Robert Del Bene
Analyst · TD Cowen
Thank you, Raul, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll go over our fourth quarter results, touch upon our full year performance and provide guidance for the full fiscal year 2027 as well as for the first quarter. Now starting with our fourth quarter results. Total revenue was $3.1 billion, declining 6.6% year-to-year. This is below our expectations as we experienced increased weakening of discretionary spending on short-term services projects, particularly within GIS, where revenue was impacted in both the U.S. and Europe. Both GBS and insurance were in line with our expectations and consistent with recent performance. Our book-to-bill ratio for the quarter was 1.07 with bookings down approximately 14% year-to-year, driven by 2 factors: the first being a tough comparison to last year's fourth quarter, which included large renewals; and secondly, the impact of a decline in short-term project-based services, which was the case for both GIS and CES. Adjusted EBIT margin was 7.6%, slightly above our guidance range and up 30 basis points on a year-to-year basis. This performance was driven by spending management at a point of discrete nonrecurring items in the quarter, largely offset by the impact of declining revenues. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.77 at the high end of our guidance range, consistent with our adjusted EBIT performance. Now turning to our segment results. The CES book-to-bill ratio for the quarter was 1.07, bringing our trailing 12-month book-to-bill to 1.10. Bookings were down 11% year-to-year with the largest driver being the decline in project-based services. CES, which represents 40% of total revenue, declined 3.9% year-to-year with performance consistent with the prior quarters of fiscal 2026. Enterprise applications grew in 4Q with sequential revenue performance improvements throughout the year, while custom applications continue to weaken in the fourth quarter. This is where we've experienced the most significant impact in short-term discretionary project delays. The quarterly GIS book-to-bill ratio was 1.11 with a year-to-year bookings reduction of 19%. This year-to-year decline is the result of large renewals in the fourth quarter of last year that made for a difficult compare. GIS, which represents approximately 50% of total revenue declined 10.6% year-over-year and came in below our expectations. The shorter-term project-based services pressure we've seen all year continued and worsened in the quarter and for the first time this year, the weakness extended to resale based discretionary projects. Insurance, which represents approximately 10% of total revenue, grew 4% year-over-year driven by continued strong performance in our software business, which delivered high teens growth in the quarter. We expect that momentum to continue, supported by strategic customer migrations to our cloud-based Assured platform and growing adoption of our recently introduced AI-enabled smart apps. Now let me briefly touch upon our full fiscal year 2026 results. Total revenue was $12.6 billion, down 4.8% year-to-year. This reflected a 3.8% decline in CES and a 7.2% decline in GIS, partially offset by continued growth in insurance, which increased 3.6% for the year. Overall performance was consistent with the themes we've discussed throughout the year, including macro uncertainty leading to pressure on discretionary spend and specifically project-based services. Full year bookings declined approximately 6% year-to-year, reflecting a more challenging comparison in the second half of the year due to several large prior year renewals in GIS. The full year book-to-bill ratio was slightly below 1. The GIS full year book-to-bill ratio was 0.94. And in CES, where we had robust bookings of larger, longer-duration strategic deals the book-to-bill ratio was 1.1. Adjusted EBIT margin declined 20 basis points year-to-year to 7.7%, largely driven by our investments to support future revenue growth in the form of offering development, sales and marketing. Our teams executed on spending reductions to largely offset the margin impact of revenue declines. Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $3.23, down 6% year-to-year, driven by the year-to-year decline in adjusted EBIT and an increased tax rate partially offset by a lower share count from share repurchases. Now turning to cash flow and balance sheet. We generated $110 million of free cash flow during the quarter bringing our full year total to $713 million, which was ahead of our expectation and up from $687 million last year. The year-to-year free cash flow performance was largely driven by lower cash taxes and lower capital expenditures, offsetting the decline to adjusted EBIT. As planned, we repurchased $60 million worth of shares in the fourth quarter. For the full year, we bought back $250 million worth of shares, which was nearly 18 million shares, representing almost 10% of our outstanding shares. In the fourth quarter, we continued to reduce capital leases paying down a total of $34 million. We remain focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet with appropriate levels of debt. Since the beginning of fiscal year 2025, we have reduced debt through cash payments of $808 million, a combination of prepaying $300 million of bonds maturing in September of 2026 and our ongoing capital lease reductions. The combination of these cash payments, which were partially offset by the impact of tax, reduced our debt balance by $537 million. These actions, along with an increase in our cash balance resulted in a net debt reduction of $1.1 billion over that same 2-year period. Before turning to guidance, let me briefly outline our capital allocation priorities for fiscal 2027. First, we will continue to prioritize investments in the business as we build the foundation for future revenue growth. Second, we remain committed to strengthening the balance sheet, including deploying approximately $400 million to retire the remaining U.S. dollar bonds maturing in September and further reducing our capital lease obligations. And third, we plan to repurchase $250 million of shares in fiscal 2027, which we now expect to execute more evenly throughout the year to maintain flexibility in how we deploy capital. Now let me provide you with our full year fiscal 2027 guidance. We expect total organic revenue to decline 3% to 5% year-over-year with a 3- to 4-point improvement in the rate of decline in the second half of the year. The drivers of our top line trajectory for the year are reflected in our segment outlook as follows: in GIS, we expect a mid-single-digit revenue decline for the year, with performance improving in the second half. The first half is expected to be broadly consistent with the full year fiscal 2026 performance. As the year progresses, there will be reduced headwinds related to contract losses that occurred in previous years. In CES, we expect revenue to decline at a mid-single-digit range consistently throughout the year, reflecting similar year-to-year performance in project-based services. And insurance, we expect revenue growth to be in line with fiscal 2026 with performance improving progressively throughout the year, driven by expected new customer contracts and a ramp of our AI-based software solutions. Our guidance for all 3 segments does not assume any change in the current macro environment. We anticipate adjusted EBIT margin in the range of 6% to 7%, reflecting revenue performance, continued investments in offering development and go-to-market capabilities and normalizing for the onetime benefits incurred during fiscal 2026. We expect non-GAAP diluted EPS to be between $2.40 to $2.90. The anticipated year-to-year decline is largely driven by lower adjusted EBIT and the higher tax rate partially offset by lower outstanding shares. We expect free cash flow for fiscal 2027 to be about $600 million, largely reflecting our adjusted EBIT guidance. For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, we expect total organic revenue to decline between 6.5% to 7.5% year-to-year, reflecting 4Q bookings performance and continued pressure on project-based services. At the segment level, we expect CES to decline mid-single digits, GIS is anticipated to decline at a similar rate to the fourth quarter, and insurance is expected to grow at a low single-digit pace. We expect adjusted EBIT margin to be approximately 5%, a function of the lower first quarter revenue and normal seasonality. We expect non-GAAP diluted EPS to be approximately $0.40. And with that, let me turn the call back over to Roger.