All right, we're going to kick off here. I'm Brian Bergen from TD Cowen, Services and Payments. Very pleased to have DXC Technology with us next for this fireside. With us from DXC, we have Raul Fernandez, President and CEO, and Rob Del Bene, CFO. We also have Roger Sachs and Tiffany Horvath in the room from IR, so appreciate all your time today.
Thank you. Thanks.
DXC, for those that don't know, it's a diversified IT services vendor serving enterprise clients with application consulting and engineering services, infrastructure, workplace offerings, and other solutions. Its broad-based workforce comprises approximately 120,000 professionals globally, and it serves a wide variety of enterprise Fortune 2000 companies. I think what would be best, Raul, would be kind of an opener on the DXC State of the Union. You have been in the CEO seat now for a bit over a year, right? Talk about how, you know, what that primary focus for you has been since taking the helm, and just at a high level, how would you characterize that State of the Union?
Yeah, sure. I think it's a bit of context that's helpful here. DXC came together as a combination of CSC and HP, but if you look at the '23 and me chart of DXC, it's made up of a lot of companies, right? I think one of the things that I knew coming into it, and then one of the things that became a deeper sense of appreciation and awareness, was there was a lot of federated operations, so offerings and countries and subsets of divisions really not working as a unified team. That was one of the big opportunities that I noticed very early on and began really the rebuild and the turnaround around kind of four pillars: people, process, culture, and scale.
People brought in a tremendous amount of talent at the executive level, and then two or three levels down that I knew came from a different background that had kind of like, the best way to put it is a survivability DNA, right? They've been through situations where they've had to figure it out. It was not a, oh, just do what the last guy did, and that's what you needed here. You needed a fresh look. The company is incredibly blessed with incredible clients and a wonderful history with those clients. If you were to start any business from scratch, what would you want? You want a good product and you want a good client base. We have a good product and we have an incredible client base.
The product, our services, can still have a lot of upside, and that again is where people, leadership comes in, but processes. Better ways, best practices in pre-solutioning, better practices in marketing, better practices in sales, better practices in sales performance management. I noticed that when I came in a year ago, I was coming in at the beginning of the new fiscal year, so budgeting cycles were already underway. I really did not have a chance to put my imprint on it. As we went through last calendar year and fiscal year, I realized that there was a lot more oversight needed in our revenue function, and I stepped in as interim Chief Revenue Officer in November, recruited somebody who ramped up over the first few months of the year, and then we announced him in March.
Being able to be in the process pre-fiscal year of quota development, planning, cross-referencing territories and people and accounts and making sure that we're paying for the right things was something that, again, hadn't been done in the past, was remedial. You think it's basic, it is basic, but it hadn't been done. The discernment that a lot of basic foundational work needed to be done, got the people to begin to get that done, got a culture change in terms of how we approach things, how we're going to be more self-propelled, how we're going to be more entrepreneurial, and then processes that are repeatable, like, okay, here's what good looks like, here's what great looks like, and we're going to repeat great over and over and scale it and train it. Those are kind of, that's the state of where we were.
We've laid a strong foundation. We've had some great early wins, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, quarter- over -quarter of a book to bill of over 1.0 is obviously building a good track record mathematically at some point. Over 1.0 gets you into a positive revenue trajectory, and that's our number one goal, is to get to positive revenue, profitable growth in the right categories, super indexed on AI, super indexed in a couple of industries where we've got a degree of knowledge and insight that exceeds, you know, some of our competitors. Financial services, core banking, and some modernization work is super excited about some of the early wins there. It's a great, great global company. It's big enough to be globally important, but small enough to still be able to manage.
If you think about the heavyweights, we're on the lighter side of the heavyweights in terms of scale, but that's easier to try to get more nimble and be more nimble.
Okay, makes sense. You touched on a lot there. Obviously, people, process, culture. When you think about what's furthest along versus what you need to lean into most and catch up, where would you categorize those?
Processes, replicability. There is early, hey, this worked, we won, let's do it again. Now let's do it again in all the offerings and all the geographies and all the languages, and then let's make sure that we are doing it again from the ground up and that it is not a one-off to be successful, right? Like I know at any given day I can field a team that can beat anybody, but I cannot do that at scale yet. I have to do that at scale.
Okay, okay. As you think about the timeline for these major initiatives, how did you build that plan? We're talking, you know, one, two, three years. I know you'll get to a state where there will always be continuous improvement, but the heavy lifting, how long do you think that's going to take?
This is a foundational setting year. We identified what needed to be fixed in the first, you know, year, I'm going to call it calendar year versus fiscal year, the first calendar year. This new calendar year, which again blends in fiscal years, is leadership mainly in place, foundational go-to-market elements, everything from the delivery side to the pre-sales and sales side in place. Need to get repeatability and replicability of certain winning motions and actions, and then lean into a couple of new things that we think are going to be great spearheads for us and beachheads for us in terms of getting new work, AI-centric work.
Okay, okay, makes sense. As we kind of talk about that leadership and the changes you've made, you know, pretty notable, at least the count here on the last call, you talked about 22 changes in the extended leadership team in about 15 months, including that new Chief Revenue Officer. Talk a little bit about those backgrounds. You mentioned kind of survivability. Just double click there.
It's people that I've worked with either in an operating role, I've worked with because I've been an investor in their company, a board member in their company, but they've had to constantly figure things out on their own, and they've had to constantly not just accept or take a current business model or current set of opportunities, but reshape it and reshape it with will and with intelligence and with teamwork. You know, having personally recruited a lot of these people, I knew they were successful in their past, and I think that the trait from a DNA standpoint is just, I think there are great people that know playbooks and they run playbooks. There are great people that run playbooks, they run playbooks, and then they also make the next playbook, and that's what we have here.
Okay, so certainly sounds like scrappy, but also challenging everything that's been done in the past within the company.
Yeah.
Okay, okay. You know, when you make a lot of these changes, there's naturally, as leadership comes in, they have their people that follow them and take their roles. There's execution risk around that. How do you think about building that into the plan?
I think the execution risk of not making changes is higher than the execution risk of keeping people, and that's a different point of view, right? Usually like, oh my gosh, I don't mind. I know I can get more people. I know I have a deep bench of talent at all levels instead of my people. And so if we're not aligned on doing things in a different way, because clearly eight years of revenue decline is nothing, there's nothing winning about that, and I'm not here to continue that trend. I'm here to reverse that trend and make it positive, and I'm going to bring and do everything I can as fast as I can to make that happen.
Okay, all right, very clear. Why don't we pivot to demand?
Yep.
It's obviously been a very volatile environment in technology and services particularly. What have you seen over the last several quarters? Just kind of talk about the progression of client demand in the conversation.
We can talk about macro, but at the micro level, I've met over a hundred customers, big ones, you know, $500 million in TCV, $100 million, $50 million, all sizes, new work at $100 million. I am incredibly positively shocked every time I meet them and I talk about another part of the business that they're not, you know, using from our services standpoint. They all say, you need to send that person in or that division needs to come in and present. There's more opportunities here. We clearly do a lot with you. We can do more with you. You're a trusted partner. We're getting the list of our trusted partners. They're shrinking. You should be taking a bigger share of that. If I'm hearing that at my level, that should be across the board. So much more engagement with customers.
We have the skill sets. We have the case studies. We have the references. You just have to engage and you have to be present to win. This company, you know, early pre-COVID went very remote. COVID obviously very remote, but we're like other tech companies swinging back, using every facility we have to fill it up as fast as possible, not just from an execution standpoint, does that make us better as teammates, but you have to be there to learn from both the good things you do and the bad things that you do. That's how I learned, you know, I learned from watching others that were ahead of me professionally do both the positive things and the negative things. That is another culture shift as well. From a demand standpoint, great customers, great relationships, great reason to go have a conversation.
From an offering standpoint, some really innovative things that we are now positioned from an AI standpoint in a way that's understandable. A lot of this early stuff is, you know, a lot of new terms that are thrown around and new things that, you know, in two years we'll be like, well, of course that's that. Cutting through that noise and actually seeing real bottom line results and then also taking advantage of the leverage we have. Being so close to these customers, we have the most insight on infrastructure readiness, on data readiness, and on people and process readiness. We are uniquely positioned to know where they are on the spectrum to take in massive AI projects, and we're uniquely positioned to help them get there. That insight and that positioning is one we just have to take better advantage of.
Yes, macro uncertainty, certain industries obviously hit more, pauses, elongation, but I've lived through, you know, since the late 1990s, a bunch of these highs and lows in the macro environment. This one so far, yes, a little bit of turbulence, a little bit of noise, heavier in some industries than other, but I think our own self-help execution outweighs anything that overhangs today from a macro standpoint.
Yeah, okay, that's clear too. There's a bit of a difference here for what you're seeing in those conversations. Are you able to attach that though, the company-specific kind of goodness of the changes in the processes you're making versus that sentiment at the client and their decision-making? Even recent weeks has been obviously good and bad headlines around tariffs. Is there anything that's changed?
Yeah, look, I think you're seeing certain industries that have been hit directly on their cost of goods input, and they're pausing certain things or recasting, you know, their outlooks or taking away guidance. There are some that are hit more than others, and there are some that even though they're hit, they're in a category like we have a luxury car partner manufacturer where we run the production floor, plus we run some of the in-car infotainment systems. You know, they've got pricing power. They can pass along 20% tariff increase. Every customer in every industry has a different story on how they're dealing with this.
I think the counterbalance to this is you cannot not go into these AI initiatives, and the early ones are going to be wide and maybe not have the ROI, but they'll give you the experience to understand where is it that you can double down, where do you have to fix your data, where do you have to fix your processes, where do you have to restack your people in terms of skill sets, and then how quickly can you get an ROI on all that stuff.
Okay, okay. You've had, you know, you're showing some building traction, some early traction. You've got two straight quarters now of that book to bill above one. How do you feel about the ability to sustain that in the near term? You're entering a new fiscal year, so we understand that there could be seasonality, but any color you could share there?
Yes, so far are just connecting a couple of thoughts here. We do see strength in our pipeline, particularly in strategic projects. We are seeing a little bit of a slowdown in demand in the shorter-term project-based services, and it is what Raul was referring to. If you look at our bookings for the second half of the fiscal year and our pipeline in the short term for the first and second quarter, those project-based shorter-term services are kind of flattish as opposed to robust growth, but the strategic projects, the larger strategic projects are where we really succeeded in the second half of the year, and the pipelines going forward are really strong in those categories as well.
Our full-year pipe for the company is encouraging, and you know, we have to convert and progress the pipe naturally, but you know, early indications are that pipeline's looking robust and certainly better than it did a year ago.
Revenue is the key to this, right? It's in general. More revenue cures a lot of sins, right? Having a better go-to-market, having a better top-of-the-funnel pipeline, and then making sure that your conversion rate, which historically has been pretty good for us, stays the same or gets better, will lead you to book to bills over one and over time that will lead you into the positive revenue trajectory. It all starts with a qualified larger base funnel opportunities, revenue opportunities.
Certainly converting on new opportunities.
Exactly. The other piece, it's offense and defense. That's the offense. The defense is win all your renewals, keep all your customers happy, which by a lot of metrics in the last 12 months, they've gone, they're in great positions. Do not lose anything on the defensive side, meaning your renewals. On the offensive side, get better at capturing more business in those accounts and then capturing net new accounts, which was one of the reasons we highlighted Carnival Cruise Lines in our last earnings call, because that was one where the pursuit started in, I want to say the February timeframe of last year.
Some of the new players were actually touching literally the proposals that was going in, and we made it, you know, through a field of 22 competitors, beat an incumbent, did not win on price, we won on quality and overall execution capability. It is a great, that is why I feel so confident that on any given day we can do that. I cannot do it at scale yet, and scale is what we have put the foundational elements for the company in place with the people and the processes to do that at scale.
Okay, okay. What can you say about kind of the mix of work that you have been winning in that new versus renewal or extension, and then also just any trends around the ACV in some of these, the duration or ACV, just to give us context as that layers in?
Yeah, I'll take the second one first. The ACV, because the bookings we've had are longer term in nature, the durations are longer. The ACV is robust, but the mix is different than last year's ACV, right? It is more spread out over time, which is why we guided the way we did for the full year. That has been factored into our guide along with the resale continuing to decline year to year because of the economic environment. Six months ago, I would have said resale would be flat in fiscal 2026, and now we are calling for a decline because it is discretionary. Companies could stop a refresh of equipment very quickly and postpone it, right? That is what has bled into our pipe and into our guide for the year.
The bookings, I mean, the bookings have been, my comments related to the bookings are pretty consistent across CES, across that business, and in project-based services within GIS, there's consistency there as well where discretionary is being postponed, strategic are being, you know, given the green light. With the insurance business, you know, that's extremely lumpy related to renewals. Those will bounce up and down, but our confidence and our backlog entering the year in the insurance business is very strong.
Okay, okay. Now, as we talk about all these qualitative trends and some quantitative, but when we bring that to a guidance framework, as you thought about fiscal 2026, what are some of the nuances there as it related to maybe client ramp progression, any assumptions of deal wins or conversion, any of those factors that are important to consider?
Yeah, the guide of minus 3% to minus 5%, we left room at the low end of that guide for further economic uncertainty. And baked into those numbers is the resale impacting us by about a point year to year. Is project-based services continuing as it has the last couple of quarters, continuing for the year? And that's another point. So there's a couple of points of economic uncertainty baked into the guide. And, you know, if there are improvements and the project-based services are released, we, you know, we would be on the better end of the guide. And if not, we factor that in. You know, short of worsening, I think we're at the first half versus the better end of the guide versus the worst end of the guide.
Sure. It's been relatively consistent since,
more or less, right?
Yes.
Okay, okay. When you think about coverage, right, you know, how much you already have in hand on that backlog to get to the middle of your range, how do you forecast that?
We have a really good view of backlog entering the year. We know exactly how much sell and deliver we need within a year. Our, you know, the supporting backlog at the beginning of fiscal 2026 is similar in magnitude to historical rates. We are not expecting an outsized performance or, you know, an improvement in the opening backlog. It is kind of similar to previous years, this consistency.
Okay, okay.
We will be looking over time, we will be looking for improvements to that backlog position as we progress.
Okay. Do you feel that the changes you've made in the front end, the go-to-market, the sales comp structure, does that give you improved visibility as you build this out? Does it help?
It gives us, I'd say coverage is a better word. Again, being able to have looked at the deployment of the quotas this year versus last year, I got too, it was too late. Like I got here and they were out the door. This year is better than last year, and next year will be even better than this year because I've got somebody that will have been there a year full time, not part time, because I was literally just doing it because we didn't have one. It'll get better.
Yeah, the discipline in recording opportunities, and we use Salesforce. The discipline in recording opportunities and progressing those opportunities is vastly improved from a year ago. It's much better. The predictability of the pipe is better than it was a year ago.
Okay. Let's shift to margin. So you've laid out an adjusted EBIT margin target of 7-8% for 2026. You're obviously making many changes in the organization, investments, but at the same time there's optimization. Is there a way to scale like the gross savings that you're driving in the plan and then obviously the net investment that comes from that?
From a. I think when you do turnarounds, there's a period of time, period of performance where you're paying for multiple things at once while you're sorting things out, right? It's never perfect where you're like, okay, I'm going to offload these people, these costs, these systems, and I'm unloading. It's never a perfect wave. There's always going to be some overlap. Part of what we have this year is an overlap overhang, which we're going to work through with the new leadership in place. Those are investments and in some cases paying for some things that next year we're just going to be better fine-tuned to refine and go, okay, this is the winning play and we can take out this other stuff. That's one of the overhangs on the expense side.
Yeah, so one way to think about it is that, you know, the pressure associated with the revenue declining and both the variable and fixed costs that we have to take out of the system as a result of the revenue declining, where we've been very successful in keeping pace with the revenue declines and ripping out enough cost. Included in that has been substantial overhead reductions and efficiencies that are process efficiencies we're driving throughout the company. We've been able to in 2025 make investments and compensate for the revenue declines. The plan for 2026 is going to be similar. We still are guiding to a revenue decline. We have cost takeout plans that are similar in magnitude to last year, plus overhead, you know, non-volume related reductions, plus investments we'd like to make that account for the guide we gave.
We have got room in there to make incremental investment if we have more opportunity or want to increase sales capacity.
Okay, okay. Let's keep this moving down from margin to cash flow then. I think you know you've given a $600 million guide for cash flow. Walk us from maybe the EBIT or the net income level to that. Any moving pieces then within net working capital or CapEx?
The way to think about it is on a year-to-year basis, we're going from the $680-$690 range to $600 in the guide. That is simply the reduction in after-tax EBIT and accounting for a $30 million increase in restructuring year-to-year. That is the simple math. We think that positions us well. We have a lot of other free cash flow levers that we will work during the year to try to improve our position and give us more flexibility. Other than the EBIT decline and the restructuring reductions, think of all else being flat year-to-year. We're going to go, you know, we're going to go work the basics on every line item.
Okay. Obviously, a lot of moving pieces beyond that with finance, leases too. That, and when you net those together, talk about the trend you've seen over the last two years.
Yes, thank you for that. We made a change in 2025 where we stopped, almost completely stopped signing up for new capital leases. We ran everything through capital expenditures, which hits free cash flow. If you normalize for that fundamental, and we did that to pay down debt, if you will, paying off our capital leases without signing new origination. It pays down the debt. That was, you know, purposeful. We said we'd do it at the beginning of the year. We executed on that. If you were to normalize for that activity over the last three years, our free cash flow has actually, you know, grown nicely. I showed that chart in the earnings call, right? It was, you know, really good normalized free cash flow performance on a year-to-year basis.
We're going to continue that strategy on capital leasing or minimizing capital leasing in fiscal 2026.
Okay. As you work through all these changes in the organization, you're driving to get to growth. If you're successful on this, what does a, as we sit back and think about margin or free cash flow margin, what does an optimized free cash flow profile for this business look like?
I think in terms of optimizing, our goal is with sustained profitable revenue growth, we expand margins and we've got room for margin expansion. Think of it as three- to four-point range, right? We could foresee that would drop the free cash flow. That's the way we think about it.
Okay. You've done a lot of the heavy lifting in the networking capital programs, now in the balance sheet. You don't.
Yes. Yes.
Okay. Last one on guidance here is just as we think about cadence for fiscal 2026, any important puts and takes as you move through the year on growth or margin or cash flow?
Look, from a guidance perspective, I think the revenue guide, as I mentioned earlier, leaves room at the lower end if economic conditions worsen a bit. For us, execution of this opportunity pipeline is paramount. I have confidence that we'll execute on the cost reductions that we need to make. I have confidence that we'll be able to deliver consistently strong free cash flows. The pluses and minuses to those numbers will be our execution of the pipeline and performing on the revenue line.
Okay, okay. We'll go to the last topic here with capital allocation. So you're starting the buyback. You've laid out a $150 million repurchase target in 2026. Maybe first off, you know, how are you thinking about the deployment of that? Is it opportunistic? Is this, you know, relatively even throughout the year?
In our guide, we mentioned that we should think of it as being linear through the year. You know, around the edges, if there's, we're going to remain opportunistic in the very short term here.
Okay. You're aiming to do that while maintaining, I think, a cash level that's pretty consistent, right?
Yes.
Entering and exiting the year?
Yes. That's correct. That's correct.
As you do that, how does the rank order of capital allocation priorities change? Talk to that dynamic. As you know, we're understanding the $150 million repo now, but as you complete that program, as we look ahead, when do you feel that M&A may come back into the picture?
I think part of what did not happen before was things were not integrated. I have to fix stuff in the past. I have to make sure the foundation is solid. It has to be a win-win. It is just not accretive, but it has to keep the customers, keep the key people, expand your either offering or geography in some way that you are doing it faster through an M&A exercise than organically. Then something else, like whether it is the company has an incredible ability to get talent and scale that talent in a better way in that part of the world than we do. Look, I have bought and sold a lot of things. I have invested a lot of things. I am pretty conservative when it comes to doing this because I think we have a lot of the right stuff in place.
It is not like I need to buy anything to win. When I buy something, it has got to be a clear winner for us. It has got to be a clear winner for them. It has got to be mathematically and operationally out of the park.
Okay. I'm presuming you guys are successful in executing then your own shares are likely even more attractive than anything.
Exactly.
Right. Okay. The other side of this, you can acquire things, but you could also divest things. There's been talk over time about portfolio pruning. As you look at what you have today, is that still in the conversation? Do you like what you have? How are you thinking about that dynamic?
Yeah. Look, I think we know that there are certain business units because of the flavor of revenue, the margin that are valued more than Hultco. Obviously, they are. Our number one goal is positive revenue growth. Once we're down that path, we can then hopefully have a different point of view on valuation. Then we can think about what's the best move to go to the next stairstep of value creation for shareholders. I mean, we're all aligned. We want the most value creation as quickly as possible, but on a solid foundation. Near term, no. Medium term, let's see how it plays out in terms of the marketplace.
Okay. That's clear. We're out of time, Raul. Rob, thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you so much.