Okay, good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining here this morning. My name is Adam Tindle, and this is part of my supply chain coverage here at Raymond James. Very happy to have James Morgado, newly minted, somewhat newly minted, CFO of Insight Enterprises, which is a solutions integrator, not a systems integrator, not a reseller.
We'll talk a little bit about that.
I would imagine. In terms of our format, James is going to go through some slides to kind of reintroduce the company. There's been a lot of changes over the years. Many of you may be familiar with Insight, who's been a longtime attendee of the conference, but a lot of positive changes in the business that James will recap, and then we'll try to save some time at the end for some questions and, of course, have the breakout afterwards, so with that, James.
Thanks. Thanks, Adam. And thank you for hosting us again. As Adam said, I'm James Morgado. I'm CFO of Insight. I was appointed on January 1st, and I'm still CFO, which is good news. Joining me is Ryan Miyasato. He's our Director of Investor Relations. I'll do a company overview for about 20 minutes or so, and then we will jump in, as Adam mentioned, some Q&A, and then there is a breakout session immediately following where we can have a continued dialogue for those of you that can attend. Typical disclaimers, not going to read these. They're available for you if you need to reference them. So as Adam mentioned, we are a solutions integrator, and we sort of coined this phrase in 2022 at our Investor Day.
Joyce Mullen, our current CEO, took over at the start of 2022, and we had an Investor Day in October of which we outlined our long-term strategy and some financial goals. I'll talk a little more about a solutions integrator, but it effectively takes the capabilities that we've built over many years and combines our expertise in hardware and software along with our deep services and technical capabilities. And the real core of this is that we focus on delivering specific outcomes for our customers by combining those things together to drive to the results that they need. Our customers are a key component to our strategy. We'll talk a little bit more why we believe that's a key strategic asset for us. We are focused in the fastest growing areas of the market.
So if you think about data, data and AI, cybersecurity, edge, we have deep expertise across all three hyperscaler platforms. We have over 6,000 technical resources to bring to bear. And so we're focused on above-market profitable growth. If you look at our margin expansion over time, this is a particular area we focused on, and I'll show a chart that shows our progression towards this. But we have strong capabilities or have demonstrated our ability to expand margins, both EBITDA and gross margins. Our focus over the last couple of years has been particularly around gross margins. And there's two broad areas if you think about gross margins. One is we have a natural tailwind to our business. As our cloud business and our services business grows faster than hardware and software, we have a natural mixed tailwind associated with our gross margins.
The second piece is we started a program a couple of years ago around pricing and profitability to drive gross margin expansion. That's a combination around how we price and using discipline around that and using our deep knowledge of so many products across the industry and how those are priced to make sure we're capturing as much of the margin as we can. The other side of the equation was around cost. We have centers of excellence in both India and with our Amdaris acquisition about 18 months ago. We have a center of excellence in Eastern Europe as well that helps us from a cost basis. We also deeply utilize technology, particularly in our services. We have over 100 patents that are pending around our methodologies and frameworks and some of the applications that we have developed as well.
We have last on the far right of this slide, we generate very healthy cash flows. You'll see a slide here. Over the last couple of years, we've had over 150% free cash flow as a percentage of net income. Now, that is a bit stronger than it would be in normal times. Part of that is our hardware growth has declined over the last couple of years, which typically uses cash. And so in rapid hardware growth, we may see that cash flow come down. But generally, we have very healthy cash flows, which is a very good thing. It funds not only our organic business, but M&A is a key component to our strategy. It has been in the past and will continue to be. And so our healthy cash flow generation gives us the ability to continue to fuel our M&A. So here's a solutions integrator.
I know it's a bit of a busy slide, and sometimes to define what something is, the best thing to talk about is what it's not. So I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment, but we have several pillars to our strategy, and I mentioned clients are a key component to our strategy. In North America alone, we have over 30,000 customers. That is primarily focused in the corporate and mid-market space. We really don't play down in the small space, so if you think of, for example, CDW is a natural comparison that's given to us. They play more in the small space. We don't. We play in the mid-market all the way up into the enterprise segment, so 30,000 customers, that means if you think about it, we touch at least $1 of business with all the Fortune 5000 in the U.S.
Delivered differentiation is really around our technical capabilities. We've spent the better part of over a decade building our technical capabilities, both through a combination of organically as well as M&A. I mentioned that we have over 6,000 technical resources. They span capabilities across Google, Microsoft, AWS, application development across all the major platforms. We have cybersecurity practice. We have deep expertise in data and AI and all of the partners that would cross that landscape. Culture is absolutely critical. It's one of the three reasons I joined Insight. Fuchsia is our corporate color. If you see me walk, you'll probably see my fuchsia socks that I'm wearing today to show the pride that we take as a company and the culture. It actually has financial implications to us as well. We have really good turnover.
Our retention metrics are some of the best in the industry, particularly around our technical resources. And for a company our size in our industry to attract technical talent is really critical. So that's a key differentiator for us. The last is I mentioned this a little bit about profitable growth. And I'll show you some slides against our financial performance. We're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish over the last couple of years. And we think that we still have plenty of room to go. So what is a solutions integrator? I mentioned that I'll talk about what it is not. We are not a systems integrator. So we certainly have the technical capabilities that a systems integrator does, but there are some unique differences. For example, we don't play in the ERP space. So we don't do any ERP implementations.
That's potentially a big part of an SI's portfolio. SI's also focused on a different customer segment. We certainly have customers in the Fortune 300 and above, but our sweet spot is really what we define as that corporate and mid-market space, which would be the Fortune 300 and below, and if you think about that market, by the way, Insight at our size, roughly nine billion in revenue, would fit into that corporate space. Most of our customers in that corporate and mid-market space don't have the technical capabilities that a Fortune 300 and above would have, and so they need partners, and it's an underserved market today. It's really served by regional players, and since we have many of those customer relationships, that's an asset for us.
It differentiates us a bit from a Systems Integrator so we can bring the full portfolio to bear to that corporate and mid-market space. We also have different project sizes. You look at the Systems Integrator; they tend to do multi-year, very large projects. We are very willing to come in and do smaller projects. Part of our mantra is earn the right to do more with our customers. I think that positions us well. We have the technical capabilities that an SI does, but focused on a different segment of the market. We are not a reseller. We've evolved. What we say is we've evolved beyond a reseller. One of the big notable differences is that a reseller typically doesn't have the technical capabilities that we've been building over many years. By the way, that is difficult for a reseller to build.
We've done it through a combination, as I mentioned, organically and very smart M&A over time. I'll show you some of the M&A we've done and how that's built into our practice. And then lastly, we are absolutely not a distributor. That's not in any way intended to be disparaging towards a distributor. Rather, distributors are very important to us as a partner. So for example, in the hardware side of our business, we will utilize some of the distributors to hold inventory for us for our customers. We definitely have a full integration center where we do on the hardware side, we will do full integration for our customers and hold some inventory for our customers. But we will leverage distributors as part of our partner network. And then lastly, distributors don't have typically the technical capabilities or the end customer contact that Insight does.
There's plenty of examples I can use about the full solutions that we develop for our customers. Happy to do that in Q&A. But some of that will bring home some of the outcomes and solutions that we deliver for our customers. We are a global company. I briefly just touched on this slide. We have presence in over 27 countries across the globe. This absolutely helps us with our customers, particularly the larger ones who may have footprint outside of the U.S. Here's the financial performance over time. I mentioned gross margin expansion. You can see that in the upper left-hand corner and EBITDA margin in the lower left-hand chart. These are all on a TTM basis. So from Q1, our gross margin, Q1 of 2023, on a TTM basis, our gross margin was about 16%. Over the most recently completed fiscal year, it was just north of 20%.
So over that period of time, we've driven four points of margin improvement. Again, that is the two factors that I mentioned. One, there's growth in our cloud business and growth in services, which have a higher margin, as well as our pricing and costing initiatives that have driven that margin. I certainly think if you look forward, and I'll talk about the long-term goals in a minute, as I look out over the years to come, this rate of margin improvement is likely to slow some. That's a pretty dramatic margin improvement. But we still think we have room from a gross margin standpoint to continue to expand. I think the mixed aspect of our business is expected to continue. And we still have room both on our pricing and costing initiatives.
And then lastly, this has translated into the EBITDA margin expansion that you see in the bottom left-hand corner. As we look out towards the future beyond 2025, I think one of the big opportunities that we have as a company to continue to expand EBITDA margin is in OpEx leverage. And we think about our operating expenses as a percentage of gross profits. And we think that we certainly have room to expand that and continue to drive EBITDA margins. In the upper right-hand corner, I'm showing cloud here. And I'm sure Adam's going to ask me some questions around the cloud business. This has been a particular area of interest over the last couple of quarters around some program changes from both Microsoft and Google, which has had an impact to our gross profit growth in the cloud segment.
Transitory, I guess, is a tough word after the Fed from a few years ago, but absent that, I would say 2025 is a bit of a transitory year as we work through those cloud program changes. Our cloud growth over time has been very healthy. You can see the growth rates on here. You see in Q4 it began to slow a bit, and that is as those partner program changes have come into effect, and we will have that impact in 2025. In 2026, we expect this to return to our long-term CAGR of 16%-20% growth in the cloud business. I don't have services on here, but services has also grown in the low double digits, mid-teens range over the same period of time. I mentioned that M&A was very critical to us, and we've been on this journey for quite some time.
I'll focus on some of the acquisitions that we did starting in 2015 that really allowed us to start building our services business. We acquired a company called BlueMetal, which brought some around app design and mobility. We acquired Datalink then in 2017, which was really around data center, and then in 2018, we acquired Cardinal. That's around additional digital innovation capabilities, and then Hanu in 2022 expanded our footprint in India. They were also a top Microsoft partner, which also brought us some cloud capabilities there. Most recently, we've had three acquisitions starting in 2023. A company called Amdaris, which has application development capabilities in Europe, focused on the Microsoft platform. Very good company. Brings very strong margins to the business and built out our capabilities in Europe. Also gave us a presence and a center of excellence in Eastern Europe, which also balances out our technical capabilities.
At the end of 2023, we acquired a company called SADA, which gave us a deep presence in Google's platform. They were both a resale business as well as a services business. We had a Google practice prior to that acquisition, but it was actually the third out of the three large hyperscalers. Google, they were Google's largest partner. We acquired them and it jumped to our second largest in the three hyperscalers. In 2024, we acquired a company called InfoCenter, which is a pure play services company in the ServiceNow platform. I say this often, but dollar for dollar, it's the best services company I've ever seen. They have really rounded out our services capabilities in the ServiceNow platform. Going on to our full year outlook, I mentioned the partner program changes.
We called out in our earnings call, there's about a $70 million headwind year over year in our cloud business as both Microsoft and Google have asked their partners to move away from the enterprise space and have shifted both their incentives and their focus into the corporate and mid-market space as it pertains to reselling of cloud. They want us to continue to bring our full services portfolio to all customers. But the real sort of challenge that we're working through in 2025 is as we pivot away from the larger customers and continue to grow in the corporate and mid-market space, there is this one-year sort of challenge that we're faced with. Factoring all of that in, we expect gross profit to grow in the low single-digit range. Gross margin, we would see approximately flat.
And that $70 million headwind that I called out has an impact on gross margin. So you don't quite see the expansion in gross margin that you typically would had we not been faced with that. But holding the gross margins in approximately the 20% and then EPS in the $9.70-$10.10 range. And then lastly, I'll end with the KPIs. These are the long-term KPIs. If you look over to the right of this slide, it's a bit of a busy slide. But if you look over to the right, you'll see what we commented in 2022 in terms of what we thought we could drive in our cloud business, the 16%-20% CAGR in gross profit in cloud, same CAGR for our services gross profit. EBITDA margin to expand to the 6.5%-7% range.
We're knocking on that door already as we exited 2024 at 6.2%. EPS, we had said at the time that we thought could grow 19%-22%. You'll see that our CAGR has been only around the 3% was flat last year. There's two factors. One is we absorbed the changes that I mentioned, the $70 million this year. And then in particular, we didn't anticipate the decline in the hardware business that we've seen over the last couple of years. So that's had an impact on EPS growth. And then lastly, ROIC at greater than 25% and adjusted free cash flow at greater than 90%. And we exited 2024 at 173%. And we would expect that to normalize a bit as we head into 2025 and as hardware continues to grow, but still expect healthy cash flow.
All right. Perfect.
I'll kick it off with just a high-level question and then certainly would love any audience questions. But James, you guys oversee a lot of different areas of technology, right? We're sitting here in March trying to figure out kind of a mixed December/January earnings season across tech. What are the spending trends that you guys are seeing, either geographically or by product category? And if you could just speak to kind of high-level demand overall early in the year.
Yeah. So as we exited 2024, there was a couple of signs that we saw. First, talk about a little bit about the hardware business. There's a couple of signs that we saw that were encouraging as we exited the year. First, we had the first quarter of gross profit growth in hardware in the last eight quarters. So that's typically a good sign.
We haven't seen that in quite some time. The other piece is in our commercial business, we've seen three consecutive quarters of growth in our commercial business, which tends to work up segment. So if you look back at historically, we see commercial recover first. That kind of moves up into corporate and then enterprise is typically the last. So those were both kind of encouraging signs as we think about the hardware business as we enter 2025. As we started 2025, I'd say that the quarter is playing out so far as we had expected. We're only two months into the quarter. And last year, we did have false reads, as you know. I think in Q2 and Q3, we started month one pretty strong and then the quarter deteriorated. So far this, we're about two-thirds of the way through the quarter and we've seen our expectations hold up.
So I'll knock on wood. So hopefully that continues. That is a good sign for our services business because a portion of our services is still tied to hardware. I'd say on the rest of the services business, we continue to see cautious behavior from customers as they weigh out where they're putting their dollars to play. If I look at the cloud business, we're faced with those partner program changes. But if I look at the underlying dynamics around cloud, it's largely shaping up to our expectations. So early in the year, but so far, those are the signs we're seeing. Other questions? They haven't had their coffee yet.
Continuing on that topic, PCs is an area that a lot of investors are focused on. And we've been waiting on a PC cycle. I think Joyce commented on this in the earnings call for quite some time.
We've got the support expiration from Microsoft supposedly happening later this year. Are you seeing any indications now or as you kind of look in the pipeline that we might start to experience a greater PC refresh in the coming quarters?
Yeah. You know what I would say is that our customers are certainly having more and more conversations around refreshing their device install base. What I would say is I don't see this. One thing that I do think is starting to, and it's small at this point, but we are starting to see some potential pull-ins possibly around tariffs. I don't think that this is meaningful at this point, but we are starting to see a little bit of that, and increased conversations around device refresh. I think our customers are certainly aware of the end-of-life support or the additional cost that would be if they don't upgrade.
And there are millions and millions of devices that will not work in Windows 11. And so there is going to have to be our expectations. There will be some reckoning at some point on that. But we haven't seen a major inflection point on the device side. It's been kind of steady as we had expected.
On the partner program changes, the $70 million. I understand, and I think it's helpful that you quantified the headwind for this year. The question that's often asked is the potential for out years, 2026, 2027, additional impact. Do you think that $70 million is kind of fully encompassing all the changes that you see? Or for example, with Microsoft, customers might have multi-year licenses, right? A three-year license, right? So you'd have another cohort of Microsoft renewals and presumably in 2026, another one in 2027.
Are there additional cohorts of renewals that would cause future headwinds in outer years in that particular?
Yeah. There is a little bit left in 2026, but nothing that we think would impact our growth rate in that 16%-20% CAGR. In fact, most of the impact is more acutely in the first half of 2025. And by the time we get into the second half, it starts to normalize a bit. And by the time we exit the year, it's almost largely behind us. It's interesting. If you think about the positive out of the changes here, is that there has been a deep focus on growing our services business even faster. Our partners want us, both Google and Microsoft want us to do that. And internally, it's forced us to focus on that.
We're seeing some good early signs, at least in terms of both on the Google and the Microsoft side, particularly on Google. We've had a longer-term practice on the Microsoft side. But Google with the SADA team, they've done just an amazing job of pivoting that business in a short period of time and focusing on services growth. So I think it's largely behind us as we exit 2025. Maybe time for one more. They won't be as shy in the breakout after this. Well, you guys will get a close-up look of my fuchsia socks for those of you that joined the breakout.
Just maybe final question as we wrap up. It's a lot to digest, a lot of information, obviously, and a lot of different segments and pieces of the business and moving parts, right?
If you were to try to maybe distill it down and make the case for investing in Insight over the next couple of years for the audience, how would you characterize that?
I think we are two things I would say. The overarching theme is I think we are fantastically positioned. I think from a financial standpoint, there's still plenty of wind in the sails in terms of what we can do on EBITDA margin and gross margin, OpEx leverage. I think we're focused in the fastest growing areas of the market. I really like our technical capabilities in terms of particularly as AI becomes more and more relevant to our customers in the corporate and mid-market space, our services portfolio is pretty phenomenal of what we can bring to bear. So I'm really excited about what that will mean into the future.
Our partner relationships are as strong as they've ever been. So we bring that into the future. So I think there's a lot of room both from a financial basis as well as our ability to bring our full portfolio to bear to our customers and drive growth.
All right. We'll leave it there. Thanks, James.
All right. Thanks.
Breakout is in Cordova 4.