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Unisys Corporation New
2/25/2026
Good morning and welcome to the Unisys Corporation fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michaela Paworski, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Yesterday afternoon, Unisys released its fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. Joining me to discuss those results are Mike Thompson, our CEO and President, and Deb McCann, our CFO. As a reminder, today's call contains estimates and other forward-looking statements within the meaning of the securities laws. We caution listeners that these statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call. These items can be found in the forward-looking statement section of yesterday's earnings release furnished on Form 8K, and in our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. We do not assume any obligation to review or revise any forward-looking statements in light of future events. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as non-GAAP operating profit, that exclude certain unusual or non-recurring items, such as post-retirement expense, cost reduction activities, and other expenses that the company believes are not indicative of its ongoing operations. While we believe these measures provide a more complete understanding of our financial performance, they are not intended to be a substitute for GAAP. Reconciliation for non-GAAP measures are provided in the slides for today's call, which are available on our investor website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike.
Thank you, Michaela. Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss the company's fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. I want to start off with three clear messages that we hope you take away today. First, we continue to execute against a consistent operating strategy, which is yielding improved profitability and free cash flow as we continue to advance our pension removal strategy. Second, the market perception of Unisys and our solution continues to advance among our clients, prospects, partners, and industry analysts. And third, which relates to a subject I know that's top of mind for everyone, we believe artificial intelligence is poised to become a powerful driver of long-term demand in the solutions that are core to Unisys as a designer, orchestrator, and enabler of modern IT ecosystems. Before discussing AI, I want to discuss my first message of how consistent execution of our strategy is translating into financial results. Fourth quarter revenue grew 5% year over year, resulting in a slight improvement in our full year revenue projections coming in above our revised midpoint. Our non-GAAP operating margin was 18% in the quarter and 9.1% for the year, exceeding the top end of our upwardly revised projections and representing 30 basis points of annual improvement. We had a high degree of confidence in achieving the fourth quarter weighting of our license and support revenue, and we met those expectations. Full-year L&S revenue exceeded our original expectations by nearly $40 million, making this the third consecutive year of substantial upside in our highest margin profit center. Our actions to streamline corporate cost reduced SG&A as a percent of revenue by nearly 300 basis points over the past three years. We generated $128 million of full-year pre-pension free cash flow in 2025, up 55% from the prior year and above the $110 million we expected. We have strong liquidity with over $400 million of cash on the balance sheet at year-end, up almost $40 million year-over-year. We increased our year-end cash balance while net leverage, including pension, has improved to 2.8 times compared to 3.0 times at the end of 2024. Our liquidity also improved despite using $50 million of cash as part of a discretionary contribution to our U.S. pensions. Our total contributions have reduced our global pension deficit by $300 million to $450 million at year-end, and lowered future expected contributions by more than the interest on the incremental debt we raised, improving near-term cash flows. We also executed another annuity purchase, which removed approximately $320 million of gross U.S.-defined benefit pension liabilities in 2025. This, coupled with our liability duration matching strategy, which has successfully removed substantially all market volatility from the total future contributions keeps us on a fixed path for full removal of the U.S. defined benefit pension plan. I want to shift to my second message, which is that awareness and perception of Unisys and our solutions continues to advance. We're seeing this evidence by our wins and our pipeline. 2025 was an especially large renewal year, and our team successfully signed $1.7 billion of renewal TCB, securing a large portion of our recurring revenue base. Over a billion dollars of renewal TCB was signed in the fourth quarter alone, which included closing a three-year extension and improved economics with our largest DWS client, who has been with us for nearly three decades. This field services renewal spans US, Canada, and Latin America, and secures the necessary scale for us to provide affordable field services across our client base. Multi-year renewals can be a catalyst for expansion within client account by integrating new solutions that support enhanced client centricity and improved overall margin profile. We capitalized on these opportunities in the fourth quarter, which was our largest quarter of new scope signings in recent years. Almost all of our largest renewals during the quarter included new scope, evidencing improved perception within our existing client base. For example, during the quarter, we signed a five-year renewal with one of the largest public university systems in the United States for cloud transformation, migration, and modernization services and expanded scope to include centralized application management across campuses, and a center of excellence that will leverage AI agents to standardize and modernize application management, streamlining processes for both students and staff. As we discussed last quarter, we've seen some competitors price aggressively to prioritize revenue over profitability and delivery quality. While that contributed to a few significant renewal losses and presents several hundred basis points of growth headwinds for 2026, We're confident our investments in our core areas of our portfolio will continue to drive market and wallet share gains and will both reduce client costs and extend the scope of our delivery for our clients. In our wins and pipeline, we're seeing more instances of clients placing increased value on delivery quality and viewing it as a real differentiator. For example, in the fourth quarter, we won back a public sector client in Australia with a large scope for DWS solutions after they experienced a decline in delivery quality with one of our competitors. This win sets a powerful new foundation for our business in the region and provides a global playbook for showcasing delivery differentiation. We also added several new logo opportunities to our DWS and CA&I pipeline from chief information officers who moved to new organization and engaged us immediately to participate in their transformations because they know we're a true partner with all the necessary skills to modernize and reliably manage complex IT ecosystems post-transformation. We're also achieving new heights in recognition and awareness among industry analysts that influence client decisions when selecting IT solution providers. During 2025, we build upon several years of advancing awareness and recognition within the analyst community, Again, increasing our total report placements by over 20%, including two new leader recognitions. In the fourth quarter, we received a very significant recognition from Gartner, which elevates Unisys to a global leader position in their outsourced digital workplace services Magic Quadrant for the first time. Magic Quadrant reports are the culmination of rigorous fact-based research evaluating completeness of vision, an ability to execute and provide a wide-range view of the relative position of providers. In addition, in its companion critical capabilities for outsourced digital workplace services report, Gartner ranked Unisys as the number one overall provider for the North American market and the number one global provider for both service desk and device management capabilities. This acknowledgement is already helping us access more opportunities, giving us an edge, especially relative to the three of our largest competitors that fell out of the leader quadrant. Unisys was also named the Forbes list of America's best midsize employers in 2026, which comes on the heels of being named Time Magazine's world's best companies in 2025. Our culture is reflected in our below-average voluntary attrition, which was 11.4% for the year. As we look to the future, I want to discuss why we view AI as a powerful long-term driver of demand for our solutions and how we've invested in solution development and delivery skills to capitalize on it. As I said earlier, Unisys ultimately develops, enables, and orchestrates the IT ecosystem. In all three of our segments, we provide solutions that enable emerging technology throughout the enterprise and are agnostic to the placement of AI, software, or hardware that make up our clients' environment. As the industry heads into a major multi-year AI infrastructure build-out to supply the technology needed for broad AI adoption, there's a growing shortage of skilled technicians and that will provide the design and service layer for modernization and postmodernization support. Importantly, demand for services will grow regardless of whether clients develop custom AI agents on private infrastructure, leverage standard capabilities from software providers and hyperscalers within private or public clouds, or a combination of both within hybrid environments. For us, the scale and reach of AI goes beyond the software and extends to physical AI, The scale and skills of our field service organizations present a unique market opportunity for us. We're already beginning to support private AI builds for OEM partners, requiring liquid cooling skills, complementing the work we already do in maintaining critical hybrid infrastructure, such as servers and storage and data centers, or IoT devices in everything from conference rooms to restaurants. We will also continue expanding services our existing use of agentic AI and expect AI agents to continue to be layered throughout our managed service offerings, orchestrating increasingly complex and automated workflows. Clearly, AI is adding complexity to managing the IT estate. Tokenization costs are high, business cases are challenging, and measuring returns on investments is difficult. We expect all these factors to increase client reliance on external providers. Unisys can reduce the cost of AI adoption for clients by developing solutions that can be leveraged across a large base of clients with standardized architectures for faster deployment. In 2025, we launched Service Experience Accelerator, an agentic AI framework for delivering next-generation service desk. SEA is now in production with some of our largest clients, and we are enhancing our solution to improve its ability to handle input ambiguity. We plan to roll this out to about a third of our existing client base during 2026, which establishes a growing base of leverageable technology to support long-term expansion, continued delivery optimization, and enhanced quality. In CA&I, we're advancing our intelligent operations architecture, with an integrated framework for rapidly developing, deploying, and orchestrating AI agents to streamline IT operations and aid in financial operation decision-making, especially as it pertains to design and compute. Our alliance partners offer a significant and relatively untapped opportunity to scale distribution and continue raising awareness in the market. Hyper scalers are eager to promote solutions that use their cloud platforms, tools, and models to drive AI adoption and development of their AI-enabled cloud ecosystem. For example, in CA&I, we're standardizing our SOC managed service delivery with Microsoft's Sentinel and Defender threat detection as its main components. We are powering the service layer with AI agents, which helped us engage with Microsoft on development and discussions about joint promotions. Many of our key enterprise software partners are also seeking to accelerate uptake of their AI capabilities. As another example, we are a high volume user of AgentForce internally, which we adopted to optimize our field service dispatch, and we're engaging with Salesforce to explore how we can jointly offer our internal framework as a service to some of their other clients and prospects. These examples illustrate the repeatable playbooks we developed across our portfolio that we think will help us capitalize on AI-related demand, strengthen our partnerships, and ultimately accelerate our growth in XLNS solutions. In the ECS segment, we continue to be highly confident in the enduring value of our ClearPass Forward ecosystem, despite hypothetical threats posted by AI development. AI coding capabilities do not replicate decades of development required to integrate processes code, equipment, and environments with unmatched latency, availability, redundancy, and security. Our core platform offer an unmatched combination of speed, resilience, and most importantly, security, which is of critical importance to the financial services, government agencies, healthcare, and travel transportation companies we serve. Replicating these benefits would require parsing our unified platform into numerous functions and a wholesale reorganization of business processes for minimal benefit, bringing with it significant business risk. At the same time, we continue investing in our core platforms, which are already cloud compatible, enhancing our value-added products, such as data exchange and ePortal, which unlock valuable data and allow it to move across environments and applications powering AI and analytics. These solutions represent increased extensibility and ecosystem expansion that establish ClearPath Forward as a pillar of a modern AI-enabled enterprise solution advancing digital transformation. At the same time, we are leveraging AI to help us quickly assess workforce skills, identify gaps and vulnerabilities, as well as assist in cross-training and upskilling talent for the future. We are beginning to leverage our internal engineering expertise into advisory engagements with ECS clients. And while quantum computing may not be imminent in the short term, we are beginning to see tangible client engagement for quantum advisory services we introduced early in 2025. With that, now I'll turn the call over to Deb to go through our financial results in more detail.
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