Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Kyndryl Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Lori Chaitman, Head of Investor Relations. Ma’am, please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Kyndryl’s earnings call for the third quarter ended December 31, 2024. 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. 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. 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 events, which are available on our website at investors.kyndryl.com. With me here 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. Martin?

Thank you, Lori, and thanks to each of you for joining us. On today’s call, I’ll discuss our recent progress and execution, the momentum that our capabilities are generating for us in the marketplace and the growth strategy we outlined at our Investor Day in November. David will then share more detail on our recent financial results and our increased fiscal 2025 earnings outlook. We delivered another strong quarter for signings, margins and earnings growth. Signings grew year-over-year for the fifth consecutive quarter, and are up 31% to $16.3 billion over the last 12 months. Adjusted pretax margins increased substantially compared to last year and we generated more than $170 million of adjusted free cash flow in the quarter. Once again, our performance was led by double-digit revenue growth in Kyndryl Consult and demand for modernization, cloud, security and AI services. Hyperscaler related revenue surpassed $300 million in the quarter, tracking ahead of our nearly $1 billion full year target. Our 3A’s initiatives, alliances, accounts and advanced delivery continue to generate incremental signings, revenue and earnings. As David will discuss, the projected pretax margins on our signings continue to be in the high single digits, which is a leading indicator of our future earnings and cash flow trajectory. In short, it was another great quarter of strong execution by our team, driving substantial progress toward our near-term and longer-term goals. In addition, we began to buy back stock in the quarter under the share repurchase authorization we announced in November. As an independent company, we’ve leveraged our global scale and our expertise in mission-critical work and our global scale to be a vital and trusted partner for our customers’ current and future technology need. We’ve done this by investing in several key areas, capturing data about how complex IT systems…

Thanks Martin, and hello, everyone. Today, I'd like to discuss our third quarter results, our continued progress on our 3As initiatives, the solid margins at which we're signing customer contracts and our outlook for fiscal year 2025. The key message is that we delivered dramatically higher record margins and earnings this quarter, and that's a result of strong execution on our powerful strategy. In the third quarter revenue totaled $3.7 billion, only a 3% decline in constant currency. We've now lapped our most aggressive actions to step away from negative, no and low margin revenue streams and we're adding new customers and expanding the scope of services we provide to existing customers. As a result, our constant currency revenue growth was sequentially 4 points stronger than the year-over-year decline we reported last quarter, consistent with our plans to inflect back toward growth in the second half of our fiscal year. Our reported revenues were affected by currency movements, creating a 2 point gap between our reported revenue change and our constant currency revenue change, unlike the second quarter when both numbers were the same. As Martin highlighted, our $4.1 billion of signings made Q3 our fifth consecutive quarter of signings growth and brings our trailing 12 months signings growth to 31%. Our strength is broad based both across our practices and among our segments. We also continue to gain momentum in higher margin advisory services. In the quarter, Kyndryl Consult revenues grew 26% year-over-year, which underscores how we're growing our share in this higher value add space. Kyndryl Consult signings grew even faster, up 35%. And importantly, we're also delivering growth in managed services. Our managed services signings have increased 27% in the last 12 months. Our third quarter adjusted EBITDA was $704 million and our adjusted EBITDA margin was…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Martin, are you ready for our first question?

Yes, operator. Thank you very much.

All right. Our first question is going to come from the line of Tien-Tsin Huang with JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks a lot. Really great signings here. So I just wanted to ask about your pipeline from here. I know we've crossed the calendar year. Any change in tone on the ground from what you've seen on the pipeline standpoint and confidence in converting the backlog in a timely way, that kind of thing?

Sure. Thanks Tien-Tsin. Look, we see a very strong pipeline in fourth quarter, our fiscal fourth quarter. And it continues to be driven by the capabilities that we've built. It continues to be led by Consult. You saw that we had another great Consult signings and revenue quarter. When we entered the year, as we talked about and gave guidance initially, we said the two vectors of growth for us that will get us back to growth in the fourth fiscal quarter, our Kyndryl Consult and our alliance activity. And as you've seen, we've – we're going to be well ahead of the rate of growth that we achieved last year in both signings and revenue and consultant, we're actually on pace to beat the alliance activity as well. So demand remains strong, driven by our capabilities. And the pace of complexity is a real tailwind for us. As you saw from our readiness survey, while 90% of the C-suite thinks their IT infrastructure is best-in-class, fewer than 40% feel like they're ready to take advantage of the opportunities that are present in order to manage those risks. And so the things we do, sometimes – sometimes super exciting, like helping them with their AI projects, but sometimes a little more boring like configuration management and asset management, all of it is to allow them to position themselves for the future. So we see a great demand profile continuing.

Great. Thanks for that. Just my follow-up is you delivered on the profits and the outlook here looks strong. I know FX is obviously a drag and there's a lot of debate around the outlook of a dollar. Just curious here on your – on the hedging and the efficiency and contract profitability given potential volatility in the dollar, I know there's a good history here for you, but is it worth going through that? Maybe David, just to make sure that we're good on hedge efficiency?

Yes. We feel good about our hedge efficiency this year and how that's working out. Obviously, revenues move around based on where exchange rates are. But when we look at our expectations or the impacts that currency would have on us, we – year-over-year there's a significant impact. At the beginning of the year, we expected it to be a $75 million headwind for us. And then with our hedging, by the time we get to August, it was a 70 [ph] even with the moves that we had. It was a $70 million headwind. Now it's an $80 million headwind. And so what we've seen is that even though there have been large movements in the exchange rates because of our hedging program the impact on the bottom line that we've seen has been very limited compared to what we expected at the beginning of the year. So year-over-year, yes, it's a headwind, but our hedging programs are keeping that very consistent with what we – with what we expected at the beginning of the year with the movements being initially a favorable 5 and then an unfavorable 10. So net only $5 million away from what we were anticipating at the beginning of the year.

Right, that's very clear. Thank you so much as always.

Thank you.

Thank you Tien-Tsin. Operator, next question please.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is going to come from the line of Tyler DuPont with Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey. Good morning, Martin and David. Thanks for taking the questions. It's nice to see another quarter of bookings growth on a quarterly book-to-bill above one is always good to see. So I just want to ask where you can pinpoint this growth is coming from, whether it's across specific practices or industries? And if, could sort of provide an update on the ramp of the recent large deals that you signed, it sounds like there were around 20 deals fiscal year-to-date over $100 million. How is that ramp compared to expectations, and any call-outs there?

Sure. As I mentioned during the prepared remarks, we're seeing strength that's really very broad-based, and it's running across our geographic segments in terms of the signings growth that we're seeing. It's running across our practices as well with five of our six practices seeing signings growth north of 20%, so very broad-based from that perspective. And really throughout the industries that we serve, financial services, obviously being a key part of that, but strength there in retail and travel, good industrial uptake public sector and health care activity continues to be robust as well. So we feel that the – for us, call it the macro elements, the macro picture has felt fairly consistent from sector to sector. Among practices, I think we expect to continue to see strong growth in security and resiliency cloud and apps data and AI and certainly apps data and AI has been a particular growth area for us. So that's an important part of what we're driving. And then on the large deals, you're right the more than $100 million signings that we've had. This year we've had 20 year-to-date compared to 10 in the first nine months last year. So real ramp-up in that activity, and certainly that's an important contributor to the signings growth that we've had, but we've also had a lot of signings growth on the consult side, and those typically tend to be smaller or less than $100 million transactions there. So again, when we look both at Consult and at large managed services signings, we're seeing strength on both sides.

And they represent, sorry, David, just to add, they also represent Tyler, both renewals and growth within our existing customer base and new customers as well.

That's right. One of the $100 million signings this quarter was actually a new logo for us.

Great. That's very helpful. David and Martin, I appreciate that. And just speaking of macro, I wanted to all talk about tariffs and recent client conversations you're having with respect to potential tariff implications. As yesterday kind of proved, you can definitely get whiplash keeping up with back and forth. But many of your clients are impacted by potential tariffs. And given where we are in the calendar year with enterprise IT budgets being finalized right around this time, I'd be curious if maybe you could speak to any client dynamics you're seeing there, potentially tariff implications leading to sort of elongated timelines. Just anything there worth calling out?

Sure. Let me make a few comments. First, from what we've seen, everything we've seen there's no direct impact to Kyndryl. And bear in mind that what we do is not discretionary, as we've said before. From a customer perspective, I think it's also important to note that, and you said this well it changed dramatically in 24 hours. And I think from our customers' perspective, what they're dealing with is that volatility. They're trying to figure out where this is going, where it might land and then how they might respond. But it's really no different from any other business challenge that our customers face, whether it's a challenge in reaching new customers and how to provide better employee experiences. Yes, those are maybe less volatile, but the regulatory environment changes all the time, and in each of those cases – each of those cases has a technology component to help. It's not always the entire answer, but it's always part of the answer. So for us, it's a tailwind to demand as again, customers – our customer base is trying to navigate increased uncertainty. In any instance, all of those things are good tailwinds to our business. And I think that's part of – part of why we've seen consistent double-digit signings growth in Kyndryl Consult because we help them – we help them with the basics, so they can be prepared for any environment.

Great. That's very helpful Martin. Appreciate the insight.

Thanks Tyler.

Thanks Tyler. Operator, next question please.

One moment. Our next question comes from the line of Divya Goyal with Scotiabank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning everyone. So Martin, on this macro theme, I wanted to actually try to get Kyndryl Stake [ph] or Kyndryl's positioning on AI front with deep-sea-like models potentially coming to the forefront. How does Kyndryl and Kyndryl's business get impacted one way or the other with the proliferation of potentially these firm models coming to the market in the near future, if I may say?

Sure. Thanks Divya, and thanks for joining the call. So when we talk to our customers about AI and their plans, we do a lot of work to get them ready, their data architecture ready. We do a lot of work to help them design and test different opportunities. And then when they're ready to go, and I'm going to come back to that ready to go point in a second. When they're ready to go, we help them put it into production, doing all the things that have to be done if you're going to embed AI into a process, you have to understand where your assets are, you have to understand how to transform that application landscape. You have to understand the configuration management. So going from a POC to a run environment is very complex. That's why customers rely on us, because we know most about their systems and our run and transform approach allows them to scale these things. Now the DeepSeek [ph] innovation, if you will its part of what customers are struggling with. But on the list of what their challenges are, are really – they need AI skills; probably number one is how do our customers get the AI skills they need to even try these POCs. They need to understand the data privacy and the security constraints that sit around what they might be trying and there’s a regulatory element to that as well. They need to figure out how to integrate this stuff. And then there is – then there – ultimately, there’s a business case. And to the extent that DeepSeek or somebody else has figured out a way to shorten the training time, sure, that would be a tailwind to a new business case, but there are so many more things happening around the AI space that our customers need to address that it’s just – again, it’s just one of the elements. All of this points to, as I said earlier, all of this points to an increased rate of innovation, which is an increased rate of complexity, which means customers need to deal with the vulnerabilities of their infrastructure and invest with us, as you see in our signings growth, invest with us to be ready for the future. So we’ll see what happens with DeepSeek will see what the world learns about it. Everyone, I think, is trying – our customer base is trying. We’ve helped there. Customer base with machine learning, embedding machine learning into their processes, embedding Gen AI into their process, embedding agentic AI into their processes. So a good tailwind for us. But again, we sit at the base of what has to happen in order for them to take advantage of the opportunities they see.

That’s helpful. Maybe in the same vein, I’ll just ask a follow-up. So across your U.S. business, and we’ve not talked about this in the past. So I’ll try – I’m trying to get your perspective here. Could the DOGE or the efficiencies that are getting created with DOGE and the federal U.S. government, could that have any impact whatsoever, again, positively or negatively on Kyndryl? And that’s all for me.

Yes. Okay. Look, I think any attempt to make business or government, state federal anywhere to more efficient is an opportunity for us because at the heart of what we do, yes, we get our customers ready for the future, and we help them prepare for the changing environment, but we also deliver a lot of productivity. Enterprise IT is – the foundation of enterprise IT is productivity. So our ability to help them unleash resources, our ability to help them embed new technologies, which make them more productive, our ability, quite frankly, to help them find unused resources and Kyndryl Bridge, as an example, does this for our customer base, we can find all of the cloud – public cloud instances that somebody spun up that are no longer being used. We can find unused software licenses in their environment. So any focus on productivity is a good tailwind for us. Now the DOGE as part of the U.S. federal government, we don’t have a big U.S. federal business currently. So I don’t see a specific element there. But again, any focus on productivity is something we can help with. So I think it’s a tailwind for us, Divya.

That's great. Thank you.

Thanks, Divya. Operator, next question please.

One moment. And our next question is going to come from the line of Ian Zaffino with Oppenheimer. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, great. Thank you very much. Not to really beat a dead horse here on the AI side. But is there anything on – to your benefit and how you run your business like something like a DeepSeek could bring if it’s Bridge or anywhere else? And kind of how are you thinking about that? Thanks.

So a couple of things. We – obviously, we’re pretty substantial investors in and users of our AI, our machine learning. It does sit at the heart of Bridge. And critically, we are helping – giving our customers insights that are coming out of Bridge so they can understand how to optimize. Within DeepSeek, at least on our early work and looking at it, there is some innovation here around how to split-up if you will, a problem and distribute that problem to be solved across an estate. So you’re using resources that already exist and are underutilized. So I do think there are some innovations, and that’s just one specifically, but there are some innovations in what DeepSeek has accomplished that are worth investigating understanding and figuring how can we use resources more effectively. But again, Kyndryl Bridge and the machine learning in Kyndryl Bridge is what today drives the way we deliver – today what drives our ability to automate. It’s today what drives our ability to give insights to our customers and create kind of the self-healing architecture that we’ve talked about. So yes, I think there might be something in here. We’ll have to – we’re spending some time to understand it.

Okay. Great. And then if I was to turn to the Consult business a little bit. How are you thinking about that growth as far as the pace has been growing at, the ability to continue that? And then when you look at the growth, where is that per se coming from? Is that share gains? Is that winning new business? Is it expanding with additional accounts or existing accounts? Maybe kind of give us an understanding of the sources of growth there? Thanks.

Sure. And certainly, the growth is something where we’re really excited about. Consult has grown from being 10% of our business at spin, probably 14% a couple of years ago and 21% of revenues this past quarter. It was the first time we crossed over the 20% threshold. It’s running around 25% of our signings. So we’ve got a what we think is a clear path to moving up to Consult being about 1/4 of our revenue in the not-too-distant future and then ultimately, maybe even a little bit more than that. So it’s an increasingly important part of our revenue and our earnings and how we go to market and how we meet customer needs. And I think what we’re seeing is that the growth there is coming from a number of different areas. By definition, that kind of growth is a share gain. And I do think there’s work that other firms were providing before we were an independent company with the alliances we currently have, that we’re now able to provide, and that gives us an opportunity to take business that others were doing as well as to do some things that our customers for whom we are providing managed services sort of had to do on their own and do internally. So part of what we’re doing is actually growing the pie in terms of work that we can provide that folks needed to do internally. So I really see the growth as being a combination of share from others and some work that was previously in-sourced moving to us. And that set of opportunities associated with that, our ability to provide multi-vendor solutions and to be objective in finding the best solutions for our customers is something that’s really distinguishing us and creating opportunities that are clearly so unique to us in this – in the marketplace so that we’re able to achieve growth levels that are significantly above where other folks have been.

All right, perfect. Thanks for all the color.

Thanks. Thanks, Ian. Operator, I think we have one more question in the queue, please.

One moment. And our last question is going to come from the line of Jamie Friedman with Susquehanna. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thank you and good results here. So Martin, I wanted to ask you also about Consult, I thought that was an excellent prior question. But to step back, how would you describe the mind share of Consult? Like what is Consult known for? If you ask the industry, what – I’ll just say Infosys is known for extreme offshoring. Accenture is known for best practices. I’m just giving you the one liners. What’s the mind share that Kyndryl Consult is or what is it that you anticipate it will be for Consult?

Yes. Thanks, Jamie. Look, it’s a great question. It’s – I think it’s two things. It’s mission-critical and it’s run and transform. And the ability to run and transform is not something that our customers have organically and they need help. But at the same time, because we’re doing mission-critical, we obviously need to keep those systems running while transforming them for the future. And as I noted earlier, the ability and the insights that we get from Kyndryl Bridge allow our Kyndryl Consult team to go in and make very fast recommendations that can be implemented quickly to, again, prepare our customer systems for the opportunities or, quite frankly, the changes they need to keep up with a changing regulatory environment. So mission-critical, and our run and transform approach is – will continue to drive our Kyndryl Consult growth.

Thank you. And then, David, in terms of where we are in the evolution of the IBM relationship, could you just remind us about that transition to the P times Q. When that happened, if it already has happened or if it will happen and how to think about the – what’s that about and how to quantify it? Thank you.

Sure. We continue to be a fairly large customer, a large customer of IBM’s, one of their largest in the world, particularly of software and mainframe-related software, given the sizes of the mainframe estate we manage for our customers. We’re – in terms of the IBM relationship, we’ve exited all the transition services agreements, and I’d say our relationship is primarily a vendor-customer relationship at this point in time. And with respect to software, there are two things going on. The first is that we were entitled to a declining rebate over time, and that’s what’s been giving rise to the $200 million annual increase in costs. So we – our rebate went down in fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024 – sorry, calendar 2023, calendar 2024 and again, in calendar 2025. And so this is the – that’s created a $200 million headwind each year. And this year, beginning in January of 2025 is the last time we see that increase affecting us. So that’s the first thing going on. And then the second is that also at the beginning of 2025. We’ve moved from having a fixed price that we pay to having our cost based on price times quantity. And that’s a – I think that’s a positive move for us because it creates the opportunity for us to really manage our cost by managing the amount of licenses that we need for our customers. And that’s an opportunity we’ve been preparing for, and we’ll continue to look to utilize to make sure we optimize and manage the costs here.

Got it. Thank you both.

Thanks, Jamie. Martin, do you want to close out our call?

Sure. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today as we look ahead, and we continue to build on our solid and proven foundation of the 3As, Kyndryl Consult and Kyndryl Bridge. We’ll continue to leverage our capabilities to expand our share of wallet with our existing customers. And as we’ve said a number of times, continue to win new customers as well. We’ll continue to operate at an aggressive pace, both in terms of tackling our immediate execution priorities and the longer-term milestones that we set out back in November at Investor Day. And obviously, we’ll continue to rely on the Kyndryl Way as our playbook for how we work and how we win together as a team. We are showing up with our customers with a winning mindset. We’re challenging ourselves to drive progress every day, and we’re focused obviously on the outcomes we’re delivering. So we see opportunities available for us to continue to learn, to innovate, to grow, to assert our market leadership, to demonstrate our expertise and to deliver the exceptional value that our customers expect and have gotten. So we look forward to capitalizing on all those opportunities. So with that, operator, we will conclude our call. Thank you.

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.