Earnings call transcript: IBM Q4 2024 sees record cash flow, stock dips

International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM) reported its fourth-quarter 2024 earnings, surpassing EPS expectations but narrowly missing revenue forecasts. The tech giant, currently valued at $236 billion, has shown remarkable momentum with a 36.66% price return over the past six months. Despite strong financial performance, IBM ’s stock fell 1.08% in after-hours trading, reflecting investor concerns over revenue shortfall and broader market conditions. According to InvestingPro analysis, IBM is currently trading above its Fair Value, with technical indicators suggesting overbought conditions.

Key Takeaways

• IBM exceeded earnings per share (EPS) expectations with $3.92 against a forecast of $3.80.
• Revenue came in slightly below expectations at $17.6 billion versus $17.62 billion forecasted.
• The company’s stock declined by 1.08% after the earnings release.
• IBM achieved a record free cash flow of $12.7 billion for the year.
• The company projects over 5% revenue growth for 2025.

Company Performance

IBM demonstrated a solid performance in 2024, with a full-year revenue of $63 billion, marking a 3% growth from the previous year. The company recorded an operating pre-tax income of $11.2 billion and an operating EPS of $10.33. A significant highlight was the free cash flow of $12.7 billion, the highest in the company’s history. As a testament to its financial stability, InvestingPro data shows IBM has maintained dividend payments for 55 consecutive years, with a current dividend yield of 2.59%. IBM continues to strengthen its position in the hybrid cloud and generative AI markets, contributing to its competitive edge.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $17.6 billion (slightly below forecast)
• Earnings per share: $3.92 (above forecast)
• Operating pre-tax income: $11.2 billion
• Free cash flow: $12.7 billion (record high)
• Revenue growth: 3% year-over-year

Earnings vs. Forecast

IBM beat the EPS forecast of $3.80 with an actual EPS of $3.92, a surprise of approximately 3.16%. However, revenue was slightly below expectations at $17.6 billion compared to the anticipated $17.62 billion. This mixed performance reflects the company’s ability to manage costs effectively despite a challenging economic environment.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, IBM’s stock price fell by 1.08% in after-hours trading, closing at $258.27. The stock remains near its 52-week high of $261.80, with InvestingPro revealing an impressive 14.89% return in the past week alone. The RSI indicates overbought territory, suggesting potential price consolidation ahead. The decline aligns with broader market trends, where tech stocks have experienced volatility due to macroeconomic factors. For deeper insights into IBM’s technical indicators and over 100+ additional metrics, explore InvestingPro’s comprehensive analysis tools.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, IBM anticipates over 5% revenue growth in 2025 at constant currency, with software revenue growth approaching double digits. The company expects free cash flow to increase to $13.5 billion. Key growth areas include Red Hat, projected to grow in the mid-teens, and consulting, expected to see low single-digit growth.

Executive Commentary

Arvind (NSE:ARVN) Krishna, CEO, emphasized the role of software in IBM’s strategy, stating, " Software (ETR:SOWGn) is the basis for all of those capabilities." Chief Financial Officer Jim Kavanaugh highlighted the company’s transformation, noting, "We have fundamentally repositioned our business to a software-led integrated platform." These statements underscore IBM’s focus on software and AI as growth drivers.

Risks and Challenges

• Geopolitical tensions could impact global operations and supply chains.
• Interest rate volatility poses a risk to financial stability and investment.
• Supply chain vulnerabilities may affect product delivery and costs.
• Demographic shifts could alter market demand and workforce dynamics.
• Increased competition in the AI and cloud sectors may pressure margins.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about IBM’s M&A strategy and regulatory challenges. The company also addressed dynamics in its consulting business and growth in transaction processing and mainframe sectors. IBM’s AI software product strategy was a key topic, reflecting the market’s interest in its technological advancements.

Full transcript - International Business Machines (IBM) Q4 2024:

Conference Operator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Now, I will turn the meeting over to Olympia McNearney, IBM’s Global Head of Investor Relations.

Olympia, you may begin.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Thank you. I’d like to welcome you to IBM’s Q4 2024 earnings presentation. I’m Olympia McNearney, and I’m here today with Arvind Krishna, IBM’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer and Jim Kavanaugh, IBM’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We’ll post today’s prepared remarks on the IBM website within a couple of hours and a replay will be available by this time tomorrow. To provide additional information to our investors, our presentation includes certain non GAAP measures.

For example, all of our references to revenue and signings growth are at constant currency. We provided reconciliation charts for these and other non GAAP financial measures at the end of the presentation, which is posted to our investor website. Finally, some comments made in this presentation may be considered forward looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially. Additional information about these factors is included in the company’s SEC filings.

So with that, I’ll turn the call over to Arvind.

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, IBM: Thank you for joining us today. Let me start by reflecting on our strong close to 2024 and performance over the midterm model, then get into more detail on the execution of our strategy. We are pleased with the progress we made in 2024, delivering revenue growth of 3% and $12,700,000,000 of free cash flow. We saw continued acceleration in software and our highest level of cash flow generation in many years. As we close out the midterm model we laid out at the end of 2021, I am proud of our achievements.

We met or exceeded our target metrics for revenue growth, profitability and free cash flow growth. We set out a plan for mid single digit growth and we delivered on it, growing our revenue by a 6% CAGR over this period. All of our segments delivered revenue growth in line with our model over the last 3 years. Software grew ahead of our goal of mid single digits and this momentum continued with 9% growth in 2024. We committed to accelerate the growth of Red Hat and we delivered double digits for the year.

Infrastructure performed in line with our model as we invested in innovation and transformed the business model. Consulting met the model for high single digit growth, although we acknowledge 2024 was below model. We are confident that our investment in partnerships and skills, as well as our early leadership in GenAI position us to accelerate consulting growth as we move forward. Overall, our technology momentum and consulting signings bolster our confidence in our future performance. Before getting deeper into our execution, I’ll make a few comments on the macroeconomic environment.

As we look at the broader environment, IBM’s mission to help businesses leverage technology to both scale revenue and grow profitably is more critical than ever. Geopolitical tensions, interest rate volatility, supply chain vulnerabilities, demographic shifts, evolving cyber threats, or creating headwinds of businesses worldwide. In this context, technology is key to drive sustainable growth. IBM’s combination of advanced technology and deep consulting expertise positions us to uniquely deliver end to end business transformations. We entered the year intent on enhancing our portfolio.

Software is now about 45% of our business with more than $15,000,000,000 of ARR growing at double digits. We delivered strong and accelerating revenue growth of 11% in the 4th quarter, which includes 8 points of organic growth and strength across the portfolio. This growth was led by Red Hat, up 17% in the quarter. Our early leadership in generative AI and the consulting advantage platform have positioned us well in today’s evolving market. In infrastructure, Z16 is our most successful program in history, highlighting customer adoption and continued reliance on the mainframe.

We see more opportunities ahead as our infrastructure solutions play a crucial role in helping clients bring AI workloads closer to their data, and we will launch Z17 in the middle of 2025. Let me now address our progress in generative AI. We continue to gain momentum with our Gen AI book of business growing to over $5,000,000,000 inception to date, up by about $2,000,000,000 quarter over quarter. Approximately 1 5th of this book of business comes from software and the remaining 4 5th is consulting. Our AI portfolio is tailored to meet the diverse needs of enterprise clients, enabling them to leverage a mix of models, IBMs, their own, open models from Hugging Face, Meta (NASDAQ:META) and Mistral.

IBM’s Granite models designed for specific purposes are 90% more cost efficient than larger alternatives. Additionally, Rel AI and OpenShift AI provide clients with a consistent and scalable AI foundation built on open source technology. This quarter, we saw strong traction in our WatsonX middleware solutions and AI assistance, including whatsonex.gov, whatsonex.ai, Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, Watsonx Orchestrate, as well as products embedding AI such as Concert. And consulting remains key to designing and implementing AI use cases, driving Watson X deployment. Through the year, we introduced key innovations that are resonating with clients.

This quarter, we launched OpenShift virtualization engine to meet growing virtualization demand. In infrastructure, the Telen 2 Processor enhances IBM Z’s AI capabilities and performance. We just announced RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server, offering the fastest and easiest migration from on premises to cloud for the 10,000 plus clients who use SAP on IBM Power. The consulting advantage platform is integrating our technology and industry expertise to drive business transformation. With more than 75 Quantum (NASDAQ:QMCO) systems deployed worldwide, our focus on emerging innovation is clear.

This quarter, we announced a collaboration with the State of Illinois to establish the National Quantum Algorithm Center in Chicago. M and A remains a key enabler of our strategy. The acquisition of Neural Magic strengthens our AI solutions with advanced model optimization. Clients worldwide cross IBM to lead transformations. Notable examples this quarter include NatWest and Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT), leveraging our Granite models for advanced AI applications.

L’Oreal is partnering with IBM to use our AI consulting and research capabilities to develop foundation models for cosmetic formulation. We also collaborated with UFC and Ferrari (NYSE:RACE), helping them tap into IBM’s AI and consulting expertise to drive operational efficiency. Announced earlier this month, IBM and the UK Home Office will partner on the emergency services network, supporting more than 300,000 emergency responders in Great Britain. Our ecosystem continues to expand as we strengthen our partnerships with leading technology providers, including AMD (NASDAQ:AMD), Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ:PANW), SFP, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Core Reef. These partnerships allow us to co innovate and deliver greater value to clients.

Before I conclude, let me touch on our outlook. We see continued momentum in our business, driven by our focused strategy, enhanced portfolio and culture of innovation. For 2025, we expect revenue growth inflecting higher to 5% plus and about $13,500,000,000 of free cash flow. I look forward to sharing more details at our upcoming Investor Day on February 4. I will now hand over to Jim to walk you through the details of the quarter.

Jim, over to you. Thanks, Arvind. For the full year, we delivered about $63,000,000,000 in revenue,

Jim Kavanaugh, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, IBM: $11,200,000,000 of operating pre tax income and operating earnings per share of $10.33 And we generated $12,700,000,000 of free cash flow, our strongest level of free cash flow generation in many years and our highest reported free cash flow margin in history. Revenue growth, combined with 120 basis points of operating pre tax margin expansion, drove 9% operating pre tax profit growth, 14% free cash flow growth and 7% operating diluted earnings per share growth. We are pleased with these results, delivering durable revenue growth in our repositioned business and exceeding our expectations on profitability, free cash flow and earnings per share. Revenue performance for the year was led by software, up 9%, with strength across our portfolio. We achieved Rule of 40, driven by the combination of accelerating growth and margin expansion throughout the year.

Consulting revenue was up 1% and continue to be impacted by a dynamic market environment as clients reprioritized spending. While infrastructure was down 3%, reflecting product cycle dynamics, we delivered more than 120% program to program growth for Z16, our most successful program in history. Our portfolio mix, operating leverage and yield from productivity initiatives generated strong operating gross margin and operating profit performance. For the full year, we expanded operating gross profit margin by 130 basis points. Our operating pre tax margin expanded by 120 basis points, ahead of our expectations and well above our model.

These results represent our highest level of operating gross margin and operating pre tax margin in many years. Now turning to a deeper dive on the quarter. We generated $17,600,000,000 of revenue, up over 2% at constant currency and ahead of our expectation. Software growth accelerated to 11%, with strength across our key categories of Red Hat, automation, data and AI and transaction processing. Consulting was down 1%.

This quarter, we achieved record levels of signings and strong sequential growth in our generative AI book of business, reflecting our early leadership in the areas our clients are prioritizing. Infrastructure was down 6%, reflecting product cycle dynamics in our 11th quarter of Z16. Looking at our profit metrics, in the Q4, we expanded operating gross margin by 50 basis points and operating pretax margin by 40 basis points. We are pleased with this strong performance, driven by our portfolio mix, operating leverage and ongoing productivity initiatives, similar to the full year. This allowed for continued investments to drive innovation in our portfolio, which you can see in our higher R and D expense, up 13%.

Our operating tax rate was 14%, which is flat versus last year. And our operating earnings per share of $3.92 was up 1%. For the full year, we generated $12,700,000,000 of free cash flow, up $1,500,000,000 and growing 14%. The largest driver of this growth comes from adjusted EBITDA, up about $900,000,000 year over year. We realized $500,000,000 in proceeds from the Palo Alto QRadar transaction, which was a small contribution of free cash flow given the payout of structural actions and foregone profit.

We also delivered sustainable lower cash requirements through changes in our retirement plans. As we close out the midterm model we introduced in 2021, we’ve grown free cash flow faster than revenue in each of the last 3 years, have exited 2024 with our highest free cash flow margin in reported history, and our free cash flow run rate is above our midterm model. In terms of cash uses for the year, we invested over $3,000,000,000 on acquisitions, and we returned just over $6,000,000,000 to shareholders in the form of dividends. Looking at the balance sheet, we ended the year with a strong liquidity position with cash of $14,800,000,000 which is up $1,300,000,000 year over year. Our debt balance ended the year down $1,600,000,000 at $55,000,000,000 including approximately $12,000,000,000 of debt associated with our financing business.

Turning to the segments. Software revenue growth accelerated to 11% in the 4th quarter, driven by strength across the portfolio, with growth of 17% for Red Hat, 16% for automation, 11% for transaction processing and 5% for both data and AI and security. We are pleased with how we finished the year, exceeding the rule of 40 and the growth driver expectations we set back in January. Let me dive in a little deeper on each of these growth drivers. We continue to see momentum in Red Hat, with 4th quarter revenue growth of 17%, fueled by 6 consecutive quarters of double digit bookings growth.

This performance reflects the continued demand for our hybrid cloud solutions as clients are prioritizing application modernization on OpenShift containers and Ansible automation to optimize their IT spend and reduce operational complexity. OpenShift is now $1,400,000,000 ARR business, growing about 25%, and we continue to see increased volume in OpenShift virtualization engagements. In addition to the strength in subscriptions, we saw a recovery in the consumption based services business. Looking forward, Red Hat’s 6 month revenue under contract, a reflection of the strong bookings performance mentioned, continues to grow in the mid teens. We delivered strong results in our recurring revenue base and are seeing momentum from innovation across our portfolio.

Our hardware platform and solutions ARR was $15,300,000,000 up 11%. Transaction (JO:TCPJ) processing delivered another strong quarter, driven by growing capacity demands, solid renewal rates and increasing contribution from our generative AI product, Watson X Code Assistant for Z. We continue to introduce new products, which are making a meaningful impact on software’s results. We have confidence in our portfolio with our market leading businesses centered around hybrid cloud, automation, data and transaction processing. In the quarter, about 8 points of our growth was organic, led by demand for our generative AI products like Concert and our AI assistance.

We launched new products such as next generation of Watson X Code Assistant that provides coding support for multiple languages and Guardian Quantum Safe that helps organization monitor and manage their cryptographic security to fix vulnerabilities. And these investments in generative AI are paying off, with the software AI book of business reaching about $1,000,000,000 inception to date in the Q4. Our performance continues to benefit from our recent acquisitions. We are seeing growing contribution from the StreamSets and WebMethods assets acquired in the Q2. And at the end of 2024, we closed the acquisition of Neuromagic, which strengthens our AI capabilities and performance engineering and model optimization.

And we are looking forward to the opportunities that the Penning HashiCorp (NASDAQ:HCP) acquisition will bring. Looking at software profit for the quarter, gross margin expanded and segment profit was up over 2 20 basis points year to year, reflecting operating leverage driven by our revenue performance. In consulting, revenue was down 1%. Throughout the year, we have operated in a dynamic macroeconomic environment. We continue to see clients reprioritizing their IT spending towards digital transformation and AI initiatives for cost optimization and operational efficiency as we wrap on a strong above market performance in 2023.

Our focus remains on rapidly evolving our offerings and enhancing investments in the quarter, our highest 4th quarter signings in recent history. Generative AI contributed about $1,500,000,000 of new bookings in the quarter as clients see the value our extensive industry and enterprise AI expertise can bring to accelerating their digital transformations. This strong signings performance takes our book to bill ratio up to 1.21 over the last 12 months. Our overall backlog remains healthy, up 8% year over year and our backlog erosion levels remain stable. Our Red Hat practice delivered another record breaking quarter of signings and double digit revenue growth.

We now have annual revenue of nearly $3,000,000,000 In the quarter, strategic partnerships were a growth contributor, both in signings and revenue with solid performance from partnerships with AWS and Azure. We are actively investing to enhance our skills and capabilities to address our clients’ top priorities with acquisitions like Accel Alpha, a global Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) services provider, which closed in the Q4. And earlier this month, we announced our intent to acquire Applications Technology Software, a consultancy known for driving business transformation with Oracle Cloud Applications. Turning to our lines of business, business transformation revenue grew 2%, driven by continued strength in transformational projects for data, finance and supply chain. While technology consulting and application operations declined in the quarter.

Similar last quarter, there was strength in cloud based application services across modernization, development and management. But we continue to see clients reprioritize spending away from on prem customized services. Looking at consulting profit, we delivered segment profit margin of nearly 12%, a sequential expansion of almost one point as we continue to realize the benefits of our productivity actions. Moving to the Infrastructure segment, revenue was down 6%, reflecting product cycle dynamics. Hybrid infrastructure was down 8% and infrastructure support was flat.

Within hybrid infrastructure, IBM Z revenue is down 20% in the quarter. This is the 11th quarter of Z16 availability and the combination of resiliency, reliability and security continues to resonate with clients. Nearly 3 years in, this product cycle has outpaced prior cycles and program to date installed MIPS have increased over 30% as clients’ capacity needs continue to grow. IBM Z remains an enduring platform for mission critical workloads, driving not just hardware adoption, but also the related software, storage and services. Distributed infrastructure revenue grew 2%.

This performance was fueled by double digit growth in storage as we introduced new innovation in quarter designed to give clients the ability to scale storage capacity to meet growing data demands to support the next generation of AI workloads and projects. For infrastructure profit, we expanded gross profit margin nearly 2 points sequentially. Our segment profit margin was down 3 20 basis points in the quarter, reflecting where we are in the product cycle and continued investments in innovation. For the full year, our segment profit margin was 17.5%. Now let me bring it back up to the IBM level to wrap up.

As Arvind mentioned, we met or exceeded our midterm model target metrics for revenue growth, profitability and free cash flow growth. And we have fundamentally repositioned our business to a software led integrated platform. Let me now turn to 2025 guidance on our 2 key measures of success, revenue growth and free cash flow. We expect constant currency revenue growth inflecting higher to 5% plus, and we expect to grow free cash flow faster than revenue growth with about $13,500,000,000 of free cash flow. Given the continued strengthening of the dollar, we expect currency to be about a 2 point headwind to revenue growth for the year.

Our revenue expectations are underpinned by accelerating growth across our businesses. In software, our businesses. In software, given the strength of our portfolio, investment in innovation and the contribution from acquisitions, we expect revenue growth approaching double digits. We continue to see the strength in Red Hat with mid teens growth for the year. In consulting, the combination of our backlog levels, record signings in the Q4 and our book of business in GenAI support an acceleration in growth to low single digits.

And with our new mainframe launch in mid-twenty 25, we expect infrastructure to be about a point contribution to IBM’s overall revenue growth. For the full year, we expect IBM’s operating pre tax margin to expand by over 0.5 point. Portfolio mix and ongoing productivity initiatives continue to drive margin expansion, mitigated by the impact of dilution from acquisitions. Our tax rate for the year should be in the mid teens. And as always, the timing of discrete items can cause the rate to vary within the year.

For free cash flow, we expect to generate about $13,500,000,000 in 2025. Given the strong fundamentals of our business, we expect double digit adjusted EBITDA growth, which is the primary driver of our free cash flow. This will be offset by cash tax headwinds and higher CapEx. Our productivity initiatives have enabled investments in innovation, skills and go to market capabilities, including our ecosystem. We have accomplished this while simultaneously growing our operating profit margin and free cash flow, which in turn has increased our financial flexibility.

This remains our playbook going forward, having executed on $3,500,000,000 of annual run rate savings exiting 2024, supporting our strong free cash flow growing in excess of revenue. Looking to the Q1, I expect our constant currency revenue growth rate to be similar to the 4th quarter. We expect workforce rebalancing fairly consistent with prior year. We are also ramping on the $241,000,000 gain from the divestiture of The Weather Company. Excluding the year over year impact of the gain, we expect about 50 basis points of operating pre tax margin expansion.

It is hard to predict discrete events, but our best view is that the 1st quarter tax rate could be a few points lower than the full year rate, but still a headwind over last year. In summary, we have delivered durable growth over the mid term model and expect to drive an upwards inflection. We have repositioned our business and are excited about 2025 and beyond. We look forward to discussing more details at our upcoming Investor Day on February 4th. Arvind and I are now happy to take your questions.

Olympia, let’s get started.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Thank you, Jim. Before we begin the Q and A, I’d like to mention a couple of items. First, supplemental information is provided at the end of the presentation. And then second, as always, I’d ask you to refrain from multipart questions. Operator, let’s please open it up for questions.

Conference Operator: Thank you. And at this time, we’ll begin the question and answer session of the conference. And our first question comes from Amit Daryanani with Evercore ISI. Please state your question.

Amit Daryanani, Analyst, Evercore ISI: I

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, IBM: was hoping you could just talk

Amit Daryanani, Analyst, Evercore ISI: a little bit about when I think about the calendar ’twenty five guide you folks just provided, if you could just provide some context around linearity and how that could play out, maybe you can talk about H1 versus H2 perspective, given I think some of the consulting and mainframe tailwinds could be a bit more back half. So if you just touch on kind of first half versus second half or anything on the linearity, that would be helpful as you think about 25?

Jim Kavanaugh, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, IBM: Yes, Amit, thank you very much and appreciate the question overall. Obviously, we’re very pleased as we talked about in the prepared remarks about how we finished on a strong note over delivering on revenue, profitability, earnings per share, free cash flow. That gives us the conviction and the confidence as we guided in 2025 with above street revenue growth at 5% plus at constant currency and a very strong free cash flow engine of $13,500,000,000 growing nicely and continuing to grow that free cash flow margin. But if you look underneath it, linearity, when you get to that point, yes, first half, I would tell you, you got to answer this by segment. We’ve got a very strong portfolio, which is executing extremely well on software.

We see a pretty normal history as we move through our first half, second half. Obviously, you do have seasonality between a 1Q and a 2Q or so Q3 and 4th, but that is we got a very hot hand and we’re going to continue to invest in innovation. 2nd on consulting, we feel pretty good about how we concluded the year with our highest recorded ever signings quarter, up 23%. We entered the year with a backlog of +8%, a strong book to bill at 1.21. We’re still dealing with a very dynamic environment around client prioritizing spend.

And I think it’s prudent for us right now, though we call low single digit for the year, to see that accelerate as we move through the year. So I would see more of a second half play than a first half play. And then you get to infrastructure. We did extremely well at the end of a 3 year cycle. Our most promising program in mainframe, I think ever overall delivering 122%.

Yes, Q1, we expect about again about a similar point impact to IBM’s growth. But 2nd quarter on, we’re back to growth above our model through the year and that’s what gives us confidence in the guide that we called for the year. So a little bit of a mix shift, definitely strength in software, which is going to drive this business being 45% IBM. But when you bring it all together, maybe it’s a point less first half on revenue versus history versus second half. But from a free cash flow perspective, we’re pretty similar to history overall.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Great. Operator, let’s take the next question.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Please state your question.

Wamsi Mohan, Analyst, Bank of America: Yes. Thank you so much and congrats on the really strong free cash flow performance. Arvind, I would love to get your thoughts around M and A, particularly as we maybe enter a period of relatively low regulatory overhang at the same time you are delivering record cash flows? And if I could, would love to get some of your thoughts on DeepSeq and any implications that you see either for the industry broadly or for IBM in particular? Thank you.

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, IBM: Thanks, Vamsi. Look, we are looking forward to a regulatory environment that is a bit more rational and a bit more pro competition. So I think what that implies for us is that we think reasonable deals have a very good chance of getting through in a reasonable amount of time and not being held up for years. So with that context, that means obviously we are going to lean in more, which is reasonable. If you look at our free cash flow and you look at what we are setting out for the year that could leave as much as $7,000,000,000 or a bit more than that during the year after accounting for the dividend.

We always look at a 3 year flexibility. I think that’s the best way of looking at it, Vamsee. So if you look at a 3 year flexibility, you can kind of borrow ahead, but we do kind of want to live within sort of what we can afford. And if we find targets that meet our criteria, we are going to lean in and get things done. I’m going to just finish that by saying, Hashi has been waiting out there for almost a year.

We certainly hope that with a friendlier environment that gets done soon and that then begins to open up the aperture for getting more deals done. So I think hopefully that address both the cash flows and the regulations around M and A. Look, DeepSeq, I think, was a point of validation. We have been very vocal for about a year that smaller models and more reasonable training times are going to be essential for enterprise deployment of large language models. We have been down that journey ourselves for more than a year.

We see as much as 30 times reduction in inference costs using these approaches. As other people begin to follow that route, we think that this is incredibly good for our enterprise clients. And we will certainly take advantage of that in our business. But I believe that others will also follow that route.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Great. Operator, let’s take the next question.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs. Please state your question.

Jim Schneider, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Thanks and good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, IBM: if you

Jim Schneider, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: maybe highlight 2 topics, 1 on consulting and 1 on the AI software side. On the consulting side of things, it’s good to see the bookings that you’re seeing. But can you maybe give us historically, the context is IBM tends to lag the consulting business relative to some of your peers, but what is the level of confidence you have in the revenue yield and revenue recovery you talked about for the back half of the year? And how do you feel about the sort of revenue yield today versus say a year ago? And then secondly, on the AI software side, you mentioned the $1,000,000,000 book of business purely within software.

That’s pretty substantial. And while there’s been some moving parts in terms of which products have gotten traction, which are the products of the ones you mentioned do you think are really going to be sort of standouts in the next couple of years from a software performance perspective? Thank you.

Jim Kavanaugh, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, IBM: Thank you, Jim. I’ll take the first one and then Arvind can handle the second one around the products and software overall. We take a look at it from a consulting perspective. We have been talking about we have been operating along with every other consulting company in a very dynamic macroeconomic environment. As with any technological shift, there are going to be reprioritization of spending that is occurring.

Clients similar to IBM, we are cutting back on discretionary based spend, so we can fuel investment into digital transformation and Gen AI overall. We’ve been seeing that play out throughout 2024. By the way, on top of above market performance in gaining significant share over the last 6 quarters starting in 2023. Now why have we been so maniacally focused on the Gen AI ramp and our greater than $4,000,000,000 book of business right now coming out 6 quarters in, which we believe by the way we’re in a very early leadership position around that. We’re so maniacally focused because enterprise clients are making their strategic provider of choice decisions.

And we are feeling very good about that greater than $4,000,000,000 book of business, which by the way is already north of 5% of our total backlog, which is as I told Amit in the first question is up 8% coming into 2025. Why is that important? Because that is going to be a long term future vector of growth for consulting for us to win that has a multiplier effect that will drag our software component of our business going forward. So we feel pretty good. While right now early in the cycle, it has less yield, it has higher durations, but we think the TAM opportunity and that multiplier effect are going to grow into each other and that’s one of a couple components on why we have conviction of inflecting back to growth in 2025 with consulting overall.

Thanks, Jim. So let me take

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, IBM: the question, Jim, on the thoughts about the software products, which I think will be standouts. I got to begin with our Watson X family. Our Watson X family encapsulates our primary products that incorporate LLMs and AI technology. Our Watson X code assistance on how we help our clients modernize their cobalt infrastructures, our code assistance on how people leverage it for Java, for Ansible have been absolute standouts and have been in market for almost a year. The rest of the Watson X family also, whether it’s about deploying models using AI or getting the data ready and governance have also been very strong drivers.

And the piece that most people have not been paying attention to, I want to point out is in the Red Hat family. Both Red Hat for getting models deployed on a single server with GPUs, as well as what we are now going to be doing with our Neural Magic acquisition on how do you optimize and get the most effective use of the hardware using Red Hat. And then when you have large deployments, leveraging OpenShift for AI deployment, or the final rounding out of the products. Look, to be candid, LLMs will infuse many, many other things. But the products are called out are the ones where we counted as direct AI products and directly driving the business and that’s what is counted in the numbers that Jim laid out.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Operator, next question.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from Ben Reitzes with Melius Research. Please state your question.

Ben Reitzes, Analyst, Melius Research: Yes. Thanks a lot. A lot of the couple of the questions were asked. So I’m going to ask about infrastructure and I also wanted to congratulate you guys. Your mix shift towards software is really resonating.

But I’m going to ask about infrastructure and 2 aspects, 1 is tied to it within software is TPP. It’s super profitable and growing 11%. Want to look wanted to see where that fit in, in terms of your guidance for the year and how sustainable that is. And I think that the AI assistant is having a big impact on that and so changing the way we may be thinking on that? And then with regard to infrastructure, which is a little bit tied to that segment, maybe I’m wrong.

In terms of the mainframe and the delta in growth, if you could just be a little more prescriptive there and talk about why you have confidence that this will be a well received cycle? Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Jim Kavanaugh, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, IBM: Okay. Thanks, Ben. This is Jim. I’ll take this. First of all, thank you for the compliments.

The team has worked extremely hard. We laid out a very ambitious 3 year roadmap a few years ago when we spun off Kyndryl to reposition IBM. And as we talked about in prepared remarks, team has executed and met or exceeded every single one of those targets that we put out to the street. So a lot of hard work here, but the beauty is we got a lot more to go, which we’re extremely excited about, and we’ll talk about that next week at Investor Day. But let’s talk about TPP.

First of all, you can’t talk about TPP to the heart of your question without talking about the absolute tremendous execution of what’s been happening with our mainframe cycle. This has been one of the longest programs and most consistent in terms of revenue growth that we’ve ever seen. And I think it’s an instantiation of the value of our enduring platform in a hybrid cloud and AI area era overall. 120 plus percent prior program, 70% of the clients on mainframe are growing MIPs. That is a very different profile than where we were 10 years ago.

And the installed MIPS are up 3x over the last few cycles. Now why is that important? We run mainframe, yes, mission critical workloads for what 97% of the mission critical transactional processing around all of many of the different industries, banking, retail, airlines, you name it. But we run it as a stack economic platform play. TP is the mission critical software on top of that, it’s a key growth contributor capitalizing on those mainframe stack economics, high source of revenue, high source of profit, the fuel investment flexibility of us continuing this engine of innovation and software.

And it also provides a solid incumbency base for the multiplier effect. We grew our transaction processing 10% in 2024, exiting at 11%. The underlying dynamics of that, I would say about 4 points of that growth is due to the capitalization of the underlying workloads that are driving Mainframe. About three points of that is the investment in the new innovation that we’ve been bringing to the mainframe platform, call that Watson Code Assistant for Z and how we’re monetizing value of JENEI. And then about three points of that is back to historical price optimization.

If you look at 2025, our guidance, where we called software continuing to accelerate approaching double digit, I would say prudently right now between Arvind and I, a consistent mid single digit growth in TP and we’ll see how that plays out with the new cycle of mainframe in ’twenty five.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Operator, let’s take the next question.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from Brent Thill with Jefferies. Please state your question. Thanks. This is Beau on for Brent.

Beau, Analyst, Jefferies: Arvind, it would be great to get your view of the business climate more specifically on the software side, but also more generally across business segments. What are you hearing from customers? And how are they thinking about their software budgets in 2025?

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, IBM: Thanks. Look, I’ve been quite public and quite vocal around this topic. So let’s acknowledge many of the things that occupy media headlines and then as a consequence they do occupy business leaders heads. Geopolitical tensions maybe on a better track right now, but certainly not solved. Interest rates, inflation, demographics, lack of skilled labor, supply chain.

I think these issues all carry over into 2025. That said, and I did spend last week in Davos where you get to meet a few 100 of your colleagues from around the world. I would tell you there is more optimism in the business climate and there is more optimism on the growth that is possible in 2025 compared to 2024. And we know all the reasons for that. Is it pro innovation?

Is it pro growth? Is it pro regulation, reducing friction? All those things I believe are going to result in a better environment in 2025. That then translates into how our company is going to grow. To a person, everybody believes technology is now essential for helping them grow.

How can you service customers better? How can you market better? How can you reach people more? How can you get things done in minutes instead of hours? So software is the basis for all of those capabilities.

I think to a person, the budget that they will touch last, if there is ever an issue, is their software budget. So that is what is giving us confidence also as Jim talked about approaching double digits in software is that software is essential to how people are going to achieve their business goals. And if you can get ahead in this year, it will probably keep you ahead. So it becomes kind of a gift that keeps repeating for our clients.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Operator, let’s take the next question.

Conference Operator: Your next question comes from Eric Woodring with Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS). Please state your question.

Eric Woodring, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Hey, guys. Thank you so much for taking my questions and congrats on the really strong free cash flow performance and guide. One clarification quickly was just, Jim, just want to make sure when we think about the 2025 outlook, is that inclusive or excluding HashiCorp? And then my broader question again for you, Jim, is just if you could walk through and quantify a bit more detail some of the free cash flow puts and takes as we go into 2025, just between the cash taxes, the CapEx, the EBITDA growth, any more detail would be super helpful just as we think about our model. Thanks so much.

Jim Kavanaugh, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, IBM: Thanks, Eric. And again, thanks for the compliments to the team here collectively around the world. It means a lot. Yes, short answer on Hashi, as always, we guide all in. So we fully expect to close the Hashi transaction in a relatively soon period of time.

As we saw in the K that was issued by HashiCorp overall, we fully expect that in this new administration environment. So all in revenue growth, profit margin guidance that we gave and free cash flow, which by the way is growing faster than revenue. When you take a look underneath, we’re extremely pleased on how we finished the last couple of years overall. Highest free cash flow margin in the history of our great company for 115 years. And by the way, we exited 2024 with a free cash flow run rate above our midterm model of what we laid out 3 years ago, consistently growing free cash flow well in excess of revenue overall.

So that’s what gives us the confidence and the conviction that all of the tough work on our portfolio optimization that has shifted much more to a software centric led hybrid cloud platform company. The productivity, which by the way, executing north of $3,500,000,000 exit run rate, we got out in front of that. I would call that discipline. I would call that execution of a company gives us the conviction and confidence in our guide in 2025 that takes into account that dilution effect. Hashian and of itself, it’s probably about a point of revenue growth to IBM in the year and it’s probably many of you have done the math, dollars $300,000,000.30 give or take of dilution.

By the way, still a very attractive financial model coupled with the strategic fit and synergy because we do believe adjusted EBITDA, we’re well on our path of a within 12 months accretive and free cash flow within 2 years accretive overall if you’ve been following Hashi’s results. But the underlying dynamics of our free cash flow drive, over 100% of it’s going to be delivered by high quality sustainable adjusted EBITDA growth. That is driving this company to a sustainable durable mid single digit growth now 5 plus percent. The underlying operating leverage we continue to generate in this business will drive double digit adjusted EBITDA growth in 2025. That just to put some dollar amounts around it, that’s probably over $1,500,000,000 in of itself.

Now mitigating some of that, one, we are going to continue to invest in this business and that CapEx number is going to go up a couple of $100,000,000 as we invest in our software, our Gen AI, our next generation mainframe, etcetera, Quantum, by the way, we continue to invest in. 2, with that incremental profit dollar, we’re going to pay more cash tax. That’s a couple of 100,000,000 more there. And 3, to the heart of your question, the net interest opportunity loss overall will probably be another couple of $100,000,000 overall. So when you put those pieces together, the way I would kind of qualify it, high quality, sustainable free cash flow generation engine that’s going to deliver faster in revenue growth.

Olympia McNearney, Global Head of Investor Relations, IBM: Operator, next question please. Operator, can we have the next question? Operator, can we take the next question? Brian Essex, can you ask your question please? All right.

Just please bear with us. We’re having an issue with our operator. We’ll be back in a minute. All right. Apologies.

We’re having a technical issue with our operator. So apologies that we can’t finish our Q and A. We look forward to taking more questions and answers at our upcoming Investor Day on February 4th. Let me turn it to Arvind for closing.

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, IBM: Thanks, Alethia. Look, we do apologize from all of us. We are looking forward to your questions, but we will get multiple hours with the team as Olympia said on February 4th. So I do hope that those of you who couldn’t get your questions in will come that day and ask your questions. Look, just to wrap up, as we have wrapped on our midterm model and Jim explained some of this, we executed on our strategy to deliver sustained revenue growth and cash.

The changes we have made to our business over the last couple of years and our performance reinforce my confidence in this next chapter of our growth. I look forward to continuing this dialogue and through the

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