Ken Sharp
Analyst · Cowen. Your line is open
Thank you, Mike. In the past three quarters, we have stabilized our revenue on a sequential basis and guided to the fourth quarter of revenue stability. This is a significant accomplishment by my DXC colleagues. It is not lost on Mike and me that investors look at revenue growth on a year-over-year basis. However, when a company has a period of significant decline and change to its business, strategy and leadership, you first have to stabilize revenues sequentially. As we all know, once you achieve four quarters of sequential revenue stability, you achieve year-over-year revenue stability. Going forward, we will pivot our narrative accordingly. Turning on to our financial priorities on Slide 10. We are working to build a stronger financial foundation and drive the company in a discipline and rigorous fashion to unleash the true earnings power. To that end, remediating our material weakness and the impact it has on our corporate governance is a key focus. Our second priority is to have a strong balance sheet. We paid down $6.5 billion of debt in the past nine months, and subsequent to year end retired an additional $500 million. We are now approaching a far more manageable $5 billion debt level. Further, we have relatively low maturities over the next three years. We remain committed to an investment grade credit profile, and I believe our actions more than demonstrate our commitment. Third, we will focus on improving cash flow. The company previously provided an adjusted cash flow presentation that added back certain cash cost. We changed this presentation. And in our earnings release, we adopted a traditional free cash flow definition of cash flow from operations less capital expenditures. We expect this will improve our focus on our true earnings power and will allow you to better understand our performance. As part of our focus on the business and cash optimization, we will continue our portfolio shaping efforts to increase the focus on our core business. Fourth, we will reduce restructuring and TSI expense to approximately $550 million in FY ’22 to under $100 million in FY ’24, ultimately improving cash flow. Fifth, have a thoughtful and disciplined approach to capital allocation. As we generate free cash flow, we will appropriately deploy capital to invest in our business and return capital to our shareholders, all the while staying focused on maintaining our investment grade credit rating. For the quarter, DXC exceeded the top end of our revenue, adjusted EBIT margin and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share guidance. GAAP revenue was $4.39 billion, $85 million higher than the top end of our guidance. On an organic basis, revenue increased 0.4% sequentially. Organic revenue declined 7% year-over-year due to the previously disclosed run offs and terminations. As we mentioned, on our third quarter earnings call our Q3 10.5% year-over-year decline would be the high watermark. GAAP EBIT margins were negative 16.8% in the fourth quarter, impacted by approximately $1.1 billion of cost including pension mark-to-market, asset impairments, restructuring PSI, loss on disposals and debt extinguishment costs. Excluding these items, adjusted EBIT margin was 7.5% in the fourth quarter, an improvement of 50 basis points from the third quarter. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.74, and was negatively impacted by $0.04 due to a higher than expected tax rate of 32%. In Q4 bookings were $4.7 billion for a book-to-bill of 1.08. The fourth straight quarter of a book-to-bill greater than 1. For the full year, this takes our book-to-bill to 1.12 compared to 0.9 in FY ’20. Turning now to our segment results, the GBS segment. The top half of our technology stack includes analytics and engineering applications and the horizontal BPS business. GBS was $2 billion or 46% of our total Q4 revenue. Organic revenues increased 2% sequentially, primarily reflecting the strength of our applications and analytics and engineering business. Year-over-year, GBS revenue was down 4% on an organic basis. GBS segment profit was $315 million with a 15.8% profit rate, up 160 basis points from Q3. GBS bookings for the quarter were 2.39 billion for a book-to-bill of 1.2 and a full year book-to-bill of 1.32 compared to 0.99 in the prior year. Now turning to our GIS segment, which consists of IT outsourcing, cloud and security and the modern workplace. Revenue was $2.39 billion, down nine-tenths of a percent sequentially and down 9.3% year-over-year on an organic basis due to the previously disclosed terminations and run-offs. Our ITO business had positive sequential revenue growth in the quarter. The ITO business benefited from approximately a $100 million of resale revenue resulting from a typical Q4 increase of customer demand due to their fiscal year end. GIS segment profit was $98 million with a profit margin of 4.1%, a 40 basis point margin improvement over the third quarter. GIS bookings were $2.3 billion for a book-to-bill of 0.98. Book-to-bill for FY ’21 was 0.94 compared to 0.83 in the prior year. Now turning to one of my favorite slides, our enterprise technology stack. This slide demonstrates how winning in the market for four consecutive quarters translates into revenue stability and the progression that our team has been able to achieve by focusing on our customers. Before I get into the details, I want to provide you the three changes to the stack you can expect for next year. First, as we think about next year, you will see our sequential quarter comparison giveaway to a year-over-year comparison. Second, we delivered on the sale of the healthcare provider software business therefore, this will no longer be included. Third, the modern workplace and horizontal BPS businesses will be integrated into the enterprise technology stack above. Once again, we had three layers of the stack achieve of book-to-bill greater than one and sequential growth. Now let me drill down one level. IT outsourcing revenue was $1.19 billion in the quarter up 1.4%. The first positive sequential growth since we began tracking in this manner. ITO book-to-bill was 0.98 in the quarter. Cloud insecurity revenue was $524 million declined 1.6% sequentially, and was down 5.7% year-over-year. The cloud and security business had a difficult compare as the third quarter grew 4.7% sequentially. Book-to-bill was 1.08 in the quarter. Moving up the stack the applications layer posted a 1.9% sequential growth and was down 7.2% year-over-year. Book-to-bill was 1.06. Analytics and engineering revenues were $478 million up 2% on a sequential basis and up 8.4% compared to prior year. Analytics and engineering book-to-bill was 1.46 in the quarter, the modern workplace and BPS revenues were $795 million down 3.3% sequentially and down 10.5% compared to the prior year. As we previously mentioned to you, these two businesses just began their transformation journey. So you should expect some unevenness in performance. Moving on to cash flows on Slide 15. Fourth quarter cash flow from operations totaled an outflow of $280 million. Free cash flow for the year was negative $652 million impacted primarily by four non-recurring items, Q4 tax payments of $531 million related to the business sale. As you may recall, we plan $900 million of tax payments, so this results surpassed our expectation. As we told you before in Q3, $832 million related to writing the U.S. State & Local Health and Human Services business for sale and normalizing payables and $200 million related to deferrals of certain tax payments due to COVID relief legislation that will be paid during FY ’22. One of our key initiatives we are employing to drive cash flow and improve earnings power is to wind down restructuring and TSI cost. Since DXC was formed four years ago, we had significant cash outflows with approximately $900 million and expense per year on average. In FY ’22, this will be reduced to approximately $550 million, with a larger portion being allocated to facilities restructuring efforts to improve the work experience for our people as we reshape our portfolio for our virtual model. We have heard from many of our analysts and investors that our cash flow are hard to understand. As we previously discussed above, we changed our free cash flow presentation. We believe this will allow investors to better understand our performance. Second, we acknowledge our cash flow conversion does not correlate well to earnings. As part of our effort to build a sustainable business, we will continue to evaluate these historical practices of using capital leases to a much greater level long-term purchase commitments and selling our receivables, unwinding these historical practices may have an impact on short-term cash flow. We will also focus our efforts to build the necessary rigor associated with capital budgeting to better control our outsize capital spends. On Slide 17, we detail our efforts we have undertaken to strengthen our balance sheet. As you can see, we have achieved a lot in this area, reducing our net debt leverage ratio by more than one turn from the high watermark of 2.4 to 1 at the end of March. Another goal we gave you was to improve financial visibility and we are committed to providing annual and longer term three year guidance. Starting with our first quarter guidance on Slide 18. Organic revenues declines are expected to moderate, down 2% to down 4% in the first quarter year-over-year. This translates into reported revenues between $4.08 and $4.13 billion. Our sequential revenue is lower for two reasons. First, previously mentioned lumpiness of resale revenue that occurs in Q4. Second, our portfolio shaping efforts reduced revenue by about $100 million. EBIT margin 7.4% to 7.8% includes 20 basis points of margin headwinds, due to the sale of our healthcare provider software business. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share in the range of $0.72 cents to $0.76. Moving on to our FY ’22 guidance on Slide 19. Organic revenue growth of minus 1% to minus 2%. On a year-over-year basis, divestitures will account for $1.2 billion of the revenue decline. Our previously disclosed terminations and runoff wind down in the first half of FY ’22. We expect to see further improvement in the quarterly year-over-year organic revenue growth rates as we move through the year. This translates into revenue of $16.6 billion to $16.8 billion. EBIT margin 8.2% to 8.7%. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $3.45 to $3.65 an increase a 42% to 50% year-over-year. Free cash flow of $500 million. Now moving on to our longer term expectations on Slide 20. Organic revenue growth of 1% to 3%. Adjusted EBIT margin of approximately 10% to 11%. NON-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $5 to $5.25. Free cash flow of approximately 1.5 billion. I should note, our guidance does not anticipate additional portfolio shaping. With that I will now turn the call back to Mike for his closing remarks.