8/5/2026

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fiscal First Quarter 2027 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Lori Chaitman, Global Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

speaker
Lori Chaitman
Global Head of Investor Relations

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Kindrel's earnings call for the first fiscal quarter, June 30th, 2026. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that our remarks today include forward-looking statements. These statements do not guarantee future performance and speak only as of today, and the company assumes no obligation to update its forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Actual outcomes or results may differ materially from those suggested by forward-looking statements as a result of risks and uncertainties. For more information on some of these risks and uncertainties, please see the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2026, and as such, factors may be updated from time to time in the company's subsequent filings with the SEC. Also in today's remarks, we refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Definitions and additional information about our calculation of Non-GAAP Financial Metrics, as well as 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. Following up prepared remarks will hold a Q&A session. I'd now like to turn the call over to Kyndryl's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Martin Schroeter.

speaker
Martin Schroeter
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Lori, and thanks to each of you for joining us. In the first quarter, we executed on our key priorities and made progress in our targeted growth areas supported by continued strengths in the United States. Signings and revenue grew in Kindrel Consult, and we continued to see positive momentum with hyperscalers. We continue to invest in the areas where we see opportunity, Kindrel Consult, our alliance partnerships, and our agentic AI capabilities through Kindrel Bridge and our IP, to support and modernize our customers' most complex mission-critical IT estates. And at the same time, we took actions to further streamline our operations. While there is more work ahead, our strategic priorities remain clear. We're focused on delivering our fiscal 2027 outlook and our 2028 objectives. With more revenue expected to come from higher margin post-spin signings this year and next, the quality of that revenue base gives us confidence in our ability to increase profitability and deliver more than 1.2 billion in adjusted pre-tax income and a billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2028. And these targets can be achieved on low single-digit constant currency revenue growth. Harsh will provide more detail in a few minutes on our recent financial results and our outlook. Last quarter, we outlined the priorities that support our fiscal 2028 targets. As we highlighted, we entered the fiscal year with a five-point improvement in beginning backlog versus fiscal 2026. And four months into the year, Our pipeline consists of more scope expansions and new logos that support future signings growth and better mix of higher value services. AI, modernization, and cyber preparedness remain important priorities for enterprises around the world as they balance innovation and transformation with operational stability in an uncertain macro environment. This is driving demand for Kindrel Consult with signings exceeding revenue over the last 12 months. These same dynamics are creating opportunities across our Alliance ecosystem with customers' modernization needs accelerating demand in both public and private cloud. We continue to sign deals with average projected pre-tax margins in the high single digits, reflecting our focus on higher value services and pricing disciplines central to our transformation. Through our advanced delivery initiative, we are embedding more automation and AI into our operations Improving productivity and upscaling our teams for higher-value work. And with Kindle Bridge, our AI-powered services delivery platform, we're providing our customers with the technology foundation to deploy, govern, and orchestrate AI agents' energetic workflows across complex IT estates. In parallel, we're taking workforce rebalancing actions to address lower-than-normal voluntary attrition and our SG&A costs, with savings expected to begin in the back half of this year. We'll continue to share our progress against these signposts as we drive our business toward our multi-year objectives. I want to focus my discussion on total signings performance. While our customers remain thoughtful and deliberate in their IT decision-making, we're seeing demand for AI-led modernization, especially where Kindrel Consult and our hyperscaler alliances help customers address their mission-critical needs. We're encouraged that over the last six months, our total signings have exceeded our revenue. Deal size and composition are additional proof points that demonstrate how we're executing our strategy. Over the last 12 months, we signed 40 deals in excess of $50 million, of which 10 were signed in the first quarter. And among these 40 large deals, approximately 30% of their value consists of scope expansion or our new logos, which compares to 15% in fiscal 2025. Strong Science and Kindrel Consult and Momentum and Hyperscalers are translating to revenue growth in these targeted areas. Kindle Consult revenue grew 14% and hyperscaler-related revenue streams grew 48% in the last 12 months on a year-over-year basis. Performance in Kindle Consult and hyperscalers has partially offset the revenue headwinds from focus accounts over the last few years and, more recently, lengthening sales cycles and customers' decisions to procure hardware and software directly from IBM. Kindrel Consult's results demonstrate broad demand from enterprises looking to design and scale agentic AI across their business workflows, modernize complex hybrid IT environments, and strengthen cybersecurity and resilience. To meet that demand, we've been expanding our consulting skills and capabilities, including investments in forward deploy engineers, human systems architects, and AI innovation labs, where we co-create agentic solutions at scale with our Kindrel agentic framework. To further address customers' modernization and AI needs, we've been expanding our relationships with our alliance partners. Recently, we expanded our alliance with AWS to help enterprises adopt and scale agentic AI as they modernize and run mission-critical workloads in the cloud. We also expanded our work with Microsoft Azure to help customers design, build, and operate cloud architectures that align with evolving data residency and operational requirements. And we continue to strengthen collaborations with partners such as Broadcom and Dell, HP Enterprise and Red Hat to support customers modernization efforts in complex private and hybrid cloud environments. AI is accelerating the need for modernization. Every day I speak with business and technology leaders in different industries and nearly every customer conversation comes back to the same long term themes. First, Enterprises are eager to realize the benefits of AI, but many are trying to deploy next generation technologies on infrastructure applications and processes that were not designed for them. As you've heard me say before, it's like trying to run a new 200 mile per hour capable bullet train on tracks built for 30 mile per hour world. Equally challenging, as our Kindrel People Readiness Report found, there's also a lack of skills as only 23% of business leaders said their workforce is ready for AI. The need for Kindrel's expertise and modernization capabilities to continue running their business while transforming it, that run and transform and run approach, is where Kindrel is differentiated. Second, AI, cybersecurity, and data residency regulations and mandates are becoming fundamental considerations in how customers plan and invest in IT. Enterprises increasingly want greater control over their data, their AI models, and their digital infrastructure. And Kindrel helps our customers navigate and build technology foundations that can adapt to the evolving regulatory requirements, geopolitical realities, and business needs over the long term. Third, and related to the previous theme, cybersecurity and resilience remain top priorities. As agentic AI becomes more powerful, as we've seen with recent frontier models and further embedded into how enterprises operate, our customers need strong guardrails and policies to bolster the governance and security of their critical systems. This is especially important in the highly regulated emission-critical environments where Kindrel has deep expertise in governing and securing data across complex hybrid environments and adhering to unique compliance requirements. Fourth, customers increasingly want open and interconnected platforms for flexibility and choice across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments. As technology ecosystems become even more diverse and interconnected, Organizations need agile platforms that integrate seamlessly across environments and applications, enabling interoperability, reducing vendor lock-in, and accelerating innovation. And finally, while most AI investments were initially justified through productivity gains, customers are increasingly looking beyond efficiency toward growth, toward speed, and toward new business outcomes. These are structural and durable trends that leverage our heritage and expertise in mission-critical IT infrastructure, our ecosystem, Kindrel Bridge, and our differentiated portfolio of agentic AI capabilities. We're helping customers simplify complexity and build technology environments that can adapt as business, regulatory, and technology requirements evolve while improving resilience, security, and operational performance. Now let's talk about three tangible examples of how we're helping customers deliver business outcomes across the modernization continuum using an agentic AI approach. First, with a large global payments company that we've been working with for decades, the challenge wasn't deciding to modernize. It was to better understand the complexities and dependencies across decades of mission-critical mainframe applications to modernize effectively, maximize their ROI, and drive the agility and scale that the business required. We expanded our scope to roll out Kindryl's agentic modernization platform with prepackaged AI modernization workflows, which can be scaled to support multiple customer teams globally carrying out modernization work. We deployed our engineers to develop additional AI workflows to meet the customer's unique modernization and tech stack needs. Next, we expanded our scope with a leading European financial institution to transform its operations and technology while improving efficiency and meeting increasingly complex regulatory requirements. This customer wants to modernize applications, infrastructure, and operations at the same time, not as separate initiatives. We're bringing together Kindrel Consult, Kindrel Bridge, and our managed services expertise to implement an AI-native agentic banking platform. This end-to-end modernization effort will automate its operations, strengthen security and resilience, improve overall decision making, and enhance the customer experience. And then we were recently awarded a new logo with a global technology company to help streamline software engineering and IT operations using the Kindrel agentic AI framework. This will help them grow while improving security, resilience, and speed. By combining Kindrel's expertise in agentic software development, platform engineering, and IT operations, we will deliver a scalable, secure, and efficient technology foundation that supports their expanding edge AI global business while reducing deployment complexity and operational risk. In all three examples, our AI-led modernization approach is accelerating transformation timeline and improving efficiency, strengthening the resilience of their mission-critical technology environments. We rewarded NuScope with each of these customers and now expect to expand into new areas, demonstrating the breadth of our capabilities and importantly, creating opportunities to deepen and expand our long-term strategic relationships with our customers. We're a trusted advisor and a long-term partner for our customers with differentiated solutions that center on achieving tangible business results. With the expectation that higher value signings continue to improve, our focus is clear. Drive profitable growth and stronger free cash flow. And with that, I'd like to pass the call over to Harsh to discuss our quarterly results and our fiscal year outlook. Harsh.

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Q1KD 2027

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