we priced and projected has tended to be really good. And we track our what we call our did versus bid fairly carefully over time as you'd expect. And we've really seen a difference, a deviation of no more than a point, so in the basis points range, often coming within 0.5 point to 1 point of what we expect. And obviously, we'll work to try to close that. We identify anyone who's off by more than 1 point, and that ends up becoming an operational opportunity for us as well as frankly, over delivering on what we expect is not a bad thing either. So we actively look to apply advanced delivery and other tools to take advantages of that. And I think it's a combination of the nature of our business. There's a predictability associated with it and a lot of time and effort and skill and expertise that goes into solutioning and the costing associated with that solutioning that drives the consistency that we've had over time. And I do think it's one of the things we started off with in terms of the nature of this business and that skill set, being able to produce it. It's continued throughout the period of time we've been independent. And that's why the signing business with a high single-digit margin, the last fiscal '23, fiscal '24, latest 12 months, each of those 3 periods being the 9% area actually gives us the confidence to come out with the projections and the guidance that we're sharing today. Because the backlog that we have and our ability to keep signing business with these kind of margins combined with our business model, it just drives these margins into our -- into our earnings over time. And 1 of the things I find really interesting is that we book our revenues and we report our earnings under GAAP, of course, and that means we earn the revenues over time. If on the other hand, we were marking our backlog to market over the last year, we've added $1 billion to that -- to our gross profit backlog. It doesn't get reported when it's signed, it gets reported when it's delivered. But that value add that we've had over the last 12 months is kind of there waiting to be realized and where you can see it is in our gross profit book-to-bill being 1.3, 1.4 range over the last 12 months.

Yes. We've added almost $6 billion, which is $1 billion more than what was added before.

Yes, we've added 4 and we've reported -- we've added 4 and we've reported 3. So it's things. It's a $1 billion add to that is that backlog over time.

Add to the add. Add to the add.

It's Jamie at Susquehanna again. David, if you could just remind us, so the '28 is, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, completely new, right? And then in terms of the '26 and '27, there's a lot of reasonable basis in here, a lot more detail. But can you remind us what of that is new too?

Sure. I think as we prepared for this get together, our -- what we heard is the common request out there, and what we're trying -- very much trying to address this a 3-year algorithm for growth within revenues, earnings and cash flow. And that's really what we're focused on here. I think when you look at the period between now and then, yes, we reaffirm this high single-digit margins, not only in fiscal '28 but in fiscal '27. So we see a ramp up there. We've provided some additional clarity around how revenues are going to inflect to growth and then accelerate over time to get to the mid-single digits in fiscal 2028. It sounds like a long time over way, but that's just fiscal year plus 3 from now for us. And so I think that's a real positive. And then the margin trajectory, we're not laying out specific details for fiscal 2026 yet. We'll do that in our May earnings call. But certainly, you'll see -- we're continuing on an upward path. We're in an upward path for first half of this year to the second half. And I expect that on an annual basis, that upward trajectory is going to continue again fiscal 2026.

Sure. Looking at your numbers, it would imply -- I'll try to be a little louder. Gene Fox from Cardinal Capital. Could you talk a little bit about the progress that you've made, taking capital intensity out of the business and pricing business that formerly had been using your balance sheet and not paying an adequate rate of return and how that figures into both your strategy and your financial model?

Yes, yes. So thank you. I'll let David comment as well. Just start to say even already three years ago, when we started talking about Kyndryl and the path forward, we were very clear that over time, we saw an opportunity to reduce the capital intensity of the business and immediately, we saw an opportunity to get paid for the capital that gets deployed. And I think we are -- the latter, we were able to make quick progress on, thanks to the execution of David's team and the teams in the field, the former takes a little bit longer because customers have architectural control, you got to negotiate things take, et cetera. So part of the success, if you will, of the alliance activity and all the services we're building around the hyperscalers is certainly the revenue growth. But part of that is also because it's now moving customer workloads into public clouds where it's not on us, right, and that's going to continue. Again, you can't get there overnight. It takes time. But I do see the -- as we said 3 years ago, the capital intensity of this business will come down. And while we're waiting for it to come down, we're going to get paid for it. Do you want to add?

It's exactly right. From a numbers perspective, we've already reduced our capital intensity as a percentage of depreciation to under 5%. Net CapEx this year is forecasted to be right in the 4.5% range. And there are opportunities to continue to bring that down that we will weigh against what our customers want as well. Sometimes we see customers wanting an end-to-end solution that includes us providing the assets. And what's really important to me, as Martin alluded to, is that when we get those requests and we go through the solutioning and the pricing for it, we're going to get paid for the capital that we deploy in addition to earning a margin on our services. I've seen situations in my past where people look at, oh, I'll deploy this capital, and we'll look at a multiyear contract. And all of a sudden, you can end up essentially using your services margin to subsidize deploying capital. And we don't want to get -- that's not what we're going to do. If a customer really wants us to bring capital to bear to provide an end-to-end services solution, we'll do that, but we're going to price for the capital we're using and we're going to get paid separately and fully for our services. So it makes us a little bit -- I think we still prefer to bring our capital intensity down, but we reach a point where we're much closer to indifferent on this and the opportunity for capital intensity to be in that 4% range, maybe 3.5% to 5% range over time, I think it's there.

Rich Glass, Glass Capital. Just might fall under housekeeping but here we are. Given you didn't really discuss the debt structure and maturities, I think they're pretty far out and they're pretty well laddered and it's pretty reasonable cost of debt. The -- you can correct any of that but the actual question revolves around any remaining pension obligations, post-retirement health care obligations, any other going away presence from your former parents, whether on balance sheet or not that maybe we should know about?

I appreciate the housekeeping question. I think our house is clean from a number of perspectives. I think our debt ladder and our debt structure, I got the advantage of setting that up, brand new. And so we've got a nice ladder in place. Our next debt maturity is in 2026. So we've got time for that, and we'll probably refinance that a little bit before that comes due. The next thing on our radar screen is actually our revolving credit facility renewal. It's down to being 3 years post spin, it's down to 2 years left to run. And so I think over the next 6 or 9 months or so, that's a logical time for us to be extending that. But nothing, no significant changes planned there and our debt ladder is in really good shape. We do have pension obligations are -- they're disclosed or -- our net funded unfunded obligation is in the 400 -- a little over $400 million. That's down significantly from where it was at the time of our spin primarily due to the way interest rates have moved over that period of time. So it's out there in the scheme of things, a scheme of our business. It's not large, interestingly, it's primarily European in terms of where it sits. So I feel okay about that as well. And nothing else that would jump out as being a significant housekeeping item.

Thank you. Jag, I think you had a question and then Dilyaver, and then we'll close out.

Thank you so much for all the additional information.

Jag, name?

Jag Sriram from Royce Investments. My question is around how sustainable is the signings growth, especially given that IT budgets are always pressured. Your peers are not posting anywhere close to the numbers you've posted. And the third is, as consult becomes a bigger and bigger portion, that's more of a discretionary spend from your customers' point of view.

So a couple of things. And again, David can comment as well. Petra talked about this earlier. She was -- she sees the pipeline. Elly did mention it but I know obviously, he spends his time looking at the pipeline. And I will tell you, we feel good about the momentum we have in signings. And as a total, bear in mind that a lot of what we printed as signings performance was by choice, i.e., we were trying to get content out of these contracts. And if you look at -- if you looked at it on a -- you can't really adjust but if you looked at it without that, if you try to adjust for like -- for the stuff we engineered out and you -- that's been growing since we were spun out and that's been growing since we were spun out because of the capabilities we've developed not just the consult business but across all of the practices are -- they remain super high value, valuable to customers in places where they need to continue to invest. And then consult obviously, has been an added bonus on that. And the Alliances team -- and part, it's not the only, but the Alliances team has done a really nice job on making us relevant with our partners. You heard Judson talk about us. making us relevant with our partners so that we can grow that business. We said in -- you'll remember, Jag, we said first year, we'll sign over $1 billion. We signed $1.2 billion. We said we -- last year, we'll double that, we did. Now it's turning into -- now we're turning into revenue. And that momentum is still continuing. And then on the consult versus managed services, I'd say that there is there is a view that some consult is discretionary. And I think that's right. I think for a lot of what some companies are doing or it's either discretionary or it's more sort of staff augmentation kind of stuff. And those do go in a different macro environment. But think back to the way Jamie described the insights coming at a bridge and think back to what Ismail talked about on how we pick those up. The sense, and they didn't say it discretely but this is work that has to happen. If you're aware that -- if you're aware that there is an issue with the resiliency in your infrastructure, if you're aware that with a simple investment in a -- with a quick payoff, you can improve the -- you can improve the rate at which you have global best practices deployed. There are not too many CIOs who are going to find that discretionary. And again, it's not just that we show up with the insights. It's not just that we show up with a really strong business case, it is directly linked to their business outcomes. So we do sit in a slightly different position. That's one of the tailwinds we have. And then secondly, because we work with so many regulated entities, we know we work with banking regulators in U.S. and Europe, Asia everywhere. We work with health care regulators. Europe, Asia, and we work -- anyway, we work with so many regulators. Our customers are increasingly having to deal with a complex regulatory environment, whether that's on security, whether it's on resiliency, whether it's on data management. Again, not a choice, not discretionary. You have to be regulatory compliance. So again, I do understand this idea that some companies are probably more discretionary. The work we're doing is not discretionary. The regulatory regimes are not discretionary. The insights we're showing up with and their fast payback business case directly tied to a business outcome is not as discretionary. So I feel great. I know you heard it from Ismail, who had, I believe, a lot of energy on this point as well. We see a lot of opportunity here in consult for the long term.

Martin, we'll take one last question, and then I'll ask you to close.

Dilyaver from Tudor Investment Corp. Congratulations guys and all the work done so far. A question on the relationship with IBM. Where are you -- are there still any services they provide to you and when does that completely go away?

Yes. So just for everyone -- thank you, Dil, for the question. Everyone's sort of benefit, when IBM spun us out there, where I would say this is oversimplified, but there were 3 elements to the relationship. They retain their ownership stake 19.9%. That went away at the end of the year, as they said it would. There were TSAs, transition service agreements, that we had 2 years to get off and we did. That's done. And then there was the commercial relationship. And the commercial relationship dictated what we pay for hardware and software and maintenance services and all this broad range of things and already only 8 or 9 months in elements were being renegotiated already. So we got a better maintenance deal early in the second year for that. The hardware deal is now set to a standard terms. So we don't pay any -- we don't get a better deal than anybody, but the volume we purchase, we get the best deal, the globally best price. And then software is at the end now of its 3-year increasing price point, right? The way IBM structured the software deals, we paid -- every year, we paid 200 more than we have paid the prior year. We're getting to the end of that now. And we go now to the P x Q, the price which is detailed in the discounts that we have and we know them, and those will stay what they are. And at times of quantity, how many licenses are we using? And -- and as we sit here now, that P x Q math, recognizing, by the way, that IBM has been raising their software prices for 3 years. So as we sit here now, yes, we'll have a little bit of a headwind next year as we go to P x Q but not substantial, and it's smaller than it's been, quite frankly, it's less than the 200. It's been because we've been able to take the Q down. So the only thing that remains in the -- obviously, we work with IBM very closely still in front of customers. Elly, I do joint calls with them. I think they were into CLE on other stuff recently. So we've got a good relationship. We work well together in front of customers. And the only thing that remains out of -- the 3 big elements is the commercial contract. Anything you? No, Okay, all right. Thank you. Lori is giving me the -- all right. Look, thank you, everybody, for spending your morning with us. We do really appreciate not only your time but your support. We also -- I appreciate -- I think the whole team appreciates the engagement and the questions that were really, really fabulous. We've covered a lot. We threw a lot at you in 3 hours. But again, the key point here, 3 years ago, we laid out a very powerful strategy that we've executed. We have expanded our margins. We've positioned ourselves to get back to growth. As David said, these things will continue to drive margin growth, and we're at the point now that we're going to be talking about growth. David very kindly said the way we talk about it is growth here, that is really just a David thing just so you know. There's not we around growth year. But having said all that, it's all now -- for us, it's all about growth. So I hope you get a sense of our confidence, hope you get a sense of the energy from the team. I hope you get a sense that, look, this is a team that is -- now has delivered ahead of schedule. We've set out, again, a meaningful and a worthy and an achievable goal for the next 3 years. And now we collectively are going to go back to work to make all of that happen. So thank you very much. We appreciate your time.