Earnings Labs

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)

Q1 2020 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 21, 2020

$233.26

+2.28%

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Transcript

Operator

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 Ms. Patricia Murphy with IBM. Ma’am, you may begin.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Thank you. This is Patricia Murphy, Vice President of Investor Relations for IBM, and I want to welcome you to our first quarter 2020 earnings presentation.I’m here with Arvind Krishna, IBM’s 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 Investor website within a couple of hours, and a replay will be available by this time tomorrow.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.Our presentation also includes non-GAAP measures, to provide additional information to investors. For example, we present revenue growth at constant currency throughout the presentation. In addition, to provide a view consistent with our go-forward business, we’ll focus on constant currency growth adjusting for the divested businesses for the impacted lines of total revenue, cloud and our geographic performance.We have provided reconciliation charts for these and other non-GAAP measures at the end of the presentation, and in the 8-K submitted to the SEC.I’d like to make two other comments regarding this quarter’s presentation. First, consistent with our last two quarters, IBM’s revenue, profit and earnings per share reflect the impact of purchase accounting and other transaction-related adjustments associated with the acquisition of Red Hat. These adjustments and charges are primarily non-cash. Second, our segment structure for 2020 remains consistent with 2019. So, with the beginning of this year, we realigned a couple of offerings between segments, resulting in very modest adjustments. Our results reflect this realignment, and we’re providing a view of first quarter 2019 on that recast basis in today’s supplemental slides and two years of historical recast data on our website.So, with that, I’ll turn the call over to Arvind.

Arvind Krishna

Management

Hello, everyone. As you all know, we are in the midst of an unprecedented global public health crisis. I’d like to pause for a moment and say that my heart goes out to all those dealing with COVID-19. One of the first commitments I made was to be transparent and open, not just with our employees and our clients and partners, but with our investment community as well. In that spirit, I will participate, not just today, but in earnings calls from now on. There are a few topics I’d like to cover with you today. First, I’ll revisit areas I’ve talked about; second, I’ll tell you about what we have accomplished in the last two weeks; and finally, I’ll tell you about areas I intend to focus on in the near future; and then, I’ll quickly touch upon our Q1 results.Let’s start with the areas I’ve talked about. I have told our team, it is essential that we deepen our understanding of our clients’ journey to hybrid cloud and AI, which will result in hybrid cloud as the fourth platform. We remain obsessed with continually delighting clients. And we further established IBM as the gold standard for good tech. All these are underpinned by our culture that fosters growth and an entrepreneurial mindset. I see these as our collective priorities. I’ll move on to what’s been done in the last few weeks.Despite the challenges we’re facing as a result of a global crisis, we’ve remained steadfast in our commitment to employees, clients, and society at large. More than 95% of our 350,000 IBMers are working remotely now. In addition, about 8,000 of them remain at essential sites to carry out mission-critical work. As our clients adjust to this new normal, they need a partner they can trust. IBM is…

Jim Kavanaugh

Management

Thank you, Arvind. I want to start out by expressing my sympathy to all those who have been impacted by this health crisis and deep gratitude to the incredible people who have been helping IBM, our clients and the world to deal with this crisis, especially those on the frontline.Now, turning to our first quarter. We delivered $17.6 billion of revenue with modest growth net of currency and divestitures. We had good gross margin expansion, operating earnings per share of $1.84 and continued solid free cash flow.Before I get into the specifics of the quarter, in light of the current environment, I want to take a step back and provide some perspective on a few areas. First, on our client base, our portfolio and our financial profile, which you’ll see provides some stability to our business; second, what we saw at the end of the quarter; and then finally, add on to Arvind’s comments on what we’re doing with our own business to address the current environment.IBM has always focused on the enterprise space and within that, our business is more concentrated in large enterprises. For decades, we have run our client’s most critical processes, like core banking systems, supply chains, and claims processing. From an industry perspective, the majority of our revenue comes from clients in financial services, telecom and the public sector, including government and healthcare. We have long-term relationships with these clients in the form of multiyear services contracts, recurring software streams and financing arrangements.As a result, when you look at our business mix, about 60% of our annual revenue is in recurring businesses. While we’re not immune in this environment to disruptions in the transactional content and volume reductions, our client profile and annuity base provides some level of stability, not only in our revenue, but…

Arvind Krishna

Management

Thank you, Jim.We have taken the importance of transparency seriously, and so it was a tough decision to withdraw guidance. But these are unprecedented times, and this quarter is not the time to declare that we have clarity, that does not benefit us, and it does not benefit you as investors and analysts.With better clarity on the economic recovery, we will provide an update at the end of the second quarter. But please know there’s a difference between the ability to accurately predict a near-term revenue or earnings per share number, and confidence in our business over the longer term. And I have confidence in our business. Under different scenarios, we have ample free cash flow and liquidity to support the business and secure our dividend. We are entering this environment from a position of strength.So, over to Patricia for the Q&A.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Thank you, Arvind.Before we begin the Q&A, I’d like to mention a couple of items. First, you’ll notice we updated our chart format to streamline the information presented during the webcast. The content no longer presented in the mainline charts is now included in our supplemental information, which is at the end of the slide deck. And finally, as always, I’d ask you to refrain from multi-part questions. So, operator, let’s please open it up for questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Amit Daryanani with Evercore. You may go ahead.

Amit Daryanani

Analyst

Thanks a lot guys for the opportunity. And Arvind, congrats on the spot, and nice to have you on the Q&A session. You guys -- Arvind, you spent a fair amount of time kind of talking about the areas where you want to focus on as you go forward. And maybe to put aside the COVID discussion, how do you think about the investments the Company needs to do? And how do you go about that organic versus inorganic? I just wanted to understand, when you think of investments, which way are you going to skew as you go forward. And maybe on the flip side of the coin, are there things that you want to focus less on; are there things and opportunities to divest to further potentially help your balance sheet?

Arvind Krishna

Management

Okay. Thanks, Amit. Let me start with talking about the portfolio and your questions on investment.So, look, obviously the portfolio is something I evaluate deeply. We do it all the time and continuously. But, I do want to caution that in the immediate period, which is right now, we got to focus and put our priority on supporting our employees and clients. Now, investment to us encompasses both, encompasses both organic investments and inorganic, or acquisitions. We’ve been clear that we will acquire when we find properties that are both attractive or that fit our strategy. And hybrid cloud and AI are the focus of our business going forward. But, when we talk about hybrid cloud, it is an all-in. And I’ll just give a quick reflection on Red Hat. We had Linux as the core, you had OpenShift surrounding it. We put all of our middleware on OpenShift. We have hundreds of GBS projects already leveraging both the Cloud Paks and OpenShift to make application modernization. And then eventually we’ll find services also running those modernized applications for our clients.You’ll find there are many, many properties in that -- in my broader definition of hybrid cloud that’ll fit that and ditto on AI, where AI should be looked upon as the way to get the value out of the data that people collect, both their internal data and external data. Now, I don’t want to also comment on big or small. Size is not a priority. It’s about being thoughtful and strategic. And so, you should expect that over time, over time meaning just that as it gets past the next few months, we will get back to an acquisitive strategy. Jim?

Jim Kavanaugh

Management

Yes. The only thing I would add to Arvind is our capital allocation strategy obviously is there to support the business design and the business and portfolio strategy that we have chosen. To your point around hybrid cloud, data AI, we’ve got enough fire power with regards to a strong balance sheet, solid free cash flow generation, solid investment grade, a good access to market, which we talked about in the prepared remarks that gives us ample free cash flow and flexibility to invest in our business, while also returning value to our shareholder in securing that dividend that we talked about upfront. And that acquisition component is a very big important part of our capital allocation strategy, and that hasn’t changed.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Sheila could we go to the next question, please?

Operator

Operator

Yes. Our next question will come from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Wamsi Mohan

Analyst

You mentioned some changes in go-to-market in your prepared remarks, leading perhaps to the more technical bent. I wonder if you can elaborate there a bit. And Jim, I appreciate you’re not providing explicit guidance at this point. But maybe can you address the levers that Company has in responding to the pandemic in the context of preserving cash flows? You alluded to a few things in your prepared comments as well, but last call you had mentioned several puts and takes of the cash flows as tailwind and headwind, and just wondering if you could maybe recast those again.

Arvind Krishna

Management

With respect to a more technical approach to selling, it’s a journey we have been on, but actually the current crisis in effect catapulted us or accelerated what we are doing. And I’ll touch on sort of three elements. We have always wanted to have our product teams do a lot of demonstrations and proof-of-concepts that we are now going to them virtually, where we stand the properties up on our public cloud and then allow the clients to sort of play around with them. And so, you take away the weeks of doing it in a more traditional manner.Second, in our services teams, they’re doing a lot of what they call virtual garages. So, a garage used to be that we would have our consultants and our implementers sit side-by-side with our client and go do those. But, when you do have social distancing and it’s not just us, our clients don’t really want us on premise either, they have now become virtual garages, but there’s an advantage there by the way. A bigger advantage is it allows you to actually get access to skills that are around the globe, not just those that may be physically co-resident at a client. And that is again not much more technical approach. And then, third with a lot of remote delivery happening in the GTS part of the business, they are also bringing a much more technical solution to bear through this. So, those are the elements that I mentioned, but you can expect us to do more and more of this as we go along.And Jim, I’ll give it to you for the second part.

Jim Kavanaugh

Management

Yes. Hello, Wamsi. Thanks for the question, because this is important. As you can imagine, given the unfortunate and unprecedented situation everyone around the world is dealing with right here with COVID-19, we’ve been spending a lot of time on our business profile, our business model, stress testing it, running multiple scenarios, as I said in the prepared remarks. But, when you look at it, it’s always been done around one, the long-term sustainability of the IBM Company to deliver value for our clients and for our investors. And that means you’ve got to have a strong balance sheet, you’ve got to have ample liquidity that gives you flexibility to continue to invest, so that we emerge stronger as we get through this pandemic, when we move forward. And that really -- simplistically, if you take a step back, it’s two levers. One is on the top-line in revenue and the others on the fundamentals of your operating leverage in the business. Both of those deliver that free cash flow in that cash. And in that latter part, I would put in there optimization of your balance sheet.And we’ve looked at our revenue portfolio, as we talked about in our prepared remarks. We believe we are differentiated, although we’re not immune from what’s happening in the marketplace. We do have some level of stability in our revenue, our profit, our cash, and that’s driven by all of the work that we’ve done over time to transform this Company, transform and optimize our portfolio. We went from -- in 2008, at the last recession, we were only about 45%, 47% annuity. We are now north of 60%. We have always been focused on large enterprise versus consumer SMB, and that is playing out well.Our industry concentration, as I said on the prepared remarks, over 70% of our revenue sits in industries based on IDC and Gartner that are going to be either moderately or minimally impacted by COVID-19. So, we are diversified along geographic dimensions, market dimensions, industry dimensions, client dimensions that gives us that strong annuity content to move forward.And then on the margin and balance sheet, we’re going to optimize as we’ve always done, the portfolio shift in the higher value, the structural actions we just got done here in the first quarter, $900 million that impacted our PTI in the first quarter. That by the way will give us a annualized return of over 2x. And we’ll keep watching our credit portfolio and the quality, our deferred revenue, and also our DPO and DSO which is in very good shape. So, net of that is, we feel confident around ample financial flexibility, ample liquidity to continue to invest in our business as we move forward and secure that dividend.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Thank you, Wamsi. Can we please go to the next question, please?

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Toni Sacconaghi with Bernstein. You may go ahead.

Toni Sacconaghi

Analyst

Yes. Thank you. Arvind, welcome, and great to have you on the call. I was wondering if you could maybe define or articulate on a scale of 1 to 10. How different do you think IBM’s portfolio businesses will be two years from now? I recognize change is not going to happen imminently. But 1 to 10, with 10 being extremely different, where would you place that? And then, Jim, if you could just, very quickly, you talk a lot about the stability of IBM’s portfolio. But it looks like year-over-year, pre-tax income went from over $2.2 billion to under $1.6 billion, if I back out the restructuring and charge. So, even though revenues weren’t impacted, PPI, adjusted for the restructuring, was down nearly 30%, and this is your lowest transactional quarter. Is that how we should be thinking about changes to profit going forward, or was there something unique about this quarter where we saw more negative leverage? Thank you, both.

Arvind Krishna

Management

Thanks, Toni. Look, Toni. If we look at our industry, it’s a fast-moving industry with a lot of change that goes on all the time. If I look at where we were five years ago, and if I fast forward to today, Red Hat was not there, Cloud Paks were not there. Our cloud backlog inside services was a tiny and fraction of what it is today. And I would look at all of that and say it looks like in aggregate, likely about half our business has changed in the last five to seven years. That’s, I think, the hallmark of a successful company. When you begin to change it, it takes advantage of the relationship, the value, the incumbency we have with our clients and it also takes advantage of the fast move -- fast moving nature of technology.Now, the question you didn’t ask what I thought I’d put in there is the questions of the focus. I think the focus is going to be much more around what we’ve been talking about it, is going to be around in the near term, is going to be around hybrid clouds and AI, with likely quantum coming down the road, which I do believe has a $0.5 trillion worth of value to give back to our clients since you give me the five-year horizon, not just one or two-year horizon. So, let me sort of begin with that and say that. And it’s hard to put that on a scale of 1 to 10 because you didn’t tell me how much of it changes in 10. But I gave you the sense that probably half of things change. Jim?

Jim Kavanaugh

Management

Yes. Toni, thank you very much for the question, because operating leverage is obviously one of the core fundamental pillars of our high value based thesis and high value based business model overall. But, let me just cut to the chase with regards to your question overall. You asked about it from a pretax income, I’ll take it down to an EPS level, which was similar to net income. We were down 18% overall. That EPS was down $0.41 year-to-year. Yes, it includes the $900 million worth of restructuring and the structural charges also includes as we guided back in January, a discrete tax event. But, the thing that you’re missing in that equation is all of the Red Hat integration and non-cash related purchase accounting implications that are in our EPS and in our profit number.Now, as we close that transaction -- by the way, less than three quarters ago, and we feel very confident about the health and the profile of our Red Hat business overall. We took a substantial write-down with regards to that deferred revenue, $2.2 billion overall. And we talked about Red Hat being free cash flow accretive year one and being operating EPS accretive at the end of year two.We already hit the milestone on the first metric and we’re well on our way delivering the progress on the second metric. And just to bring this all home, the EPS of a $1.84, down $0.41 year-over-year. About $0.35 to $0.38 of that $0.41 is the Red Hat, non-cash deferred revenue and integration. Why do I bring that up? Because as we said, that will diminish over time. And as we continue to replenish the backlog, which we are and we’ll talk about, and we wrap around those expenses, that’s where you’re going to get even more substantial operating leverage going forward in the future.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Thanks, Toni. Let’s go to the next question.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Matt Cabral with Credit Suisse. You line is open.

Matt Cabral

Analyst

Yes. Thank you very much. And welcome to the call, Arvind. I appreciate the commentary in the prepared remarks about what you guys saw during the month of March. I wonder if you could extend that a little bit and just talk about what you’ve seen so far across the first few weeks of April, across the segments and just the extent to which if any you’ve had customers asking for price concessions, new concern -- new terms, given the more recurring pieces of your business?

Arvind Krishna

Management

Okay. Thanks, Matt. Let me start with that because look from -- April tends to be a month where, as Jim pointed out, it’s not just in the first quarter. And every -- in every quarter, larger transactions do tend to get bunched up at the end of the quarter. I’d say that probably is more June than April. And you also asked a question on the energy [ph] side of the business or what I would call subscription. We haven’t seen, at least so far any big change in the subscription side, coming into April. Now that is no doubt because as both of us have pointed out, we do tend to run our client’s mission critical workload. It’s not the workload that’ll be the first to turn off. If anything, it’ll be amongst the last to get impacted. And so, the subscription side, we feel quite good about it. Now, on the transaction side, so far things are holding up, but it’s too early to tell. That’s one of the reasons you heard what Jim and I talk about withdrawing guidance because of a little bit of a progress is not enough give us a full view into what will happen this quarter. Jim?

Jim Kavanaugh

Management

Yes. Matt, thank you very much for the question. So, Arvind kind of gave a perspective of what we’re seeing here for the first couple of weeks. And as you stated, just given the one transactional versus annuity nature, second quarter like fourth quarter is our highest transactional quarter, particularly in our software base of business overall. But, let me give you a little perspective around the month of March versus February quarter-to-date, because I think it’s important for investors to understand the value of our high value based business model and integrated business model. Because the unfortunate COVID-19 situation that’s impacting economies around the world, has a very different profile across our business, whether it’s hardware, software and services. And as we’ve seen coming through February, the IBM Company was growing revenue through February, led by strong double-digit growth in software overall. The month of March, as I said in the prepared remarks, as the healthcare crisis intensified, that’s where we saw the fundamental shift in client buying behavior, appropriately, so by the way as we’ve done in IBM, where first and foremost you wanted to focus on the operational stability and business continuity of your enterprise and second around the preservation of cash. But, when you look at it, it was more pronounced in our software and our GBS business.We actually substantially grew in the month of March in our hardware portfolio. But, I would align that more around bringing new innovation to market. We’re in this cycle of mainframe and we did very well with the attach of storage overall. And our GTS business, remember, is a strong annuity base and it’s running mission critical work and our outsourcing IS business actually got better by 1 point quarter-to-quarter. So, that’s pretty stable. But within GBS and software,…

Patricia Murphy

Management

Thanks, Matt. Sheila, can we go to the next question, please?

Operator

Operator

Yes. Our next question will come from Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley. You may go ahead.

Katy Huberty

Analyst

I wonder, if you could start out by just commenting on what the one or two metrics are that you would like us to measure you and your team on over the next couple of years? And then, I wanted to follow up and ask, either you or Jim can comment. You talked about scenario like a range of scenarios for this year. Obviously, the most bearish would be social distancing through the remainder of the calendar year and the most optimistic would be a [Technical Difficulty]. What does that translate to in terms of sort of the bearish scenario and EPS and free cash flow, and more optimistic scenario, just any color as to how wide that range may look like? Thank you.

Arvind Krishna

Management

So, let me start. You said what KPIs or what metrics should you use? Look, I think, I’ve been clear, we should look at growth as the metric, albeit once we begin to emerge from the pandemic. And it’s impossible for me to predict how long this is going to be. You mentioned two scenarios, but I’ve listened to all of you and your peers, and I don’t have any particular crystal ball on this. The estimates are all over the place on both the depth and the length of the impact.Now, the other one that I think you should hold us to in metric, other than revenue or a pure financial metric is the number of clients on which we are engaged on hybrid cloud engagement. We talk about it from a product perspective, we talk about 2,200 clients to date. But as we begin to wrap those also with services engagement, I think that’s the second metric that is effectively a leading indicator towards the overall revenue metrics, because that’s the precondition for that. And that’s where we are driving the entire company to. That’s what I’m focused on. I run a war room on that every week. And that’s what our sales forces are incented to go get done. So, Jim, I don’t know whether you want to add something. We already answered the question I think.

Jim Kavanaugh

Management

Those are the two that align to our business model. But to your second question, Katy, I’m not going to talk to specificity around there. As I said in the prepared remarks, we have done a tremendous amount of work on stress testing, running these are scenarios. There’s a wide range of outcomes. The key here for investors I think are two questions. One, in any of those scenarios, do you still have the strength of your cash, your liquidity position to ensure that you can, one, invest in your business to make sure as you come out of this you can emerge stronger, and two, can you maintain your capital allocation and your commitment to our investors and with regards to the dividend, and both of those emphatically, yes.The second question is around each of these scenarios, how are we actually managing our businesses across the board? And I would tell you, if you break this into a product based business and a services based business starting with services, it is the safety around having an annuitized based model. GBS entering a quarter is about 80%, GTS is about 95% plus that does come down as quarters and plus 1 and plus 2 and plus 3 go out, but it provides us a very solid base to work with as far as stability that drives that profit that cash and that flexibility. But what are we looking at and how we manage a services business right now is we’re -- Arvind and I are looking at daily is one, what’s happening to the rate and consumption of our backlog, what are clients doing around projects, around offerings, what’s happening to our utilization, our chargeable billable rates, our price realization. Each of those are fundamental KPIs that we’re looking at in this environment right now, to the health of the indicator around a services based business.Around a product based business, much more transactional. As Arvind said, software is about 20% to 25% transactional, here in the second quarter, has a strong annuity base. By the way Red Hat, subscription based model, strong annuity base. But the dynamics are how we’re managing that are looking at our pipeline, our volume, our deal sizes, our yields, our progression, our renewal rates, our demand capacity for our hardware products, and where they’re at within their cycle. So, we are driving the operational discipline you would expect in this Company as we move forward. But at the end, we have enough of that financial flexibility and cash flow liquidity, which I think is the most important message for the investor.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Thanks, Katy. Can we please go to the next question?

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Tien-tsin Huang with JP Morgan. You may go ahead.

Tien-tsin Huang

Analyst

I wanted to ask just a quick one, acquisitions for you, Arvind, just looking beyond the pandemic, I know that’s hard to do. But criteria, size, thinking on accretion, dilution you’re willing to accept there, as you want to move quicker to hybrid cloud and AI? Can you share your thoughts on that? Thank you.

Arvind Krishna

Management

So, you asked about criteria, size, accretion, and the thing. Look, I think, on all three, one that is easiest, size. Size is not a criterion. So, I’m just going to put that to the side. As Jim said a couple of times, we have enough fin flex to do a fair number of things and most things that we might, I think are possible for us to be able to get done. So, I’ll put size aside and say that’s not really an issue.You asked about accretion and decretion. Jim and I are clear. We manage the business for the long term. So, if it becomes accretive, often a year or two, as we described about Red Hat, that’s more than sufficient for us. It doesn’t have to be accretive on month one or day one. As long as it’s a healthy business, provides us the kind of growth profile, and provides us the ability to get sufficient synergy, both for IBM and for the property itself. Both have to be winners. It cannot just be one of us. Otherwise, it’s not that attractive.And then, you said about criteria. The criteria is, those things that make our clients value us even higher, and the areas we have chosen to be their trusted partner on is hybrid cloud and AI. So, that’s sort of the criteria.But, please take a wide stance on hybrid clouds. Hybrid cloud encompasses how we connect private and public, it connects -- it includes how we might secure them, if might include the data that is inside those properties, provides more visibility. And as we shift that out over time, that will widen even more, because the definition of what is the cloud market, also tends to change over time. So hopefully that answered your question, but it’s something we give a lot of thought to.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Thanks, Tien-tsin. Let’s go to the next question, please, Sheila.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from David Grossman with Stifel. Your line is open.

David Grossman

Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open.

Thanks. Arvind, congratulations. Nice to have you on the call. This is I guess for both of you. Are there any components of the business that are in transition, whether that’s GTS or certain legacy software segments where the current pandemic creates an opportunity to accelerate that transformation? And perhaps you can tie that into the comments I think in your prepared remarks that telegraph that there may be some additional rebalancing actions in the June quarter?

Arvind Krishna

Management

I think, David, we are always looking at this and always looking at portfolio optimization. I would not say because of the pandemic or COVID-19 would we look at this. As you saw last year, we divested in the software portfolio quite a few things that were core to hybrid cloud. They were around marketing properties and as service properties around many of our retail clients. It didn’t really necessarily fit or pull along or had synergy with the core hybrid cloud portfolio. So, it made sense to divest them. I think, we’re done with that round, just to be upfront.Now, as we always look and say, does this or does this not bring value? Is there a reason for our client to have both, the core hybrid cloud portfolio and something? We’re going to reevaluate that all the time, but I don’t have something to name for you that we are trying to do right now. As the quarters go along, as the months go along, we will do it. But I also want to be clear that for the next few months, we have to be focused on the stability of the business. And we have to be focused on making sure that we preserve our liquidity and our balance sheet. So, that’s what we’ve kind of focused on for the very near term.

Patricia Murphy

Management

Okay, Thanks, David. Sheila, let’s take one more question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our last question will come from Keith Bachman with BMO. Your line is open.

Keith Bachman

Analyst

Hi. Thank you very much. Arvind, congratulations on your promotion as well as Jim Whitehurst, congratulations on your promotion as well. I wanted to ask a little higher level question. As I think about IBM, there is many constituents, but probably three broad ones, shareholders, employees and then customers. And as you think about the stock performance over the last, I don’t know, five to seven years, I think shareholders would conclude that they’ve been disappointed with IBM’s performance. And even from a customer perspective, if you look at IBM’s revenues relative to growth of the many markets who participate in, probably some disappointment there. So, as you think about your new leadership and perhaps focusing, excuse me, on the investor side, what do you think you really need to do differently for IBM and its shareholders versus what’s happened over the last five to seven years? Thank you.

Arvind Krishna

Management

Look, I think that -- I think, we had acknowledged the market value growth of other things. So, while we have always selected on high value, and to your point on clients, we measure our net promoter score or NPS, which I think is widely regarded as being one of the best metrics of how clients value what they’re getting from you. And that has actually improved substantially, I think over 10 points if I remember over the last two years. So, given that the NPS is improving, our clients are much more delighted with what they get from us. Now, that said, the overall portfolio has to be able to grow to return -- to make investors happier. And that’s why we are clear. You noticed me announce a lot of our management team at the beginning. I think this is a team that’s going to be able to deliver growth back to the market.So, Jim Kavanaugh of course, as you heard him talk about capital allocation and how he’s going to use that fin flex to enable both organic and inorganic investment. Jim Whitehurst who many of you know well who has dealt really well both the crises when he was at Delta and then growth, when he was at Red Hat. Bridget van Kralingen, who has a strong record of understanding client needs and is going to draw some of the go-to-market changes we mentioned. Howard Boville that we’re bringing in who was at Bank of America who has a deep empathy and understanding for some of our largest clients, but also who drove a lot of efficiency when he was at the Bank. And he can bring those attributes to the clients as well. And Mark Foster who has Services and who has a real intention…

Patricia Murphy

Management

Okay. Thanks Arvind, thanks Jim. Thanks for all of your questions. Sheila, let me turn it back to you to wrap up the call.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Thank you for participating on today’s call. The conference has now ended. You may disconnect at this time.