Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Una Pulizzi, and I'm Kyndryl's Global Head of Corporate Affairs. We want to welcome you and thank you for joining us today to hear about the opportunities ahead for Kyndryl as we prepare to become an independent, publicly traded company. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied, and these statements speak only to our expectations as of today. For more details on some of these risks, please see the Risk Factors section of the company's information statement included as Exhibit 99.1 to the company's registration statement, Form 10. In today's remarks, we will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.
Corresponding GAAP measures and a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to GAAP measures are provided in the presentation materials for today's event, which are available on our website at investors.kyndryl.com. The information contained in this presentation is provided as of the date of this presentation and is subject to change without notice. The information contained in this presentation may be updated, completed, revised, and amended, and such information may change materially in the future. I am pleased to be here with our CEO, Martin Schroeter, Group President, Elly Keinan, and our CFO, David Wyshner. They will lead today's discussions about Kyndryl's business addressable market, competitive advantages, growth prospects, and financial profile. Following the prepared remarks, we will hold a Q&A session with all three executives as well as our CTO, Antoine Shagoury.
If you are interested in asking a question, please submit through the Webex chat at any point during this presentation. Please include your full name and company. We will get to as many as time allows. Today's presentation materials are available on our investor relations website. I would now like to turn it over to our CEO, Martin Schroeter. Martin?
Thanks, Una, and hello to each of you, and thank you for joining our first Kyndryl investor meeting. I'd like to step back and start with the very basics of who we are and what we do. Kyndryl is a true IT services company with a customer-centered culture. Customers are our North Star. We help our customers design, manage, and modernize the technology systems that the world depends on every day. As you'd expect from a true services company, at the core of our business is our people and our customer relationships. We have 90,000 employees who represent the best global talent in the industry, and I know they're the best because that's what my customers tell me over and over. They've done more IT transformation and automation engagements than anyone. They invented how the industry does it.
These are people with experience in addressing critical technology challenges, with deep experience in working with hybrid IT and multi-cloud environments, as well as working with new and emerging technologies like Edge and 5G. Last year, our people earned more than 140,000 credits in strategic skills, including cloud, AI, analytics, and security, to name a few. The continued development of our people, our human capital, broadening their skills even further, is one of our highest priorities. Let's turn to what we do every day with our customers and our partners. First of all, when you look at our customer base, we support the operations of more than 4,000 customers around the globe, including approximately 75% of the Fortune 100, more than half of the Fortune 500. Our customers make 45% of the world's passenger cars.
They account for 50% of hypermarket retail sales, manage nearly half of the world's mobile collections, and our large banking customers represent over 60% of total assets managed. Kyndryl takes great pride in working with our customers to power their critical systems, which in turn powers the global digital economy. We do this through a super strong portfolio of IT services that are now aligned across six global practice areas. These are contemporary services aimed at capturing the opportunity associated with customers' digital transformations. We have cloud services where we help support our customers' transition to cloud environments, as well as modernizing existing clouds. Our core enterprise and zCloud services offer customers secure, reliable, high-volume computing mainframe capabilities. Digital workplace services helps customers to enhance the end-user experience to enable flexible work locations and optimize device management. This practice has been particularly important during the pandemic.
With our application data and AI services, we help our customers improve business outcomes through data management and AI-infused operations. We also provide a range of services from ERP to industry and enterprise-unique applications. Through our network and Edge services, we provide unified network services for cloud and data center connectivity and enable compute power at the Edge. Finally, we have leading security and resiliency services in the areas of cybersecurity, business continuity, and disaster recovery, helping customers constantly adapt to new threats and regulatory standards. We have tremendous capabilities in both traditional infrastructure services and in newer technologies. Across those six global practice areas, we engage with customers in advisory, implementation, and managed services. As you can see on the slide, we have industry-recognized leadership standings across the portfolio.
What our portfolio allows us to do, we can be both the integrator and the innovator for our customers. We're known for integrating tools and vendors in the data center, and we'll still do that. As an independent company, we're going to ramp up our focus on innovation, going after new market opportunity, and using our experience and our IP to the benefit of our customers. To help bring to life the scope and the scale of the capabilities that we really bring to bear for our customers, I'll share some key stats. First is our global scale. We have operations in 63 countries, which allows us to serve customers domestically and globally based on their requirements. We manage the vast majority of mainframes on the planet, with six trillion instructions processed each second. We provide 2 million TB of storage.
We manage 750,000 virtual servers and 270,000 network devices. We also manage over 25,000 SAP and Oracle systems. We have a lot of scale. We also have vitality. We apply our data, our IP, and automation to run our customers' systems better. Nine million automated actions per month result in greater quality and efficiency for us and for our customers. Four million backup jobs completed daily means more secure and resilient systems. Now I'd like to turn to what's driving the work and the types of challenges we're helping our customers address. I think we all appreciate that digital transformation in every industry has been accelerated by the global pandemic. IDC estimates 65% of global GDP will be digitized by next year, and digitization is the fundamental driver of our business.
Many companies are playing catch up, with half of all companies just beginning their digital journeys. A third of the CEOs are planning to increase their cybersecurity investments by double digits, and among top-performing companies, 62% of the CEOs identify IT infrastructure as their biggest challenge. Increasing complexity of IT infrastructure and a lack of skills are real barriers to transformation. This is where Kyndryl's core strengths come in. Kyndryl helps customers solve these issues by driving transformation and agility, by maintaining business continuity and reducing operational risk, by increasing their operational efficiency, by enabling workload portability and orchestration, and by capitalizing on the pace of technology change. With that as the backdrop of who we are and what we do with our customers, one of our primary objectives today is to make a compelling case for why Kyndryl is an attractive investment.
This overview slide, I'll come back to at the very end, but this is sort of our agenda for the rest of the meeting. These are the primary areas that we believe will make Kyndryl an attractive investment. I'm going to take the first and second points, expanded addressable market and our market position. Elly Keinan will cover our sustainable competitive advantages, and he'll share stories about why customers select us to be their long-term partner. I'll talk a little bit about an area that has really resonated with our customers, our ability to expand our ecosystem of partners. David will go deeper on our financials. I'll come back before the Q&A to talk a little bit about our new focused growth-oriented culture and our world-class leadership team. Before we move on, I want to call out this last bullet on ESG.
I don't want it to get lost because it is critically important. We're developing a holistic ESG platform and a strategy which will be overseen by a dedicated team. On the environmental front, we plan to continue to expand on IBM's renewable energy objectives. We will establish our own targets for renewable electricity and for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We'll also invest in technologies to drive reductions for our customers. On the social front, we intend to make a positive impact on society through our operations and our practices. We will work towards diversity and inclusion across all dimensions of our company, our leadership team, our employees, and our board. We'll work to maintain best practices in human capital management and user and data privacy. We will be a responsible corporate citizen.
With regard to governance, our compensation systems will be structured to align management's incentives with those of our shareholders. We will operate in a way that is ethical and in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. We're coming out of the gate with a diverse and highly experienced board of directors. Over time, we'll ensure that that remains the case. I am extremely proud of the board that we've been able to assemble. As Chairman, I'll be joined by nine leaders in business and academia, people with a global perspective on business and how to build a company with a new and vibrant customer-centric culture. Our Lead Independent Director is Stephen Hester. Until June, he was the CEO for RSA Insurance Group, before that, the CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland.
He's currently an independent director for easyJet, and he'll assume the role as chairman of easyJet in December. Our board members have diverse backgrounds in finance and healthcare, manufacturing and distribution, and even a University President with a PhD in theoretical physics. Each of these leaders knows what it's like to establish something that's lasting, something that's important to customers, something that succeeds when customers are successful, and something that has a culture of collaboration, mutual responsibility, and excellence. Now let's move to our next point on our investment thesis. Our separation more than doubles our addressable market from $240 billion pre-spin to $510 billion by 2024, and it's driven by several tailwinds that we'll capitalize on.
First, there is greater demand for digital transformation services, given that about 65% of GDP will be digitized by 2022. This will create an even greater need for services that Kyndryl can provide to support enterprises with IT modernization. Second, 85% of the world's largest organizations continue to migrate applications to the cloud and consistently seek to partner with external service providers like Kyndryl as these transitions become more complex. Third, there's been an explosion in data and analytics. It's estimated that enterprises create and captured 64 ZB of data in 2020 alone. This sheer volume of data creates complexities for organizations that need to crunch that data for actionable insights. Fourth, there's an urgent and obvious need to make information and technology systems more secure.
The need to increase investment in cybersecurity is top of mind for CEOs who are increasingly concerned about cyber threats to their operations and their growth prospects. Lastly, the accelerating pace of companies adopting new technologies like automation and AI and machine learning is rising, expected to continue as companies look to integrate new technologies into their existing IT estates. Looking ahead, Kyndryl's scale and ability to design, build, and modernize mission-critical technology systems provides a huge opportunity to extend our leadership position in the markets we operate in. Because of our mission-critical expertise and the customer relationships and trust we've earned, we are well positioned to capitalize on these tailwinds and provide these higher value services that will power our customers' digital transformations. Let me show you how these tailwinds, combined with an independent Kyndryl, translates to a much larger total addressable market for us.
Slide shows you where we see the extra lift and opportunity after we separate from IBM. Pre-spin, Kyndryl was geared mostly around a market focused on more traditional services. Approximately $240 billion of opportunity consisting of areas such as infrastructure, network, and digital workplace services, and anchored by an IBM ecosystem. Separation enables us to participate more fully in an expanded market in areas of transformation services that are aligned to customers' digital journeys. The opportunity here is estimated to be $415 billion today and projected to grow to $510 billion in 2024, with approximately $175 billion in opportunity unlocked for us on day one of the spin. Not to say it is instantly available to us. The addressable market gets much larger when we are independent.
The areas of expanded opportunity include cloud, data security, intelligent automation. These are projected to grow faster than our historical business mix, and given their importance to customers' transformation journeys, are really high-value opportunities. As I described earlier, we're building global practices that are linked to these opportunities areas. Global practices such as cloud, applications, data and AI, security and resiliency, and network and Edge. Just to give you a bit more context with two examples. Cloud services. Previously, cloud services were infrastructure services tied to the IBM public cloud and IBM's ecosystem. As an independent Kyndryl, we have the ability to work with the bigger ecosystem, unlocking more opportunity to participate across platforms. The market didn't change, but what we're able to do changes. Data services is another good example. Previously, data services meant we managed databases and spinning disks, hard drives and storage.
Where we'll go as an independent company is higher value data engineering services, curation, orchestration, things like that. Like data services, over the next several years, we will increasingly shift our focus to higher growth, higher value service offerings that will power our customers' digital transformations, such as Edge. Moving to the next area of our investment thesis, our leadership position in designing, managing, and modernizing these mission-critical information systems. On launch day, we are the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider. We have unmatched intellectual capital and IP. More than 3,000 patents issued, 800 patents pending, and 200 more already submitted. We have world-class expertise with 90,000 employees who have an average of 10 years of industry experience. We have global scale with state-of-the-art delivery operations around the world, a presence in 63 countries and 459 data centers under our management.
This is our launching point, and it's not a position that we take for granted. Every day, we know that we need to deliver for our customers. Every day, we earn and keep their trust. If I had to summarize Kyndryl, who we are, what we do, and why we're special, this is what I would tell you. At the center of everything we do is our customers and our team. We're now organized around the services our customers need as they transform digitally. Again, our new integrated portfolio is aligned to six global practices: cloud services, core enterprise and zCloud, digital workplace services, applications, data, and AI services, security and resiliency, and network and Edge.
We offer advisory, implementation, and managed services across technology infrastructures to help our customers accelerate their unique digital transformation journeys, to overcome persistent business and IT challenges, and to deliver better results against their strategic objectives, like the need to increase operational efficiencies to reduce costs and improve their productivity. Like the need to reduce risk and maintain business continuity in the face of constantly changing and unpredictable markets. Their need to drive transformation and agility to deliver on their consumers' expectations. To enable workload portability to optimize technology usability, costs, and benefits, and capitalize on the pace of technology change to deepen their competitive differentiation now and into the future. Taken together, the new independent Kyndryl has a flywheel model for growth. Our differentiation starts with our leadership in designing, building, modernizing, and operating systems at scale.
Our expert people have won the trust of our 4,000 customers who rely on us to manage their most mission-critical systems. Our blue-chip customer base has made us attractive to a broad ecosystem of strategic partners and is an ecosystem that we will expand by investing in key relationships after separation. In turn, these partnerships enhance our expertise and our experience, and they broaden our customer base, allowing us to gain new input, new IP, new insights that inform our customer capabilities. It reinforces our recognized leadership, continuing giving more momentum to the cycle, creating a flywheel for growth. I'll turn the meeting over to Elly Keinan to talk about our competitive advantages, customer stories, and our broader ecosystem of partners. Elly.
Hello, everyone. I would like to start with Kyndryl's competitive advantage. Our competitive advantage stems from the mission-critical expertise of our people and our operational data and intellectual property, including our service management codified processes. In addition, in the later sections of the presentation, I'll discuss how, as we combine these factors with our new freedom to engage a broader ecosystem, our new operating agility, and how, when we apply them at scale across our customer base, we can return this business to growth. First, let's start with our people and their mission-critical expertise. Kyndryl's success is grounded in our ability to attract, develop, and retain talent. As you would expect, our employees have deep base of technical eminence with a mix that is skewed towards supporting on-premises mission-critical environments. These skills are the toughest to master in our industry.
As Martin said earlier, our employees have done more IT transformational and automation engagements than anyone. They invented the way the industry does this. As we spin, what sets us apart is our ability to extend our deep mission-critical capabilities to more contemporary digital environments. We've already started on this journey. On the left-hand side of the slide, you will see that 96% of our employees are developing new skills each year. We've completed nearly three million hours of training in the first half of this year, and we secured nearly 250,000 badges, which are certified levels of skill achievement with more than half in cloud, agile, and analytics. We've doubled our cloud certifications for platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP, and others over the last 12 months alone. We have 19 customer innovation centers across the globe, which reflects our scale.
We execute a global and local standardized delivery model with co-creation innovation labs and industry centers of excellence to bring our expertise to our customers. The outcomes of these investments in our mission-critical capabilities include very strong customer advocacy with NPS in the 60s across multiple touchpoints. This puts us in the top quartile when benchmarked against peers. It's important to note that we've been able to consistently improve our NPS over the past couple of years and during the spin process. We have a disciplined approach to capture customer feedback and act on their input. In addition, we manage over 31,000 service-level agreements, achieving an attainment of 99.8%. Finally, Kyndryl is recognized for our strong service management and integration capabilities by IT analysts. Several were mentioned by Martin earlier, for example, IDC, HFS, et cetera. Our operational data and intellectual property are also key differentiators.
Starting at the bottom of this slide, to give you a sense of our scale, we add 2 TB - 4 TB to our data lake daily. Our scale as the largest infrastructure services provider gives us a natural advantage. We're able to identify advanced operational IT patterns that generate new insights that form the basis of our customer value. In addition, we have 3,000 issued patents, 800 pending, and 200 being filed, with over 60% in data and AI, cloud and network, intelligent automation, and security. Our scale that I mentioned earlier, and applied AI allows us to learn faster and take our learnings and apply them to our platform to further benefit our customers. To give you an example, the servers that we manage generate millions of alerts per month, with a subset representing incidents that require intervention to make sure our customers' systems are up and running.
From this subset, these incidents, we identify patterns that can be addressed proactively before they occur in our delivery environment through automation and without manual intervention. Ultimately, these patterns enable us to draw out new IP to better support and shape our customers' digital experiences. Through this, Kyndryl is able to offer our customers very high-quality delivery with continuous improvements for their mission-critical environments. Now, as Martin said, customers are our North Star, guiding everything from our culture to our operating model. We are honored to have over 4,000 blue-chip companies, including 75% of the Fortune 100 and over half of the Fortune 500, as Kyndryl customers. As I mentioned, we have over 4,000 customers across all geographies and all major industries. Our top 10 customers represent only 15% of our revenue, meaning we don't have concentration risk. Our relationships typically span multiple years.
Notably, our average contract term for managed services is three to five years, and our average managed services customer relationship is more than a decade and growing. These long-term relationships are constantly transforming as our customers' priorities evolve. These relationships and the mission-critical nature of our services provide the annuity base of our business. With our new freedom to operate in a much broader set of ecosystems, we will be able to expand these important customer relationships. Said another way, the opportunity to engage with customers where we have very long-term relationships and multi-year contracts with expanded services can provide the basis for returning our business to growth. David will provide more perspective on this later. Now, a customer example of what we do may be helpful here. This is a top European bank and leading financial services provider.
We originally signed a contract in 2011 covering all aspects of the bank's IT environment. This includes mainframe, distributed computing, storage, networking, security, end-to-end services, et cetera. This included core banking, bank operations, customer accounts, application processing, and more. In fact, this mainframe environment, at approximately 150,000 MIPS, that's millions of instructions per second, is one of the largest managed mainframe assets in the world. Over time, this relationship grew with the addition of public cloud management. Recently, the customer announced that it would re-platform critical workloads on public cloud. This represented an expansion of our partnership to help integrate the bank's new hybrid cloud model and manage the hybrid environment. We've extended our mission-critical footprint to encompass newer contemporary digital environments that align with the customer's transformation. Here's another example of a customer with whom we've had a long-term relationship.
We've had the honor to serve one of the world's leading material sciences companies, a Fortune 500 business, over the past 16 years. Our work evolved from the original multi-year outsource agreement, where we managed the customer's servers, storage, networking, and disaster recovery, all with security as an intrinsic part of the solution. This included the infrastructure for manufacturing and production systems, supply chain systems, and collaboration systems. Over time, we were able to expand into service desk and deploy a more variable consumption-based model to match their needs. Recently, the customer embarked on a digital transformation with the goals to improve their customer experience and drive service improvements and increase speed of service delivery.
This required a partner who had the experience to accelerate their digital transformation with a deep understanding of their current environment and who could bridge across to their future digital environment to deliver integrated end-to-end capabilities. The customer selected Kyndryl as their primary partner for their IT infrastructure. There are three important elements to this new work: network transformation, platform management, and endpoint management. We provide a hybrid IT environment, which includes Azure workload management. We're also deploying new software-defined networking capabilities, 5G, and a transformed security architecture. As we did with many other customers during the early days of the pandemic, moved over 40,000 of their employees to a remote model while maintaining critical operations and production facilities without disruption. Both of these customer examples highlight three important points. First, our ability to build long-term relationships given the nature of the mission-critical work we do.
Second, our ability to help our customers innovate and transform over time. Third, our ability to expand relationships given our new freedom to operate with multiple ecosystems. Let me talk about our freedom to operate and invest that I've mentioned a couple of times now. This is one of the key design points behind the spin, and we're excited to capitalize on it going forward. There are tremendous opportunities ahead for Kyndryl. You will see on this chart where we've been as IBM's infrastructure services business within Global Technology Services, or GTS, and where we're going as an independent Kyndryl. A key element of our growth thesis comes from expanding beyond an IBM-centric ecosystem, accessing areas of the market where we've been previously underrepresented.
Our strategy is evolving to one that is centered on broader engagement in multiple ecosystems, where we focus on services that align to our customers' digital transformation. For instance, relative to our total addressable market, our TAM, we'll now be able to fully participate in the market for both traditional and transformational services, a market that is twice as large as the one we've been oriented around as a division within IBM. In areas that are higher value and faster-growing versus our historical business mix. On growth trajectory, as part of IBM, we're tied to the growth associated with IBM technology. As Kyndryl, we'll pivot to a broader set of fast-growing transformational services and build partnerships that will result in growth more in line with the market. On services offerings, we will expand from our foundation around mission-critical infrastructure services from traditional environments to services aligned to digital transformation.
On partner alignment, in the past, we were focused on IBM-centric partners. As Kyndryl, we're tapping into multiple established and growing ecosystems with an expanded portfolio of technologies. Our ecosystem will include hyperscalers, systems integrators, independent software and hardware providers, and next-generation technology firms. IBM will continue to be an important partner for us. On investment, organically, our focus in the past has been on IBM technology. For example, investments for services around the IBM Cloud, investments to deploy Red Hat Ansible automation in our delivery service. In the future, we will focus our investments to strengthen our services business, focusing on the best technology choices for our customers. On inorganic, our last acquisitions were more than five years ago. As an independent company, we'll have a platform to pursue new M&A that are a good fit for our strategic and capital allocation framework.
Lastly, on capital intensity, over time, Kyndryl will also become less capital intensive as public cloud becomes a bigger portion of the solutions that we provide. Overall, independence offers us new freedom across all these categories to enhance and reshape our strategy in ways that will be favorable to our long-term trajectory. To realize these benefits as an independent company, we've built an operating model based on three design principles, customers at the core. Our principles are speed through simplification, effectiveness through integration, innovation through agility. What I mean by speed through simplification is that we've substantially simplified organization by removing 2/3 of the decision nodes compared to when this was an IBM division, and removing one to two management layers associated with over 70% of our revenue. We've empowered our country presidents and our managing partners who lead our largest customer relationships with greater delegation.
As a result of these actions, our customers will see a dramatic increase in the speed of our decision-making and responsiveness. Second, effectiveness through integration means, as Martin talked about earlier, we've established six global practices focused on managed services. They are cloud, core enterprise and zCloud, application, data, and AI, digital workplace services, security and resiliency, and network and Edge. We've integrated 13 service lines, which include delivery and engineering, with 15 offering management teams to form these six practices. We also established an advisory and implementation services business. This business has a project orientation and is also organized across the six practices. This model enables us to engage with our customers across a wide continuum of capabilities, starting with advisory, implementation, and managed services. Finally, by innovation through agility, I mean we're focusing our portfolio on modular offerings with composable capabilities versus single tower technology offerings.
We also continue to adopt agile ways of working, deploying customer-centric squads and new capability-oriented guilds aligned to accelerate our innovation. I began my presentation today by saying that our competitive advantage stems from the mission-critical expertise of our people and our operational data and intellectual property, and that when you bring these factors together with our new freedom to engage ecosystems, our new operating agility, and how when we apply them at scale across our customer base, we can return this business to growth. We believe this strongly. We're excited about the new opportunity that independence brings. Thank you very much. Now I will turn it over to David, who will provide the financial perspective on Kyndryl's business. David?
Thanks, Elly, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'd like to discuss the logistics associated with our spin-off, our financial profile, our recent results and outlook, our game plan for revenue growth and margin expansion, and our approach to liquidity and capital allocation. At the risk of spoiling the punchline, here's a key takeaway. Kyndryl will become an independent company next month in a position of strength. We have $19 billion in annual revenue, long-standing customer relationships that produce recurring revenue streams, adjusted EBITDA margins of roughly 15%, and investment-grade credit ratings. Let me address some of these topics in more detail, starting with the specifics around our spin. Kyndryl stock will be distributed to IBM shareholders after the market close on November 3rd, and our stock will begin regular way trading on November 4th.
IBM shareholders will receive one share of Kyndryl common stock for every five shares of IBM they hold. IBM will temporarily retain 19.9% of our stock. The distribution is expected to be tax-free to shareholders for U.S. federal tax purposes and will have about 224 million shares outstanding. Our stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KD. We're a unicorn of sorts. On our first day of trading, we'll have $19 billion in annual revenue, a mid-10s adjusted EBITDA margin, and a history of generating significant cash flow from operations. Our investment-grade balance sheet provides more than $5 billion in available liquidity, including $2 billion of cash, and we have no debt maturities until late 2024. New companies like us don't come along every day, and we're enthusiastic about becoming an independent public company with a strong financial position.
Our revenues are diversified along a number of different axes. We are a truly global operator with more than 60% of our revenue coming from outside the United States. We generate significant revenues from advisory and implementation services, from digital transformation services, and from traditional managed infrastructure services. Our customers span a wide range of sectors, from financial services to industrials, from telecom to travel and transportation, and from corporations to government organizations. They tend to be some of the largest enterprises in the world, and our biggest customer represents only 2% of our top line. We generated $19.1 billion of revenue in 2020. Because of the multi-year customer contracts under which we operate, we begin each year with the substantial majority of our revenues already under contract, and we expect that will continue to be the case.
We know it's not easy to understand our financial profile from the pro forma statements included in our Form 10. While those statements show a pre-tax loss of $1.8 billion last year, they include more than $600 million of transaction costs related to our spin, nearly $900 million of workforce rebalancing costs, and $591 million of excess cost allocations from IBM. Adjusting solely for these items takes our pre-tax income to positive. To calculate our adjusted EBITDA, we add back $1.4 billion of depreciation expense and $1.4 billion of amortization expense, $77 million of pro forma interest expense, and $152 million of other adjustments. We've also incorporated into our numbers an estimated $375 million of incremental costs we expect to incur in the future to support our technology and growth objectives as an independent company.
The total of these adjustments brings our pro forma 2020 adjusted EBITDA to $2.9 billion. This represents a 15% margin on our revenue. Our adjusted EBITDA in 2020 translated into about $67 million of pro forma pre-tax income due to our depreciation, amortization, and interest expense. Our free cash flow, though, significantly exceeded our pre-tax income. Net CapEx was about $450 million less than depreciation, reflecting our ongoing transition to an asset-lighter operating model. Working capital contributed to cash flow as well, primarily due to timing differences in our favor. As a result, we generated pro forma adjusted free cash flow of nearly $800 million. With the majority of this year behind us, we're able to see that in many ways, 2021 has looked a lot like 2020 from a financial perspective. Operating as a captive subsidiary of IBM, revenue is again down mid-single digits in constant currency.
Our adjusted EBITDA will again be just north of 15%. Our pre-tax income will be modestly positive, and our net capital expenditures are declining. I wanted to provide both years side by side so that you can see our jumping-off point as we become an independent company. Our plan is to provide guidance for 2022 early next year after we've completed our separation and our annual budgeting process. More generally, as we look at our 2020 results and 2021 outlook, we appreciate that we're a $19 billion company, that we have a mid-10s adjusted EBITDA margin, that we're adjusted pro forma pre-tax positive, and that we have an investment-grade balance sheet, which I'll discuss in a few minutes.
We also understand that as a subsidiary of a larger company operating with a constrained technology ecosystem, our top line has been declining, and our margins haven't been where we need them to be going forward. In that context, our principal financial objectives over the next few years are clear. We'll look to stabilize and then grow our revenues. We'll work to expand our margins and believe we have opportunities to do that. Our primary use of cash flow will be to reinvest in our business, since we believe reinvestment will help drive growth and value creation. We will be steadfast in maintaining an investment-grade credit profile.
As Martin and Elly discussed, the competitive advantages associated with our people, our data and IP, and our longstanding customer relationships position us as a leader in our industry. Our separation into an independent company will give us a new freedom to expand our ecosystem of strategic partners and increase the range of solutions we can provide to customers. Our strategies, combined with these attributes and opportunities, are intended to drive revenue growth and margin expansion. First and foremost, we will deploy our resources, financial and otherwise, to further our growth. Our investment in sales capabilities and in broader skill sets will support profitable revenue growth. We'll increase the portion of our business coming from higher margin advisory and implementation services, ideally in ways that also provide a long managed services tail. We will take advantage of the swelling demand for data application, cybersecurity, and resiliency services.
We'll focus on growing our share of wallet with existing customers, aided by both our deep knowledge of their needs and our expanding tech ecosystem. Second, we will re-optimize our business, adjusting our revenues and pricing as appropriate to strengthen our margins, even sometimes exiting contracts where returns are insufficient. We'll continue to look at the structure of our workforce to ensure that we are serving customers not only well but also cost effectively. Third, we expect to transform our business model over time. As we've said, a major part of this is our expanding tech ecosystem, which gives us access to a much larger and profitable addressable market. It will drive costs down, both for us and our customers, through intelligent automation. We'll continue to transition toward lower asset intensity as more of our activity is advisory or cloud related and less reliant on physical infrastructure.
These strategies are rich in opportunity and demanding of effort. They will take time to implement and to bear fruit. We are enthusiastic about tackling them and realistic about how long it takes to change trajectory in a business like ours, where expanding capabilities takes time, selling cycles are long, and new business ramp-ups don't happen overnight. As we look at the task and opportunities in front of us, we see 2025 as the year when we expect to show positive revenue growth. To achieve this, we'll hit the ground running as an independent company, and we'll look to make progress in the near term. On this slide, we've laid out a number of milestones that are important to our transformation.
They relate to cloud certifications among our team, our plans to dramatically expand our strategic partnerships and technology ecosystem, our expected growth in service sectors where demand is booming, our continued focus on environmental sustainability, changes in our mix of business, and the opportunity for automation to drive cost efficiencies. Perhaps most importantly, we see our adjusted EBITDA margins growing from the mid-10s to the high 10s, with even greater drop through to pre-tax income as our asset intensity, and hence our depreciation expense, declines. I can't emphasize enough how enthusiastic the Kyndryl team is to tackle the challenges and opportunities in front of us. The last thing I want to touch on are some key financial attributes. Our liquidity position is extremely strong, with access to an undrawn $3 billion revolving credit facility in addition to our cash balance. We also have the ability to generate cash from operations.
The starting point for our capital structure is roughly $3 billion of debt, with maturities well-laddered from 2024 to 2041. We will also have roughly $2 billion of cash. As a result, our net debt will be only $1.2 billion, and our net leverage will be well within our targeted range of less than 1x adjusted EBITDA. Our credit profile has been rated investment grade by both agencies. We're happy about that, but our preference would be to be a notch or two higher. As we think about capital allocation, our top priorities are maintaining strong liquidity, retaining investment grade ratings, and reinvesting in our business. We expect to consider M&A opportunities when they make sense, but we feel good about our existing portfolio of operations and don't view any area as urgently needing to be bolstered by an acquisition.
To the extent that we look at strategic transactions, it will be with an eye on ensuring that our approach enables us to remain investment grade. In light of the needs, we see to reinvest in our business to support revenue growth and margin expansion, and in light of our desire to strengthen our credit profile over time, we don't anticipate having excess cash available to distribute to shareholders in the near term. Therefore, we don't anticipate paying a common stock dividend or repurchasing shares in our early days. In closing, let me reiterate that we will separate from IBM in a solid financial position with a large revenue base and mid-10s EBITDA margin, and with opportunities to spur revenue growth and margin expansion that we are ready and eager to tackle. With that, let me turn things back to Martin.
Thanks, David. For the last point in our investment thesis, we have a focused, growth-oriented culture led by a highly experienced executive team. I am very proud to be a part of this leadership team that we've been able to assemble. It was really important to our customers and to our employees that we struck the right balance of bringing in leaders from IBM with deep customer knowledge and bringing in leaders from the outside who have tremendous industry expertise and experiences. We have IBM veterans like Nel, Gonzalo, Harish, Stephen, Lee, Jamie, Ed, Mark, and Maria, with decades at the company. We have people like Maryjo, our CHRO. Maryjo most recently served as CHRO at Wolters Kluwer, and before that, CHRO at Broadridge. We have Antoine Shagoury, our CTO, who's going to join us for the Q&A. He was a venture partner at Ridgeline.
Previously, he was the CIO at State Street. We have Vic. Vic's the founding member of our advisory practice, and he previously served as CIO for Verizon Enterprise Solutions and EMC. Paul Savill was at Lumen Technologies. Una came from GE, and David came from XPO Logistics, and before that, he was CFO at Wyndham Hotels. In the middle, we have people like Elly, great hybrid. Elly is a longtime IBMer who went to be a venture partner of Pitango Venture Capital . Same for Michael Bradshaw, our CIO, who came to Kyndryl from NBCUniversal, where he was leading the organization's global IT operations. Harish is our COO. He's a longtime IBMer and went to be the CFO of PlanSource. Kris Lovejoy just announced she is joining Kyndryl from EY. Nicolas Sekkaki went from IBM to the shipping and logistics company, CMA CGM Group.
I could talk for days about the team. They're a phenomenal team with complementary expertise, and they're very strong. This is absolutely the right team to bring us to the future, and they are embodying the culture that we are building together with all Kyndryls. A true services culture that's restless, continuously anticipating and learning and innovating, that's empathetic, serving with trust and transparency, and is devoted to our customers. It's also a growth-oriented culture. Each of us, our 90,000 people, feel accountable and responsible for driving growth. We've covered a lot of ground, and we want to get to your questions. I'll close with our summary slide on why we believe Kyndryl is a good investment. First, as an independent company, we'll be able to address a bigger market in a way we couldn't as part of IBM.
Second, we are the world leader in designing, building, managing, and modernizing mission-critical information systems. We have sustainable competitive advantages stemming from the quality of our people, the data we have, and our IP and customer relationships. The separation from IBM will unlock new growth opportunities as we'll be free to expand our ecosystem of partners. We start with $19 billion in annual revenue, about 15% adjusted EBITDA margins, and an investment-grade credit rating. We have a new, focused, growth-oriented culture with the right leadership team to move us forward and the support of a world-class board of directors. With that, thank you. Now we'll take your questions. As a reminder, if you're interested in asking a question, please submit it through the WebEx chat, but include your full name and your company name.
We'll compile all the questions, and we'll get to as many as time allows. We have our first question from Tien-Tsin Huang. Tien-Tsin, by the way, thank you for calling in. Tien-Tsin, I know Tien-Tsin from prior roles. Tien-Tsin's from JPMorgan, one of the most highly respected services analysts out there. Thank you, Tien-Tsin. Tien-Tsin's question is, "What's the investment and time required, both organic and inorganic, to fully capture the $175 billion market unlocked by the spin? How much of that can you capture today without reskilling or investing, and what will drive enterprises to transition that work to Kyndryl?" Really good question, Tien-Tsin. Hopefully, I know I took one or two prepositions out, hopefully I captured what you were thinking. I think, Tien-Tsin, I think about it this way from a priority standpoint.
Our investments, when we talk about investments, at the top of the list is our investments in our people to expand their skill base. Remember where we are today, and we talked a little bit about this in the prepared remarks. We have a skill base that is very strong in mission-critical. Now we're going to take that skill base and take mission-critical into all of these other ecosystem partners that we are now going to participate in. Top of the list for us, when David, and you heard David say it earlier, we are going to primarily reinvest in this business. Top of the list for us is our labor pool, our skill base to enhance their skills in the kinds of capabilities that our customers are asking us for.
Secondly, we talked a little bit about this as well in the prepared remarks, we have a platform we're building that allows our customers to better understand their environments, that we can bring our IP and make our data real and actually help reduce our customers' environmental risk and actually help reduce our customers' operating risk. That takes investment. Those two combined is what I've said in the past has been around, we are integrators and innovators. Those are the top two lists on the top two things that we'll invest in. Thirdly, look, this is a business that requires capital. I'll let the world decide if we're very capital-intensive or moderately. In our space, we are a bit more capital-intensive than other capital-light models.
David sort of got into this a little bit during his prepared remarks. We think there's an opportunity for us to move into an asset lighter model. It's going to take a little bit of time, but we are going to keep feeding that fixed capital part of the business because we need it to grow. We need it to keep our commitments to our customers. We do expect that'll come down. On the inorganic question, look, I'd say a couple of things. One, when we look at the portfolio, we feel really good about the capabilities we have. We feel really good about the practices that we've created, and we don't see holes per se. In fact, we're working now on stitching them all together, so we show up even better for our customers. We don't see holes.
We don't see an obvious need to fill a hole there. We do feel as though we have some capacity in our balance sheet. We are always going to stay focused on investment grade. As David said, the primary mission of our cash flow is to reinvest it. We'll use some to make sure we can keep our investment grade rating, maybe even improve it a little bit, but we are completely focused on investment grade. The high-level summary, Tien-Tsin, and again, I really do appreciate the question. It's really good. High level is our people, skills, capabilities, how we integrate and what we can integrate for our customers. Second is our own innovation, our platform. Third is the capital we need. Again, if there's something opportunistic we do inorganically, we feel like we have the capability to do that.
Let me move to the next question. Martin, at a high level, can you detail your investment priorities to unlock the potential? I'm going to ask my colleague, Elly, to talk about it, because when we think about the investments, I think we think about them sort of from a practices standpoint, and not surprisingly when we sit down with customers, there are three discussions they want to have. They want to have a discussion around cloud, they want to have a discussion around data, and they want to have a discussion around security. Let me just turn it over to Elly, let him talk a little bit about our investment priorities within those practices.
The first priority is obviously our people. We're, at the end of the day, a people business. We have already started to take those deep core mission-critical skills that I talked about in the prepared remarks and modernize our capabilities. In fact, we've, in the past 12 months, doubled the capability that we have in terms of cloud security, data, certifications, and skills in that area. We'll invest in new partnerships, tapping into a broader set of ecosystems. Finally, we'll also invest in our platform, in areas like intelligent automation, which allows us to take the data that we generate every day. I talked about that in the prepared remarks as well, 2 trillion TB- 4 trillion TB of data daily, coming out of how we monitor and run and operate our customers' mission-critical systems.
Investment in that intelligent automation built on the data that we generate. Martin, if you'd like, perhaps Antoine can also comment a bit about the platform.
That'd be great.
Which I think is a critical part of this.
Sure. I'll probably just key off of Elly's last comment, too, on just the information that we glean. It's not only the information that we get as a part of normal operations, it's the patterns that we start to develop from it, and it's the tools we start to ingrain in our clients' operations to help proactively help support their environment. One of the core opportunities we look to advantage is around that reliability and availability. It's not only key within core business operations, it's actually key to help our clients keep pace with change. How do we help de-risk their change environment, how they approach cloud adoption, or even trying to rewrite their applications from a cloud-native standpoint. Exposing that capability is upfront for us on the platform.
The other two areas that are very important and very core to the strategy is one, the partner ecosystem. How do we further integrate our partners' tools and capabilities, so our clients directly don't have to navigate that difficulty within that? I think we all know, depending on our exposure to what's happening in the transformation market, the maturity is exponential. The maturity is actually more on the service provider side and on the solution side. On occasion, I often go back to say on the promising side. We're definitely building our capability to support that decision, but uncertainty. How do we help give the facts, the operations, and the reliability to support that change in the client?
The last area, which is near and dear to my heart, and hopefully our clients as well, and I actually know it's our clients as well, is around opening up our platform to them. Actually further enabling their operations and their tools and capabilities in a very different way than they've been used to dealing with us in the past.
Good. Terrific. Thank you for that. We have next question is from David Vogt. I hope I'm pronouncing that right, David. I don't think I've met you, David, but David's from UBS. David says, "Thank you for hosting the event today." Thank you, David. It's very nice. "Can you update or share with us conversations you have had with your customer base as the spin has progressed, and what has been the feedback and reception to date?" Yeah, look, David, this is a really good question. I spend a lot of time with our customers. Elly and Antoine do as well. I'll ask Elly to comment. But look, this won't surprise you.
At the heart of this is a real excitement from our customers. Look, the strategy that we laid out, what we've talked about, if I shorthand it to invest to build capabilities and engage in a broader part of the ecosystem, if you just shorthand it to those two things, our customers are really, really excited about that. They know that this business has been under-invested in, so they're appreciative that we can bring capabilities. Remember how they see us. They see us as the trusted provider of running their mission-critical systems. They're really excited about the idea that this business is now going to get investment to build new capabilities, and they're really excited about our ability now to operate, to expand the ecosystem with which we engage. Look, many of them have made cloud decisions already.
Many of them were working with Azure and Google Cloud and AWS. They've been asking us, "Can you please help us?" You heard some of the statistics from Elly. Maybe I'll ask Elly to cover some of it again. Look, we have cloud skills across, we just don't have enough. We have a lot of IBM cloud skills. We have a lot of Red Hat cloud skills. That was the mission that this business was on. It was to help those other elements of IBM. We have some Google Cloud skills. We have Microsoft Azure cloud skills. We've built a lot more this year, but we just don't have enough. Our customers are very excited about our ability to now invest, and to expand the ecosystem in which we play. I kind of said, I don't know if you have anything to add.
Look, I would add that, first of all, we've got very high NPS scores, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks. We're in the top quartile. Very good SLA achievement. They see our independence as an advantage for them. Where no longer connected to one of their big suppliers but n ow we can work with several of their technology platform providers and take this expertise that they highly value and now apply it towards that broader ecosystem, the multiple stacks of technology that they use every day. We can sit on their side of the table, as they work with all those partners to help improve their quality, reduce their risk, reduce their cost, be more agile in their own operation, be more responsive to their customers. The feedback has been very positive.
Thank you. I am going to do a follow-up from Tien-Tsin. Tien-Tsin's question is, can you comment on the importance of pursuing the higher investment-grade rating? Is it important to clients? Would you consider leverage to do acquisitions or capital returns? A couple things. Look, I think we've got a great balance sheet. I think IBM spun us out with a really strong balance sheet, but it was absolutely critical to our customers that we have an investment-grade balance sheet. We know that, and they know that we know that. We are completely focused on maintaining the investment-grade balance sheet.
As I said, I do feel like we have some capacity in that balance sheet if we wanted to do something to maybe accelerate the skills enhancements we're building, or if we wanted to do something if Antoine found something that would, from an IP perspective, that really fit nicely inside of the platform we're building. I think we have the capacity to do a few things. Like I said, we don't really see any holes there right now. Yes, investment grade is really important to our customers, and it's really important to us. We do feel like we have a little bit of capacity here if we wanted to do something inorganically on the acquisition side. Capital returns, look, we're focused on reinvesting. That really is the key to getting us back to growth.
We think that getting to growth is a really important story. We think that's part of what makes this such a promising opportunity is the ability to invest so we can take advantage of the much bigger market in which we play. I talked about it in our prepared remarks. We do see the market that we play in as essentially double what we could before. It's going to take us time. The investments start now, the ecosystem build. Our ecosystem participation starts now, but that's what we're focused on. That's the right time for us to really generate some significant returns on those investments before we start thinking about capital returns. That's what our focus is. The short answer to your question, Tien-Tsin, is yeah, our customers really think investment grade is important, too. It's a great question. Thank you.
One more question here on, can you detail the linkages that remain with IBM? Does it limit your capability to operate or invest, and especially in the context of IBM's retained interest? Yeah, this is an interesting question. IBM, as was in the Form 10, has announced that they are going to retain 19.9% for a temporary time. I think they've announced that they're going to do a debt for equity swap as they manage their capital structure. For us, they've announced, by the way, there's no board seat, no operational influence. They're not even going to vote their shares. The share votes will just follow the Kyndryl share base in terms of their voting. That's not even a distraction for us at this point. I've talked to a lot of customers, and they see it similarly.
There are two big linkages from an IBM and a Kyndryl standpoint. Not surprising in a spin of this magnitude, this complexity, and in a spin from a company that ran as an integrated unit, we have transition service agreements with IBM. We have TSAs. Very common in a spin situation. We have two years to work our way off the TSAs, and we've got people thinking now about how do we go build a platform. How do we get the most modern platform that we can find so it really supports the mission we're on, really enhances our ability to operate, and allows us to show up in front of our customers in a much more robust and much more agile and responsive way?
Elly talked a little bit about that from an operating model. Obviously, you need systems, you need a platform to bring all of that to life. That's in play. The other big element, quite frankly, it's much more substantial than the TSAs, is the commercial arrangement between the two firms. That's two-way, right? We will do some services. We'll perform some services for IBM. They'll be a big, important customer for us. Obviously, because we are managing so much of the IBM estate that exists in the world, we are a big customer for them.
I have told all of our customers, particularly because we have so many joint now dual customers, IBM and Kyndryl customers, I've told them all, "You should expect that IBM and Kyndryl will work together really well to solve your problems." I think that's what they've come to expect when we were a division, and I've told them they should expect it, and I expect it. I've talked to Arvind Krishna quite a bit about this, and he and I both agree, we will work together well. The commercials are part of that, obviously. Again, as a big important customer to IBM, I expect the relationship to be quite good. Yes, we will be a very substantial customer to IBM, and they will be a substantial customer to us, and that runs sort of across the board.
We buy a lot of their hardware, we buy a lot of their software, we resell their Cloud, that will continue. We resell some of their maintenance services, that will continue, and it even goes all the way through to research. We will engage with IBM Research, so make sure we have access to the labs, which we have enjoyed as a division. The commercial arrangement's quite far-reaching. It's quite substantial. It's important to us, it's important to them, and again, we will show up in front of customers, and make sure that we're solving their problems together. We have one more question on free cash flow from Rich Peterson. He didn't say where he's from. What does free cash flow look like going forward? Then it converts to [EBITDA].
I guess I'll look at a free cash flow realization, I think is the sort of the essence of the question. Maybe, David, I'll ask you to tackle this one.
Sure. When we look at our free cash flow last year in 2020, we generated almost $800 million of free cash flow. I would say there are three or four key components of that. The first would be our net income. Relative to that, we tend to have a little bit stronger cash flow because, as I mentioned, our CapEx is running below depreciation expense. We have a bit of a pickup there. Stock-based compensation is an add back as well. In 2020, we also had a working capital benefit. Working capital worked in our favor. Those are the things that drove our cash flow in 2020. Looking ahead, I think working capital will be more of a neutral than anything else.
As a result, I'd really look at the sources of free cash flow being our net income, plus the difference, the extent to which CapEx is less than depreciation, which has certainly been running in the several hundred million dollars a year range. Then a modest add back associated with stock-based compensation. Those would be the three drivers as you reconcile, say, from net income to free cash flow.
Great. Excellent. Thank you. We have a question from Moshe Katri. Moshe, I do know you as well. Moshe's from Wedbush. Hello, Moshe. Thank you for calling in, and thank you for the question. Moshe's question is, "Can you provide color on executive compensation, as a peg to revenue growth, profitability? Thanks." Again, thank you. I guess I'd say it this way. We haven't had a board. This is obviously a board issue. We have a comp committee. You've seen our board, world-class. We're working with the comp consultant who's in support of the board to formulate a comp system. Let me talk a little bit about the principles, and we talked a little bit about this in ESG. We do have a commitment to really strong ESG principles.
We believe tying executive comp to the outcomes that matter to shareholders is absolutely the right thing to do, and what you should expect is that we ultimately work with the comp consultant and our comp committee to get something that looks exactly like that kind of fits that bill. What is it that's going to generate returns for the shareholders, and how do we make sure that management is linked and tied to that? Right now, as you know, we have both problems. We have a revenue growth problem, and we have a profitability problem, and we think we can work on both of those simultaneously. From my perspective, again, we'll have a lot more work to do as we get our board together and we engage with a comp consultant.
Our commitment to the principles of a really good governance structure around comp is absolutely intact. Thank you, Moshe. We have a question from David Grossman, who I know as well. David, nice. Thank you for the question. David's from Stifel Nicolaus, by the way. He's got a multi-part question, or at least it's typed in as a multi-part question, but that's okay. David says, "Talk a little bit about the mechanics of returning to growth." Specifically help us understand the current headwinds in the legacy base and how long they will persist. Is the capital intensity a legacy from the IBM association? How long will it take to bring that number down to industry averages? Okay. Good. David, really good questions. I'm going to ask David to join in here on both of these in a second.
Let me first set up the answer, contextualize the answer around the mechanics of returning to growth. You know this business really well, David, because you've covered IBM for a long time. You have quite a few in your universe that sort of fit in this space. This, and we talked a little bit about this, David talked a little bit about this, is very much a business where it's backlog driven. We will start next year. We will start 2022, calendar year 2022, and we'll know about 85% of what we're going to attain. Obviously, we have an opportunity to work around the open 15% and what we get signed and et cetera. We start with about 85% of what we will ultimately book in revenue for the year.
We also, when you follow that along two years out, we know about 2/3 of that. At the end of this year, we will start with what we ultimately will book in revenue, about 2/3 of that, and then the third year out is about 1/2. What we're focused on, David, obviously, in getting this back to revenue growth is, and you know the mechanics, so I won't explain them, but the investments, as we said, start now, the skills build now, the ecosystem in which we participate starts to expand now, which means the marketplace starts to expand. For us, that means, excuse me, even though we know so much about our revenue streams going forward, it gives us an opportunity now to start to influence those out years. David, like I said, I'm going to ask David to comment in a second.
At a mechanics level, I guess the other thing I go is from that high level, because David will fill in the middle, I'm going to go right down to sort of a customer level. What happens in a customer as we expand our capabilities and expand our ecosystem is that the business that we're doing, maybe it's called cash, we're freeing up when we're deriving productivity for our customers, that's getting reinvested by customers. Right now, a lot of that, because of the ecosystem and the capabilities we have, is going elsewhere. It is our intent to capture that, right? The spending that's getting freed up and allowing customers to do new things, to move new things to the cloud, because, as I said, many of them make cloud choices. That's really the pool of funding we're going after.
Let me, again, I feel like I'm explaining to a guy who knows this as well as anybody on the planet, but let me just stop there and have maybe David comment if I've left something out or [Ed] did want to add.
I think that's exactly right. In particular, we really want to emphasize the extent to which our separation, our becoming an independent company, our not being as tethered to the IBM ecosystem, unlocks a new freedom for us to expand the ecosystem, as Martin said, and to change the revenue trajectory for our business going forward. We're really excited about that. The plans to do it are very significant. As I mentioned during some of my remarks, we're going to invest in the sales capabilities and the skills to support operating and serving our customers on that broader ecosystem. We expect to grow the advisory and implementation services component of our business in a way that really drives both value to customers and a managed services tail from that work.
We have opportunities to grow in practices that are smaller for us now, but have the potential to be really large, whether related to data or applications or Edge. Cybersecurity and resiliency practices are going to be a big opportunity for us going forward, all representing growth areas. As Martin said, we can expand the share of wallet with our existing customers. With respect to that, the opportunity there is that our customers are already dependent on us for mission-critical work. We know their systems and their infrastructure really well, the challenges they face, the opportunities in front of them. Now we can bring this larger solution set there. All of this helps drive just a different set of revenue opportunities for us.
On top of that, we'll have an overlay of pricing optimization and portfolio optimization as we look to switch our mix over time to increasingly profitable areas, increasingly profitable contracts, and a mix of business where we're fully participating in the faster-growing elements of the market. That's really how the revenue trajectory becomes different for us as an independent company than what it was for our business when it was constrained to a narrower ecosystem.
Perfect. Thank you, David. We got a three-part question from Toni Sacconaghi. Toni, who is also, I think he's still number one in his space, is at AllianceBernstein. Hello, Toni. Thank you for listening, and thank you for the questions. I'm going to read all three of them, then I'll come back to them. Question one. Kyndryl's gross margins are much lower than peers, even outside Europe. That's in quotes, in [paren], sorry. Why is that, and do you see any improvement? Sounds like your EBITDA improvement is largely driven by reduced capital intensity. A couple things. I'll ask David to comment on this.
I'll go through the other two questions as well in a second, but I'll ask David to comment on margins because I think we see opportunity a number of ways of how we get kind of EBITDA improvement over the medium term. Look, our gross margins relative to the, what I'll call the best in the industry, we do lag gross margins that are the best in the industry. We look a lot like, quite frankly, the other asset-heavy kind of business models. We think that we have an opportunity across a broad range of things, such as automation, such as reduced capital intensity, such as moving into higher value work where we can improve our margins. That's over time. I think there are multiple opportunities on gross margins. I have two more questions from Toni. Do you want to add to that or-
I will. Just to say, yeah, business mix represents an opportunity there, and while we're similar in margin to some of the more asset-intensive players that are out there, the gap that exists versus some other players, to us, indicates the real opportunity to both be growing revenues over the intermediate term and to be expanding margins. In some ways, I think the glass-half-full read here is that this represents a real opportunity for us. I don't think we have to choose between sacrificing margins to get growth. Our game plan, our strategy, and our expectation is to be able to make progress on both of those.
Thank you. Question part two. Still on Toni Sacconaghi's question. How much in cash restructuring expense do you expect in Q4 and in 2022 and 2023? Wow. We're really going out on this one, Toni. A few things, and David mentioned that in the first quarter of next year that we will host an Investor Day, another event, and we'll talk a lot more about what 2022 looks like. We'll talk a lot more about what the mile markers or the path to make sure that you can see how much progress we're making.
I can already tell you that in 2022, our cash restructuring expense is really minimal because there is a I'm sure you would've seen, Toni, in the Form 10, there's an Employee Matters Agreement that sort of limits or sort of constrains what we can do in the areas that would typically drive a restructuring expense. If by restructuring you mean sort of labor side of that, then that's covered in Employee Matters Agreement, and that would drive zero. We also know that we're going to do our own set of impairment testing across the balance sheet. I'll ask David if he has anything he wanted to comment on, but there's a whole new set of tests we will now do across customers, across countries as we change our reporting dynamics across asset utilization.
Those are typically not cash, and I think that was the nature of your question was cash. Those are not typically cash, but the Employee Matters Agreement doesn't get covered by those, but the Employee Matters Agreement essentially says people stay in their jobs. Okay, I'll shorthand it that way.
I would just add that our people assets are so critical to what we do, and that is the starting point for us in our ability to provide services to our customers. What we see as being the important thing for us to do is actually to invest in our people and in the skills that they have. As Elly mentioned, we're already doing a lot of that as we grow cloud-related certifications and other training of our people. I expect that to be an area where we're using our cash going forward.
Part three, again, still from Toni. Do you expect signings to grow in 2022 or 2023? Look, as I said, Toni, we're going to come back in the first quarter. We'll talk more about 2022. I will, from a dynamics perspective, and your models are probably better than, or certainly as good or better than almost everybody's. As David said, as Elly said, we're investing pretty heavily now, and that's the right thing for us to do. David identified that 2025 becomes an important, a pivotal year for us. We know that if we're going to get to that or when we get to that, it's going to have to start, at least from a signings perspective, it's going to start pretty soon. We'll come back on 2022 and be more specific in the first quarter.
Yeah, this place, we have to start turning around in terms of the things that customers are willing to do in the form, in this case, of signings fairly quickly here. We got a question. I'm going to go to the next question. A question received just over email. It's from a Lori Chaitman. This is a very specific one, David, so get ready Kathy Lloyd from Poplar Forest Capital. "David identified $2.1 billion in 1x cost in the bridge to adjusted EBITDA in 2020. What portion of those 1x items might take time to run off?" Sounded like both David and Martin expect OpEx investments to offset depreciation runoff over the next two-ish years. You got the question?
Sure. Yes. When we look at the key items that were in there, a part of it is the workforce rebalancing charge that we took in 2020. Substantially all the cash associated with that has gone out already. That's already taken care of. Similarly, tied to our spin-related costs, most of those costs have been incurred already. We will have some costs that go beyond the spin date, particularly tied to employee retention programs that were put in place, and a few other spin-related costs. Those are the biggest sources of the gaps or the items that were there. I view most of those costs as having been incurred and the cash outlays having taken place already.
Okay, thank you. This is the last question I have. We'll see if more come in here, but there's a follow-up from Moshe Katri at Wedbush . That is, "Looking at your revenue run rate, which portion in your view, will be subject to revenue cannibalization as service delivery continues shifting to cloud and automation?" Maybe I'll ask Elly to comment as well, if I leave something out. He may say I actually got it right, so we'll see. Look, here's how I think about it. I talked a little bit about this when I gave my customer example on what are the dynamics of how you get back to grow. In the spaces in which we sat and the capabilities we had, another way to think, we were the funding source for our customers.
We saved money, we delivered productivity to them, and they reinvested to move to the cloud. We would automate some things; they would reinvest that money. We didn't have the ecosystem, we didn't have the capabilities of where they were going, so that money didn't show up in what is now Kyndryl. Automation, and Moshe used the word automation. Automation, we see as kind of a win across the board, given the play we're running, given the strategy we have, and I would describe it as, it's certainly a win for our customers because they get some savings, obviously. More importantly, they get reduced operational risk. Again, this is kind of hearts and lungs for them. Reducing operational risk on the mission-critical workloads they have is really important to them. It's a win for customers.
It's certainly a win for our teams, for our employees, because it allows us now to take the people who know our customers so well, who know their environment so well. It gives us a chance to enhance their skillset and then keep them in the account, doing new things, doing more things. This is at the heart of why we go from being just a funding source to being a funding and reinvestment source as we build those capabilities and as we participate in the broader ecosystem. Our employees get to participate in this in a really profound way. They get a whole set of enhanced skills around already their mission-critical trustworthiness, if you will. From our firm's perspective, look, it does allow us to operate more efficiently. It does allow us to reduce our own risk. Automated tasks are less risky for us.
I think, Moshe, to your question on where do we see the revenues drying up? It is really this dynamic of as we invest in capabilities, as we put automation in place, obviously, we hand a lot of the savings to our customers. That's fine. What it really does is it enables us to enhance the skill of our teams, put them back in the customers that they know so well, where they're trusted with a new set of skills and a broader ecosystem. And we get to get then the savings essentially; we're creating for them already. Hopefully that kind of gets at the point. Look, we ran out of questions, so maybe that's good. I don't know. Hopefully.
Look, let me just wrap up with sort of my point of view on what we wanted to get done here and the message we wanted to make sure you left with. Kyndryl is different. It's ours to prove, but Kyndryl is different. We're different really for a few reasons that are really important. First and foremost, the mission is different. The mission Kyndryl has now is different, and it sort of describes why we worked with our customers to pick the strategy we picked. With that different mission, we can have a different strategy, and the strategy aligns with what our customers are doing. The strategy aligns with all the long arc trends that each of you, I'm sure, sees and experiences today. The mission is different. Our ability to invest, the capital allocated to this business is different. IBM didn't invest in the business.
Arvind covered this when they announced the spin over a year ago already. Our ability to invest, our ability to create new capabilities, and our ability to build and operate in a broader ecosystem is different. Finally, the people are different. I took you through the leadership team here. We have a really good mix of people who come from inside this business, who know the customers well, who know the business well, and know where we are, along with a really talented, really strong team from outside at the senior leadership level, people with new ideas and people who will bring new perspectives to how this business is run. All of whom are supported by a world-class board, overseeing the strategy and the execution and the path that we think we can create a lot of value.
Again, at the shortest hand version I can give you of this is Kyndryl is different. It is ours to prove, but we will prove it. It's different because the mission's different, the investment's different, and the people running the place are different enough. Thank you for joining. We really appreciate your time. As I said, we will have another investor event in the first quarter. Between now and then, we're also going to be working on, obviously, the fourth quarter, and you'll see more from us with all the things we talked about today, and we'll share progress on the enhanced skilling of our people. We'll share progress on a broader ecosystem as we go through time. Thanks again. Thank you to my colleagues for joining. We'll see you again soon.