KD 2024Q3

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Kyndryl's Fiscal Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Lori Chaitman, Global Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Kyndryl's earnings call for the third fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2023. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. These forward-looking statements speak only to our expectations as of today, and we are under no obligation to update them. 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, 2023. In today's remarks, we'll also refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Corresponding GAAP metrics and a reconciliation of non-GAAP metrics to GAAP metrics for historical periods are provided in the presentation materials for today's event, which are available on our website at investors.kyndryl.com. With me here today are Kyndryl's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Martin Schroeter; and Kyndryl's Chief Financial Officer, David Wyshner. Following our prepared remarks, we'll hold a Q&A session. I'd now like to turn the call over to Martin.

Thank you, Lori, and thanks to each of you for joining us. Kyndryl continues to make great progress in delivering value to customers and to shareholders. Today, we'll provide an update on our strong execution and our accelerated progress as the leader in mission-critical IT infrastructure services. Our strategy centered around our alliances, advanced delivery and accounts initiatives, Kyndryl Consult, and Kyndryl Bridge is paving the way for profitable growth. We're again raising our full year earnings outlook, which reflects our progress and our prospects. To fully appreciate how we reached this point so quickly and to understand Kyndryl's growth potential, it's important to recognize the critical role we play for our customers and the leadership position we hold in our industry. We're a vital and trusted partner for our customers' current and future technology needs. We have a strong heritage in running complex applications that are highly dependent upon mission-critical infrastructure, such as the mainframe. And as an independent company, our freedom of action has allowed us to quickly capitalize on opportunities that are unique to Kyndryl. As a result, we're building a strong track record of successful execution that is clearly visible in our results. Benefits from our three As have driven and will continue to drive tangible financial progress. We formed alliances with key technology leaders, which has significantly increased our addressable market, and we continue to grow these relationships. In November, we expanded our relationship with AWS on two fronts. First, to jointly develop and deliver Generative AI; and the second to collaborate on mainframe modernization. We've announced similar alliances with Microsoft and will soon be announcing an expanded collaboration with Google Cloud on Gen AI. We've expanded our service delivery capabilities through Kyndryl Bridge. We're now performing over 1 billion automations each year, addressing risks before they become incidents and building resiliency. Our advanced delivery efforts are generating savings of $500 million a year for us. In our accounts initiative, we've engaged collaboratively with our customers and have already addressed roughly half of these accounts. As a result, we've grown our aggregate margins on focus accounts by 7 points. Our progress extends beyond the three As as we leverage Kyndryl Bridge, our deep insights and the trust our customers have in us to drive growth in Kyndryl Consult. Consult revenues were up 16% year-to-date and we already have roughly 750 customers using Kyndryl Bridge, our AI-powered open integration platform. These areas are foundational to growing our business and fueling our long-term growth. Importantly, our strategic progress is driving stronger financial results. We're now three quarters through our fiscal year, and it's clear that fiscal 2024 is a proof point for us. We grew signings in the first 10 months of the year with higher value services, earnings are expected to be up meaningfully this year compared to last, and we've generated positive adjusted free cash flow in the first nine months of the year. We are enthusiastic about how our strategies and our approach to the market are driving performance. Our customers value the technical expertise and services we provide as they advance their own digital transformations. Our powerful business dynamics are creating significant value and will continue to be bold and ambitious about how we come together with our partners to deliver value for our customers. They already see us behaving as a flatter, faster and more focused organization, which is aligned to our new services culture, what we call The Kyndryl Way. We operate at the heart of large organizations' technology estates, so it's natural for us to be at the center of the secular IT trends. Our customers look to us for capabilities and scale to address these trends from risks like cybersecurity and skill shortages to opportunities like cloud and AI. Our success is fueled by providing customers with solutions that leverage both our own know-how and our alliance partners' capabilities. Our expanded hyperscaler relationships, combined with our extensive knowledge of complex hybrid IT estates, are why customers are partnering with Kyndryl to achieve their IT and business objectives as they address the larger forces shaping the evolution of IT, namely the adoption of artificial intelligence, which we know is top of mind for enterprise CIOs, technology skill shortages, the modernization needs to address aging infrastructure challenges and cloud migration. Let me share a few examples. In the health care industry, where digital applications are scaling at a remarkable pace and privacy regulations present unique challenges, modernizing IT environments and moving workloads to the cloud are particularly complicated. We've been advising two large health care companies throughout the migration of their complex platform-based IT systems onto the cloud, including their patient record systems. This migration work is strengthening the user experience for patients and caregivers while generating meaningful operating efficiencies for our customers. For a global auto manufacturer, we're using AI-enabled Kyndryl Bridge to deliver real-time insights and automate processes in order to enhance day-to-day IT performance. This work is not just about IT, it's also producing efficiencies across the customers' manufacturing facilities. And we're working with a large multinational communications provider to define and implement their strategy to modernize their IT estate and migrate applications to the cloud with the goal of reducing energy consumption by about 70%. There are two key themes among these examples: other new scope we're adding and other new customers we're bringing on. First, our capabilities and our technology alliances position us to do important work for important companies, many of which are household names. Second, the nature of the services we provide is evolving. Our independence is fueling mission-critical work that is more consultative, more multivendor, more hybrid and more value-added as we help customers address the trends shaping IT. And if you want proof, this quarter, Kyndryl Consult delivered its largest signings quarter yet with double-digit constant currency growth in both signings and revenue. And through our alliances, we've generated more than $300 million of hyperscaler-related revenue so far this year and increasing our current target for this activity to $400 million. Let me also emphasize that Kyndryl is an AI beneficiary and AI enabler. As the largest infrastructure services provider in the world, we generate large amounts of data about IT systems. We're using artificial intelligence with this data in our Kyndryl Bridge platform to identify application performance patterns, produce actionable insights, reduce required maintenance and prevent incidents from occurring. And beyond our own use of AI, our customers know that their AI is only going to be as good as their data. So they're looking for Kyndryl's expertise and how to architect their data to set the foundation for the investments they're making in AI and Gen AI. More generally, because we serve as an operator and integrator and adviser to our customers and their digital business transformations, we naturally find ourselves at the nexus of broader market trends. The unique combination of our advisory and engineering talent, intellectual property and vast amounts of operational data positions Kyndryl as an essential business and technology services partner. We're accessing incremental market opportunities, growing our share of wallet with existing customers, winning new customers and transforming Kyndryl. As our business evolves and we move further away from our spin, our revenue mix will continue to shift to higher margin, post-spin signings. This fiscal year, only one-third of our revenue is coming from post-spin signings. Next year, we'll move to half of our revenue coming from post-spin signings. And in fiscal 2026, it will be roughly two-thirds. This inflection point when our P&L was largely determined by our higher margin post-spin signings will dramatically change our earnings profile. As I highlighted earlier, our forecast for fiscal 2024 now implies more than $360 million of adjusted pretax income improvement this year compared to last and while our efforts to shed low to no margin revenue will continue to impact top line growth this calendar year, we expect to deliver margin expansion and higher earnings each year with revenue growth returning in calendar 2025. As David will explain in more detail, the margins at which we're signing contracts and the other actions we're taking to increase our profitability have us on a path to deliver high single-digit adjusted pretax margins by fiscal 2027. And yes, the math associated with that is ultimately a $1 billion or more of adjusted pretax income with a high conversion of our net earnings into cash. We're making substantial progress, earning the trust and respect of our customers and partners through exceptional and reliable delivery. We're providing innovative solutions that drive real business outcomes and earning stronger margins in our ROI from our work. We're driving powerful business dynamics for value creation, and we'll continue to be bold and ambitious about how we come together to deliver value with our partners for our customers. And with that, I'll hand over to David to take you through our results and our outlook.

Thanks, Martin, and hello, everyone. Today, I'd like to discuss our quarterly results, the formidable progress we're making on our three As, the growth in gross profit that we've been building into our contracted book of business and our updated outlook for fiscal year 2024. We again have a lot of positive developments to share. Our third quarter results reflect strong operational execution and continued progress on our key initiatives. In the quarter, revenue totaled $3.9 billion, a 10% decline in constant currency. The year-over-year decline in revenue was anticipated and primarily driven by our intentional exit from negative no and low margin revenue streams within ongoing customer relationships, not by macro factors. We continue to gain momentum in higher-margin advisory services. Kyndryl Consult revenues grew 11% year-over-year in constant currency, which highlights how we're growing our share in this higher-margin, higher value-added space. As Martin mentioned, Consult signings grew even faster. This performance reflects our unique opportunity for growth in advisory services due to our independence and our expanding alliances with third-party technology providers. Our total Q3 signings increased 13% year-over-year in constant currency and fiscal year-to-date signings through January are up 4%. Among our practices, the strongest growth this year has been in security and resiliency and App State and AI. Our year-to-date signings support our plan to return to revenue growth in calendar 2025 and fiscal 2026. Our third quarter adjusted EBITDA grew 6% to $615 million. As we've said previously, we had a tough comp in Q3 due to the exaggerated seasonality we saw last year, which included earnings from minimum annual revenue commitments, despite the tough comp, though, our adjusted EBITDA margin increased by 210 basis points year-over-year to 15.6%. Our continued margin expansion underscores our ability to drive meaningful profit growth in our business. Adjusted pretax income was $63 million, a $67 million improvement in profit year-over-year. Our continued progress on our three As is the key driver of our earnings growth. We address our customers' needs through our geographic operating segments and also through our 6 global practices: cloud, applications data and AI, security and resiliency, network and edge, digital workplace and core enterprise. Our business mix continues to evolve to reflect demand with most of our signings, including Kyndryl Consult signings coming from cloud, app state and AI, security and other growth areas. More generally, as we look back on the quarter, we're elated to have delivered results that position us to exceed the full year adjusted pretax earnings target that we've already raised twice before. Our strategy is working. Our three As initiatives are driving continuous improvement throughout our operations and fostering additional progress each quarter. As a reminder, at the start of the year, we provided fiscal 2024 targets of $300 million in revenue tied to hyperscaler alliances, $450 million in cumulative annualized savings from advanced delivery by fiscal year-end and $400 million of cumulative annualized pretax benefit from our accounts initiative. Halfway through the year, we raised our targets for advanced delivery and accounts initiatives by $100 million each. And with the continued strong execution we delivered in the third quarter, we're now raising our full year target for Alliance's revenue by $100 million and are well positioned to meet or exceed our targets for advanced delivery and accounts. Through our alliances, we're building the portion of our customer relationships that include cloud-based content. In the third quarter, we recognized more than $100 million in hyperscaler-related revenue, bringing our year-to-date total to more than $300 million. This surpasses our initial $300 million fiscal 2024 target and because of this progress, we're raising our full year target for revenue tied to hyperscaler alliances to $400 million. Our hyperscaler certifications totaled more than 38,000, which is more than double what they were two years ago and now include even more advanced certifications. Our advanced delivery initiative is transforming the way we deliver our services, and Kyndryl Bridge is driving our progress. We continue to identify and realize significant automation opportunities across our delivery operations as we increase service levels, reduce our costs and incorporate more technology into our offerings. To date, we've been able to free up more than 8,500 delivery professionals to address new revenue opportunities in backfill attrition. This is worth roughly $500 million a year to us, representing a $75 million increase in our annual run rate this past quarter. Our accounts initiative has been and will continue to be a global effort, focused on fixing elements of contracts with substandard margins. In the third quarter, we increased the cumulative annualized profit savings from our focus accounts by $75 million to $475 million. Our focus accounts program has been a galvanizing effort among Kyndryl professionals around the world in order to repair hundreds of profit-challenged relationships collaboratively with our customers, and it has been a resounding win for us as a team. Successful execution of our three As remains our fastest path toward achieving sustainable, profitable growth and the progress our teams have made on these initiatives has been and is an outstanding source of value creation for Kyndryl, our customers and our shareholders. Turning to our cash flow and balance sheet, in the quarter, we generated positive adjusted free cash flow of $348 million. Our gross capital expenditures in the quarter were $174 million and we received $15 million of proceeds from asset dispositions. Working capital was unusually strong in the quarter, and we expect some of these timing benefits to reverse in the March quarter. Our CapEx is also back-end weighted this year. Our financial position remains strong, and we continue to expect that our full year adjusted free cash flow will be positive. We provided a bridge from our adjusted pretax income to our free cash flow, as well as a bridge from our adjusted EBITDA to our free cash flow in the appendix. Our cash balance at December 31 was $1.7 billion. Our cash, combined with available debt capacity under committed borrowing facilities gave us $4.8 billion of liquidity at quarter end. Our debt maturities are well laddered from late 2024 to 2041, we had no borrowings outstanding under our revolving credit facility, and our net debt at quarter end was $1.6 billion. As a result, our net leverage sits well within our target range. We are rated investment grade by Moody's, Fitch and S&P, and our $500 million term loan matures in November, so it now shows up on our balance sheet as a current liability. We intend to refinance this debt in the first half of calendar 2024, subject to market conditions. On capital allocation, our top priorities continue to be to maintain strong liquidity, remain investment grade and reinvest in our business. Our leadership position in IT infrastructure services combined with benefits from our three As initiatives is significantly expanding our margins and will drive meaningful free cash flow growth. As a result, over time, we'll be in a position to consider regularly returning capital to shareholders, all while remaining investment grade. As encouraged as I am by the earnings growth we delivered in Q3 and so far this year, I'm even more enthusiastic about how we continue to position Kyndryl for future margin profit growth. The December quarter was a continuation of us signing business with strong margins. And as our business mix increasingly shifts toward more post-spin contracts, you'll see significant margin expansion in our reported results. In the middle graph on Slide 12 of our earnings presentation, we've included a gross profit book-to-bill graph that accentuates we've been creating and capturing value in our business. With an average projected gross margin of 26% on our $12.5 billion of signings over the last 12 months, we've added over $3 billion of projected gross profit to our backlog. Over the same period of time, we've reported gross profit of $2.8 billion. This means that we've been adding more gross profit to our backlog than our contracted book of business has been producing in our P&L. Having a gross profit book-to-bill ratio above 1 at 1.1x is a measure of how we're growing what matters most, the expected future profit from committed contracts, and we've been doing this consistently over the last 18 months. I want to remind people who are familiar with our story and highlight for those just beginning to follow us that two years ago, we laid out bold ambitions that over the medium term, our alliances initiative will drive signings revenue in roughly $200 million in annual pretax income. Our advanced delivery initiative will drive cost savings equating to roughly $600 million in annual pretax income. And our accounts initiative will drive annual pretax income of $800 million or more. Two years into this journey, our momentum clearly has us on track to achieve these goals. We're also driving growth in Kyndryl Consult and among our global practices, which is incremental to the benefits coming from our three As initiatives and we're seizing opportunities to control expenses throughout our business. We expect that these efforts will contribute roughly $400 million in annual pretax income over the next few years. In total then, the magnitude of the earnings growth opportunity we're tackling and tackling successfully is tremendous relative to our current margins. Progress on our three As has been and will be a central source of value creation for Kyndryl. I mentioned earlier that transforming focus accounts into higher-margin relationships has been a big effort and big win for us. While pricing discipline is part of our approach, it is only a portion of our strategy. We're also expanding the scope of services we provide to our customers in order to strengthen our margins and the growth in our hyperscaler-related revenues and consult revenues demonstrates this. We're removing low to no-margin third-party content from our deals, which, as you know, impacts our reported revenue. And we're driving efficiency in how we provide services with advanced delivery and Kyndryl Bridge, helping us reduce costs. In other words, turning our focus accounts into relationships that generate margins more like the blueprint portion of our revenues is a multifaceted, multiyear exercise that is about more than just pricing. I look at our progress to date is a good thing, but I also embrace the opportunity still available to us since the remaining focus accounts represent a significant opportunity to expand margins that is both specific to Kyndryl and something we've proven we can execute. Our updated outlook is for adjusted pretax income to be at least $150 million versus our prior outlook of at least $140 million. This increase implies at least 220 basis points of margin expansion compared to last year. We now expect our fiscal 2024 adjusted EBITDA margin to be at least 14.5%, which represents an increase of at least 290 basis points versus fiscal 2023. Our outlook for revenue continues to be a decline of 6% to 7% in constant currency, which translates to $15.9 billion to $16.1 billion based on recent exchange rates. As a reminder, the year-over-year revenue decline we're projecting is primarily due to the soft backlog of fiscal 2024 revenue we were born with plus intentional near-term actions we're taking to transform our business. These changes typically involve removing selected low or negative margin scope from ongoing customer relationships. We've accelerated these actions over the last nine months, which is why the year-over-year revenue decline in the second half of our fiscal year is greater than in the first half. For the March quarter, we expect year-over-year revenues to decline 9% to 11% in constant currency and for the revenue decline to be most pronounced in our U.S. and strategic market segments, where a reduction of lower margin elements is most impactful. We expect adjusted pretax income to be positive in the quarter. The sequential quarterly comp from Q3 to Q4 is a tough one due to the contractual $50 million quarter-over-quarter increase in IBM software costs that we face. Year-over-year, though, we expect our adjusted pretax margin to increase in the fourth quarter as it has in each of the first three quarters of fiscal 2024. As I mentioned, we expect adjusted free cash flow to be positive this fiscal year. We now project roughly $650 million of net capital expenditures in fiscal 2024, we estimate roughly $825 million of depreciation expense, and $1.25 billion of amortization expense this year. We still expect about $300 million of cash outlays for separation-related work, primarily systems migrations, and for our workforce rebalancing actions that are driving significant cost savings. We remain committed to our target of returning to revenue growth by calendar 2025 and over the medium term, delivering significant margin expansion and driving free cash flow growth. To wrap up, our business model centers around providing mission-critical services to large complex organizations that are dependent on technology and pursuing digital evolution. The mission-critical nature of what we do distinguishes us from other providers of IT services. Our scale, our know-how, our indispensability, and our freedom of action as an independent company have given us opportunities to become a more profitable business while continuing to serve our customers extremely well. We've been successfully capitalizing on these opportunities in ways that position us for profitable growth in the future. We still have much to do and a lot of additional value that we can generate and our accomplishments to date, including in the most recent quarter, give us confidence in our ability to deliver continued substantial progress.

David, would you like to add anything?

Thank you. Good morning. Good to see the 13% year-over-year bookings growth in the quarter. Could you talk about the underlying strength in bookings, both at Kyndryl Consult and Alliances? And to what extent that strength is sustainable going forward?

Yes. Thank you, David. Obviously, I'll ask David to join me if he had anything to supplement my answer with. But a few things I think about what we saw in the quarter. Obviously, as you said, well, good growth got us back not only in the quarter but got us back to growth on a full-year basis or year-to-date basis. I think what's important are a couple of things. As you know, we have a headwind in growing signings, which is because we're being selective about the content. Having said that, we do have these growth factors that we've been talking about, including Kyndryl Consult, including our Alliance activity, which I think is demonstrative of the role we play in our customers' environments, and it shows how our customers trust us with their most challenging work. The work we're doing in Consult, the work we're doing with our partners is just evidence that the important role we play for our customers' future is now continues to play out, notwithstanding the headwind we have as we're more selective. It also reflects the capabilities we've been building over the last couple of years and moving into the bigger total addressable market that we've talked about since we were spun out. As further signs, I guess I'll add one more data point because while we have good growth in Consult, we also maintained good double-digit growth in the quarter and on a year-to-date basis and good growth in the Alliance activity. We also did see more larger deals. We saw 15 deals greater than $100 million through the end of the year, so the first nine months of this year versus eight deals greater than $100 million through the same time period the prior year. So again, all the evidence, I think, of the trust and the confidence that our customer base has in us, even as we've kind of worked through the headwind of being selective about content. David, anything you'd like to add?

Just to add that year-to-date, Consult's are on 14% of our revenue in the quarter is in the range of 15% and that's really giving us confidence that we can ultimately move Consult up to being 20% or more of our aggregate revenue.

Thanks. Just as a quick follow-up, if I could ask about the $348 million in free cash flow in the quarter. David, you called out some working capital benefits, which were mostly timing related, and it sounds like CapEx is more fourth quarter related. Would you still expect to be free cash flow positive in the fourth fiscal quarter of this year?

We expect to be free cash flow positive for the year as a whole, probably not in the fourth quarter itself. And as you mentioned, we had some working capital benefits that helped us in the third quarter, which made our free cash flow in the quarter particularly strong and our capital expenditures are back-end loaded this year. There's going to be more of that in the fourth quarter. And then we have the usual March quarter seasonality, where we have certain payments annual, biannual payments for things like software that tend to go out in the first quarter of the year. So the March quarter is typically a tougher working capital and free cash flow quarter for us, but there's no change in our outlook. Our expectation that will be free cash flow positive for the year as a whole.

Thanks so much. Operator, next question please.

Our next question comes from the line of Tien-Tsin Huang with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Hi, thanks. Good morning, good results. Just I like the gross profit book-to-bill metric here, greater than 1. I'm just curious, the risk of realization for that is what, maybe can you go through that contract execution, things like pricing, delivery, capability things like that? I'm just curious about the realization risk of that book-to-bill?

Sure. Our experience with the realization related to our book-to-bill is positive. We analyze the contracts we've priced through a method that measures the actual realized profit against our estimates. This assessment shows that most of the contracts we've reviewed are averaging within about seven-tenths of a point of our expectations. Overall, the realization of the signings and the associated gross profit is very good. We have strong visibility and confidence regarding this.

Perfect. Thanks for that, David. Just my quick follow-up, then. I think, Martin, you mentioned the 15 deals greater than $100 million. And I think industry-wide, we've been hearing a lot of mixed results on the short-term projects, the discretionary spend. Your Consult advisory business seems to be doing well. Just remind us sort of maybe the difference here. And I know you're somewhat bringing that up to a good standard here, but are you seeing any impact from demand as we cross over into the calendar year here on the short-term project stuff?

Thank you, Tien-Tsin. I believe, as we’ve discussed previously, the focus of our consulting work is less about opportunistic or variable projects. We are primarily engaged in consulting on infrastructure management, securing customer data, enhancing system resilience, and ensuring data is designed for accessibility and protection. The essential nature of our operational business aligns with the critical aspects of our consulting services. Companies face real challenges, and we are not involved in experimental projects or merely nice-to-haves. Our goal is to ensure that infrastructure is secure, resilient, and meets business requirements. This fundamental approach distinguishes us from many others and contributes to the strong double-digit performance of our consulting business, which I think is unique to us.

Understood.

Our next question comes from the line of Divya Goyal with Scotiabank. Your line is now open.

Good morning, everyone. It was a great quarter. Following up on your comment, I am very interested in understanding how the AI trends are affecting Kyndryl's interactions with clients. Specifically, are your focus accounts beginning to prioritize Kyndryl, and are you noticing higher conversion rates as a result? Additionally, regarding your blueprint accounts, are you also seeing increased conversion there? Kyndryl Consult is clearly working alongside clients, but please help us understand how AI has driven these revenues.

Thank you, Divya. I'd like to highlight a few points. Firstly, AI is integral to our service delivery, and Kyndryl Bridge utilizes a substantial machine learning model with an extensive dataset that aids our customers in gaining insights. Currently, we have over 750 customers utilizing Bridge to optimize their systems. This engagement not only helps us identify consultation opportunities but also assists customers in strategizing their AI deployments. Many are beginning to venture into Generative AI. The key work surrounding Generative AI and AI revolves around data architecture and organization. Although we are in an experimental phase, our efforts typically lay the groundwork for necessary scientific experiments. We are at the forefront of what customers are contemplating as they examine usage of their data to better connect with their own customers. This trend has a lengthy trajectory, and as AI becomes more prevalent in systems of engagement and record, where our essential projects are focused, I believe our consultants and Kyndryl Consult have significant potential to assist customers. This represents a long-term trend that I expect will fuel growth for us for a considerable time.

That's very helpful. Just to clarify, Kyndryl is a critical infrastructure services company. How do global macro conditions affect your operations? To what extent could they potentially harm you, especially compared to application services companies that are indicating a slowdown in growth and a weak outlook for fiscal 2024?

Yes. We are somewhat insulated from macroeconomic conditions, but those conditions still affect our customers. As their environments change, they face new challenges in managing their infrastructure and determining their future direction. In the short term, we do not anticipate significant impacts, as we've noted before, we are relatively well protected. However, in the long run, as customers reevaluate their strategies, which may result in industry consolidation among other things, we will feel those effects. Over time, in any economic climate, our customers will continually seek ways to leverage innovation and adapt to better serve their clients. Our goal is to keep pace with their evolving needs and provide the capabilities they require. That has been our focus, assisting them in progressing towards the future regardless of the macroeconomic landscape we find ourselves in.

That’s great, Martin. Thanks a lot for all the info.

Thanks, Divya.

Operator, do we have one more question in the queue.

Our last question comes from the line of Jamie Friedman with Susquehanna. Your lines now open.

Hi. Good morning. Let me echo the complements good results here. I was wondering, David, if you could help us bridge between Slides 12 and Slide 7. In other words, how to think about the timing related to the gross profit book-to-bill as it waterfalls over to the pretax margin? Any comment on that would be helpful.

Absolutely. Thank you. Slide 7, which illustrates the evolution of our business mix, serves as an important link here. This slide indicates that this year, approximately one-third of our revenue, and consequently one-third of our profit and loss, is driven by post-spin signings that carry appealing high single-digit margins. Currently, two-thirds of our revenue still originates from older pre-spin signings, which do not generate significant profit for us. A crucial inflection point for us is next year, as we transition to a revenue mix that is about 50-50 between post-spin and pre-spin signings. In the following fiscal year, we anticipate that our revenues and profit and loss will for the first time be predominantly influenced by post-spin signings. We have good visibility into this shift, as illustrated by the bars on the right side of Page 7, showing that the more profitable signings will increasingly become the main component of our revenue. This creates the opportunity for the margin improvement we seek. By fiscal '27, we expect around 85% of our revenues to come from business signed post-spin rather than what we inherited. This shift is how we achieve high single-digit margins. The margins associated with our newer business will become a larger portion of our overall mix, and by fiscal '27, when it's 85% post-spin, we anticipate reaching high single-digit pretax margins in total.

Yes, I believe that was articulated well. As I consider the upcoming year, we still face the challenge of the software cost increase resulting from IBM's spin. While this poses a headwind, we also have positive factors to look forward to. David explained it clearly, as we will see more of our post-spin backlog realized. We will benefit from a full year of the actions we executed this year, and we will continue that momentum into the next year, providing in-period execution benefits. Additionally, I anticipate a tailwind from lower appreciation as we move forward. So, while we do have challenges on the horizon, there are also encouraging factors as we enter the year.

For my follow-up, I would like to ask Martin about the expected revenue growth starting in calendar 2025. What factors do you believe will help ensure that you achieve this growth, and how much of it is within your control? Is there a risk that discretionary spending or macroeconomic conditions could affect it? What is your perspective on this?

Yes. Look, we have, as we've said a number of times, we have engineered a decline in our business. And I would say on the other side, where we focused on getting to growth like Kyndryl Consult and their Alliances activity, we're growing quite well. And as I sit here today, while we have many, many more quarters of signings to get under our belt, as I sit here today, I feel as good as ever that those two growth drivers, along with all the other things we're building our capabilities around that they get us back to growth in the time frames that we've said previously, with, as David said, well, the margin profile as more of that comes through our P&L. So as I sit here today, I still believe that our Alliance activity and our Kyndryl Consult, we've proven that we can grow where we want to grow. And we've proven that the customers are willing to and want to expand their work with us and their relationship with us even as we engineer this decline. Now the biggest chunk of that engineered decline is this fiscal year. As we move into next fiscal year, the engineer decline reduces. The OEM content becomes sort of what I'll call it neutral, right? We've taken a ton of it out, it becomes neutral going forward. We still have some more work to do on focused accounts, which will have an impact. But the bulk of it is in this fiscal year. As we move into next year, then will have a reduced impact from that engineered decline and more benefit Kyndryl Consult and the Alliances activity as it keeps going. So I feel really good about where we are and what we've described now for a bit over two years about getting back to growth in calendar year '25 and driving the profitability that we've been talking about and converting that in a very high rate to cash.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you all for joining us today. We greatly appreciate your interest in Kyndryl. I am very proud of the progress our team has made and continues to make in executing our strategy. We are building this business the right way with a solid strategy that is being implemented effectively and supported by a strong culture. Kyndryl is reaffirming its leadership position as we enhance our relationships with customers and partners, which is reflected in our financial results. As we enter our third calendar year, I am as excited as ever about the opportunities ahead as we meet our customers' critical needs and develop new capabilities for the future. Thank you for being here.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.