Sabre Corporation (SABR)
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Apr 24, 2026, 3:57 PM EDT - Market open
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Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2026

Mar 3, 2026

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

All right, before we begin, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. My name is Josh Baer, software analyst at Morgan Stanley. Thrilled to have the Sabre leadership team here with us today. Kurt Ekert, CEO, and Mike Randolfi, CFO. Thank you so much for joining us.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Thanks, Josh.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Our pleasure.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great to see you. Maybe let's kick it off with the exciting news around shareholder rights before we get into AI and the business.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Right.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Can you give some background on the recent shareholder rights plan, with regard to Constellation? What does it entail? What is it in response to?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

You saw the press release we issued on Sunday evening, and there were other disclosures we issued as well. That was in response to a significant accumulation of shares by Constellation, Sabre shareholder. We took this action to protect the company as well as the shareholders. Beyond that, we're not gonna comment publicly today, but we believe this. We have spoken to a number of investors and analysts, generally we've received a favorable response, and folks understand why we've done this.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay. We saw the market response as well. Kurt, from your perspective to kick it off, what were some of the most important Sabre accomplishments over the last year, what are your priorities as we head into 2026?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Yeah, we articulate our strategy with two key elements. One is delevering. Last year, we paid down $1 billion of debt, dramatically improved our leverage ratio, and we're dramatically improving the balance sheet quality of the business. Two is its growth through innovation. Last year, some of the key accomplishments were the introduction of MCP server and Agentic AI. As you saw earlier this year, we've announced a number of key partnerships with Agentic, great innovation with respect to the Sabre Mosaic Airline IT platform, and we're seeing great traction, especially on the offer side of the portfolio there. Within distribution, significant conversion of one new business, the expansion of our air distribution marketplace, and then very strong growth with both hotel distribution as well as our payments portfolio. A really good year, both from a balance sheet and an innovation perspective.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Excellent. you've put out, 2026 and 2027 kinda growth commentary, looking for mid-single digit volume and revenue growth in each of those years. I'm wondering, with the transactional business model, some volatility that we have seen historically in this end market, what gives you the line of sight to put out that growth target for 2027?

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Sure. A few things. First, as we looked at 2026, let me just start by saying our underlying baseline assumption, which we think is, you know, hopefully conservative, is flat industry. It's not our assessment of the industry. That's a planning assumption. When we talk mid-single digits, that's based on our internal growth strategies and it's comprised of a few things. One is, we've talked about our push into the LCC part of our multi-source platform and really extending the tail of those carriers. We see that we launched a lot of our new tools that we expected to launch in the summer of last year. That was launched this year. That's gonna be very additive to our growth.

As we've articulated, we expect to continue to take share, as we've done in the last year. We continue to expect to take that this year. We expect it to continue to grow NDC. With that, what I would say is leading into this year, up to our call, if I look at the 10, 12 weeks leading up to our call, what I would say is we saw, consistent with our guide for the quarter and the year, what I would describe as the most consistent bookings, both geographically and across customer mix leading up to the call. When we look at it, we think the guidance of mid-single digits for this year, we feel really good about that. As we look at it 2027 and we see the continued growth in our growth strategies, we feel really good about that as well.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

The second piece is obviously with the inflation offset program, our gross profit improvement should fall to the bottom line.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

And accrete both at the EBITDA and the free cash flow level. We feel like we're doing the right thing from a growth and a balance sheet standpoint. As Mike said, the market backdrop that we're experiencing, Middle East war notwithstanding, is frankly the best that we've seen in a number of years.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Excellent. We'll dig into a lot of those, a lot of those growth areas. First wanna start with what's maybe most topical front of mind, key debate, Agentic AI. Is it an opportunity or a threat? I mean, you've positioned it as a huge opportunity.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Right. Right.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Want to unpack that. You know, directly, does agentic travel shopping increase or decrease Sabre's relevance? How does your data and your content breadth, you know, does it help support and enhance the moat?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Let me just speak about it from an ecosystem standpoint. If you think about, it's all about where the funnel of eyeballs and traffic will derive. If you think about our business today with managed corporate travel, where procurement or HR are directing employees where to go to shop for and book their travel, I don't see that changing with AI. You still have the safety and security of the traveler, corporate negotiated rates, company policy. There is gonna be an inherent mandate for the TMC or the booking layer to have a consumer-grade conversational commerce capability. That may drive a technology arms race or consolidation there, but we think we're very well positioned in that part of the market. That's about 45% of our air distribution portfolio. On the leisure side, very different story.

Obviously, where you have the airline or hotel dot coms and you have the loyal traveler or the credit card customer of those platforms, they're gonna continue to be very sticky. Likewise, I think you're gonna see online travel agents or build very good conversational commerce layers, and you're gonna see traditional travel agents, let's say brick-and-mortar, who have niche offerings like cruise or tour, they're gonna continue to do what they do. I think there's three areas where you're gonna see behavior change. One is for the non-loyal customer of the supplier dot com, the customer that goes there once a year. If they're offered a better user experience by some other intermediary or player, it's likely that that transaction is gonna happen not in the airline or hotel dot com, but let's say in this new agent or commerce intermediary place.

Number two is metasearch. Metasearch basically has had such success because they price arbitrage on behalf of the consumer. The user experience is not good post-decision because you get launched into a different ecosystem for the fulfillment and the servicing of your travel. A good end-to-end agentic experience may supersede that. The third is for the OTAs who derive significant traffic from metasearch, they may see that traffic at risk. The key is think about for all the existing players, it's how do you build a consumer-grade conversational commerce layer because customers will go where there's a better UX or they have better confidence. I think some of the new platforms, the new emerging platforms, are going to succeed there, and they're gonna take share away from the other channels.

If you're one of these new players, for example, we just announced a partnership with PayPal and Mindtrip. Mindtrip being the LLM, PayPal bringing its payment network or its consumer base to the flow. We're the back end. We're the search, booking, servicing, fulfillment layer behind there. Why didn't Mindtrip just say, "We're gonna go direct connect with everybody"? Doing a direct connect is fairly simplistic technology. All you're doing is you're writing to a supplier's API. Now all the data that sits there and all the complexity of handling that traffic and doing that at scale, it scales exponentially or logarithmically from a complexity standpoint.

Unless you want to build a GDS or you want to build, like, the next version of the OTA, it doesn't make sense when you can plug into us and you can on day one, for example, Mindtrip will go live in Q2 with a full end-to-end offering with servicing, et cetera, and that's going to be pretty compelling. What we hear from the large agentic players is they want to do likewise. They don't want a metasearch model. They want to own the customer from front to back, and we can provide that to all of them. Now, will they try to disintermediate us because of margin? Well, we charge airlines and hoteliers on average about 1.5% of the value of what's booked with them. That's not a large profit pool opportunity for them.

We provide a lot of infrastructure and capability, and it's quite capital intensive to do that. On the other hand, if you're looking at the hotel world, where you might be paying a 15% cost of sale to an intermediary, that might be something that's attractive for an LLM to try to disintermediate because that's a significant profit pool. We think, one, the economic opportunity for somebody to disintermediate us is not that attractive. Number two is what we do is very complex, and we have massive data. That data is very important because in a world where you're searching and you have to provide millisecond response time to provide a good user experience, you want to avoid all those hits to the supplier because otherwise it's very difficult from a physics and a cost standpoint.

We can do intelligent caching in front of that search for speed and for efficiency. The relevance of search is very important. You're not gonna as a consumer in an LLM, you're not gonna scroll through pages of response times. You're gonna look, you're gonna say, "Okay, there's three choices. What do I want to book?" It's going to be a very rapid, easy experience. The relevance of that response has to be right the first time. We think we're actually really well-positioned. Again, we think that much of what we do, there's a pretty strong defensive moat. There is a little bit of risk, the offensive opportunity here for us to become the rails for the agentic AI industry, we think we are in the leading position, and it's going to be a huge accelerant to Sabre.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

I think that's really clear. What are you seeing then from the incumbents, from a competitive perspective, just around what they're doing around, also trying to position as the back end or the rail? [crosstalk].

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Do you mean our competitors when you say that?

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Yes.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

I think that we and Amadeus have a distinct advantage over the other super aggregators in this marketplace in terms of the quality of our content, our data, and our technology solutions. With what we've done with our agentic API specifically, the reason you've seen large announcements from us and not Amadeus, we believe, is that we have a distinct advantage, and we're told by large technology platforms that that is the case. No question they'll lean into this space very aggressively, but we believe we have the lead position right now. We're gonna try to lean into that very hard.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. What's the update on the Google partnership? Are you still co-developing solutions?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Yeah.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Google's been terrific. We are now, 99+ % of our compute is in the Google Cloud environment. From a resiliency, a scale, a security standpoint, and an efficiency standpoint, it's the best place in the world to be, and they've been a fabulous partner there for Sabre. Separately, there's a development partnership, and we do co-develop. In fact, if you look at the Sabre Mosaic Airline Solutions, for example, that's all built on Google's Vertex and Gemini AI capabilities. That remains very strong.

One of the key questions is when you look at Google Flights, which is a metasearch offering versus Gemini, if they want to replicate and do what other agentic players are saying they want to do, which is they want to host an end-to-end experience, what Google does not do is fulfillment and servicing. There's a key question about what that model will be going forward. I would just say that we've got a great strategic partnership with Google. They've been a fabulous partner, and we would love to grow that partnership over time, and we'll see what happens.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Excellent. Let's shift gears and talk about air bookings and market share. Your air bookings has accelerated, going from -3% growth, I believe, in Q1 to +4% by the end of the year. December was even higher at +7%. Can you unpack some of the drivers of that improvement throughout the year, and also touch on what prevented you from.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Yeah.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Reaching the original double-digit growth expectation?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Last year was very turbulent and challenging, as anyone who follows us knows. We realized 30,000,000 air segments last year that came from converted business or one new business. The challenge for us, we had a very bullish outlook at the start of last year because we knew that was coming online. Where we were wrong is that the underlying market was quite negative and challenging. From the start of the year, basically, you start off with DOGE and tariffs basically hitting last February and March pretty aggressively. You go through the year, a lot of recession risk. Later in the year, the government shutdown. Those things dramatically hit us.

The other thing is corporate travel, which is about only between 20% and 30% of the GDS industry, but is 45% for Sabre. Corporate travel on a unit basis was down 6%-7% last year, or 600-700 basis points. While the GDS market was a bit negative last year, the impact to Sabre was much more severe. What you saw as the year, as we went into December, was that on a geographic and a line of business standpoint, that normalizing, getting to 7% growth, as we articulated, as Mike said on the call, we saw that pattern persist through the first six weeks of the quarter. I think what you're seeing is a much more stable backdrop.

As Mike said, when you look at it geographically and you look at it by the type of customer, whether it's TMC or brick-and-mortar OTA, basically consistent performance through all the different channels that we serve. Again, we believe the backdrop is very favorable. As Mike said, you're gonna see three key drivers of air distribution growth this year. One is acceleration of NDC and the reintermediation of NDC volumes that were previously direct connected by OTAs. Number two is the realization of market share gains that we continue to take. Number three is we have 50+ new low-cost carriers in the system today versus a year ago. We launched our new LCC platform that we've talked about previously. We think that will add a couple of points of growth as well. We think it sets up very well, and that assumes a flattish GDS market. If in fact you go back to normalcy and the market is 2%, 3%, 4% positive, that would be additive or accretive to the expectations we've set.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

To clarify, when you talk about 45% corporate travel, is government and military in that bucket?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

No, government military is separate from that. Government the U.S. military and government, if you go back to 2024, was about 4% of our air distribution bookings. Overall last year, that was down about 25% through most of the year. It was down, for example, in November, down 90%. You know, we've assumed that will be more stable going forward.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay, great. NDC was 4%, I believe, of total air distribution bookings exiting the year. You've got over 40 live integrations with NDC. What's the assumption for NDC looking ahead? Is that coming from, like, a small subset of carriers, different regions? What's driving that adoption and growth?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

We've got 42 carriers now where we have live implemented NDC connections. I think that's the leading intermediary position of any aggregator in the world. Number two is we've built significant capabilities for buyers or agencies to normalize workflows between EDIFACT or NDC. Otherwise, it's very inefficient and it's degrading from a user experience standpoint. The solution now is sort of primed for market. The one important piece is those 42 carriers, while that's less than 10% of the carriers to whom we're connected, it accounts for nearly 80% of the total volumes we do. It's most of the big guys now we have NDC in place. You typically have both NDC and EDIFACT for the same carrier. I think you're gonna see NDC continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate.

Certain carriers do it's very important to them. Certain, it's less strategically important. It will, let's say it grew at between 50% and 100% last year in terms of its adoption. You'll see it continue to grow at that sort of rate going forward. It will still be the minority portion of our bookings for the foreseeable future, but it's very important to the buyer or the agency, they should be relatively indifferent as to how we source that content. It doesn't matter, it should not matter to them whether it was an EDIFACT API or an NDC API. We normalize all that on their behalf. The economics are relatively consistent. For them, it's about how do they run an efficient business, and we worry about that on the back end.

I think it's gonna become an increasingly important part. The other thing, which I mentioned earlier, is in COVID, and especially Sabre was late to the game on NDC, as we've talked about previously. We've now caught up and surpassed most folks. Certain OTAs are connected to large airlines. You saw Amadeus have some level of reintermediation of those segments over the last two years. You're gonna see us begin to do the same with OTAs as well. As OTAs realize that managing direct connects is quite complex and cost inefficient and not necessarily what drives traffic and margin for them, and they realize that we can do it better. You're gonna see that as part of the growth as well.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. You mentioned NDC economics are relatively similar. Were you talking about, you know, one travel buyers, suppliers? Is that for you as well? How does that impact your economics?

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah, I mean, the way I would think about NDC is through most of the globe, what I'd say is the incentive might be the booking fee might be slightly lower, the incentive slightly lower. Maybe the margin, through most of the globe is, you know, flat to slightly lower. The exception is gonna be in the EMEA region, where average booking fees tend to be higher. For us, that represents, you know, only 16% of our bookings. Overall, as we look at it, we don't see significant impact on economics from NDC and actually view NDC more as an opportunity. That's included in our guide that we provided. It is the expectation that NDC from where we are, from the 4% we ended last year, will be growing more significantly now going forward than it has in the past.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Connecting that, Mike, to revenue per booking, your average booking fee was over $6 for the year and finished the year at $6.31. How much of that increase is driven by mix versus other revenue streams when you do the calculation, think about payments, and is that level of booking fee sustainable or because of NDC, we should expect it to move lower?

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah. Our guidance for this year for 2026 was for booking, for air distribution bookings growth in the mid-single digits and revenue in the mid-single digits. That kind of implies that booking fee is expected to be roughly flat year-over-year. We do expect it to be roughly flat. There's a combination of puts and takes. One is we have seen favorable mix trends, which do seem to be holding. NDC, is a slight, you know, is slightly lower there. After that, certain of the products we sell, particularly hotel, B2B through our GDS, that comes at a higher average booking fee and a higher average margin, also payments. All of that adds to our booking fee coupled with a favorable mix, and so that's more than offsetting, the impact on booking fee in NDC.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Yeah. Two things just to cite within distribution. We disclosed in the last call that our land, ground and sea are our non-air distribution bookings. We did more than $20 billion of turnover and about $350 million of revenue last year. Payments, we haven't broken out the revenue there, but we do $20+ billion in turnover now on our payment solutions, and we'll likely begin to break that out from a revenue standpoint at some point this year. Those are becoming more meaningful contributors to our business.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about some IT solutions. maybe how you think about IT solutions.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Yeah.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Distribution. I mean, distribution now is like 80% of revenue and has been growing consistently. IT solutions, 20% and has been declining for the last few years. What's the strategic importance.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Yeah.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Of each of these businesses?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Both are very important to us, and we think both have good long-term prospects. In distribution, think about it this way, which is it's a fairly mature market for air distribution. It's one, how do you take as much share as you can? How do you grow the addressable market, which we're doing through NDC and LCC? How do you attach other high-value items such as hotel and payments? That's really what underlies the strategy there. On airline IT, that's a very sticky business when you're in with the customer. Now, Sabre, until a couple of years ago, was selling pretty old technology in its SabreSonic solution. That's a monolithic PSS. As a consequence of that, we were competing against Amadeus Altéa, which was a legacy solution, but less legacy than SabreSonic.

There was a consistent pattern pre-COVID, in the early stages of COVID, where we were losing head-to-head. We haven't lost a customer in two and a half years. We're now winning. What you saw in the P&L was still the effect of certain folks that had demigrated. We've built a new platform called Sabre Mosaic, which is a modular AI-infused, sort of best-in-class platform for offer and order. We're getting tremendous feedback. We're selling the offer component of that very aggressively in the market. Not a lot of folks are going down the order route yet. That's more like an ERP. You know, you're displacing that. We expect over time that that's gonna sell very well. One of the key differences here is there's not gonna be a lot of PSS migrations happening in the market.

We're migrating Hawaiian back to Sabre's PSS starting in Q2. I think that's gonna be an anomaly. Folks now, if they transition, are gonna transition onto the newer offer and order platforms. We have more modules in production than any other technology provider in the world, including Amadeus. The other benefit is it's very difficult to get somebody to say, "I'm gonna replace my entire monolithic ERP system." When you say you can just implement the modules you want, and our system is an OPI system, it's very easy for them to pick and choose that. Now, one of the key challenges we have is that our largest competitor in this space has a monopolistic position, and they behave in certain ways that we believe are anti-competitive. We've got to crack the code on that, which we're aiming to do.

We think when we do that, we're gonna unlock a significant amount of airline demand for the Sabre Mosaic solutions. We've indicated that that business will grow at a mid-single-digit revenue growth this year. We think over time, that can become a high-growth part of the business, subject to unlocking that piece. The last thing I'll say is for both pieces, agentic AI is a significant opportunity. In the airline IT world, you've seen us go to market with, for example, Virgin Australia embed capabilities within ChatGPT. That's Sabre technology that is available to every carrier in the world now. In the distribution business, I think what we've announced, for example, with PayPal and Mindtrip, is a proxy for what you're gonna see us do in the market with lots of other agentic technology platforms. We think that will be a significant growth opportunity for the company.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Does Sabre Mosaic make you more competitive for potential new customers? Or is there also a motion to go back into your base and transition your existing customers onto the new platform?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

It was very interesting. About two and a half years ago, we made the decision that we were gonna focus our development of Sabre Mosaic first and foremost on improving the relationships with our existing customers and taking them on that journey. Most of the sales and the engagement activity has been around our existing customer base. We've had pretty good success there. Now we're seeing a lot of inbound interest from non-Sabre IT customers, and the aim is to begin to grow that. We needed a referenceable customer base in order to take this beyond the confines of Sabre, and that was really the approach, so.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Is there a financial impact when your existing customers move over from your legacy over to Sabre Mosaic? What's the economic [crosstalk] impact?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

It's. Yeah, the old model is largely a PB model. You're paying per booking or per passenger. It's a weird construct for a technology relationship. You know, you're typically paying license fees or something different. We'd like to move that to more of a value-added or value-sharing agreement. Some airlines are gonna be wedded to the PB model, some are gonna be more open in terms of what that looks like. On the offer side especially, the solutions that we are building and that we have in market, which are, again, all infused with Google's Vertex and Gemini AI capabilities, allow significant revenue uplift for the carriers. We'd like to be able to share in that.

We think there is the opportunity over time to improve the revenue per transaction or the revenue quality that we have with customers. The other thing is, you know, how do we sell the broader spectrum of things that they're looking for versus an all-in approach is you sell componentized technology. We do think on both a unit basis and a volume basis, there's revenue uplift opportunity.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah. As we talked about on our earnings call, as you look this year, we expect revenue per quarter for Air IT to be between the range of $140 million-$150 million. As you get to the back part of the year for a couple reasons, we expect to see that exhibiting nice trends of growth. One is in the second quarter, we do expect the transition of a lot of the Hawaiian PBs back onto the Alaska platform. Also the sell-through of the Sabre Mosaic AI offer products, which is incremental to our existing product offerings, will be additive to our revenue base, particularly as we get through the back part of this year. We've actually talked about for Air IT this year, which I think is the first year since Kurt and I have been at American, no it is, we expect revenue growth in the mid-single digits for Air IT this year, which is a definitive turnaround from where we've been.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Excellent. I wanna spend a minute talking about gross margins and some of the various pressures on gross margin, which I think is guided to 56%-57% for this year.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Mm-hmm.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Any way to break out how much is NDC, how much is FX? Then coming back to agentic, how much is just higher look-to-book?

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

A couple things. The higher look-to-book, first of all, any of that is gonna show up in your hosting line, and that's gonna show up in the technology line. As I look at what's impacted margin, there's really a few things that have impacted margin. One is we have won significant enterprise business on the agency side. That's come with significant volumes, but some of it does come with a slightly lower margin. Second, the currency impact has had a very negative impact with the dollar depreciation from an FX standpoint. The NDC component's actually been relatively small to date because it hasn't grown that significantly. It only ended this year at 4%, but we do expect it to grow more significantly. We don't break out the piece parts of it, but those are the contributors.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

I think Mike has said that, we expect to be able to hold that level of gross margin going forward.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yes

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

For the foreseeable future.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Let's talk about the inflation offset program that you mentioned, Kurt, or in your opening remarks. You've got this program basically to keep technology and SG&A flat over the next two to three years. How do you accomplish that? What are the sources of savings?

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Sure. A couple things. Yeah, as you mentioned, our goal is to keep it roughly flat, you know, with the obviously exception of volume-related hosting costs. The way we think about it is first and foremost important to support our growth strategies and our push into our agentic AI-related products and offerings. With that, as I think about them, let me think about what's the best way to answer this.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Well, the simple answer is, we've said this publicly, we're doing three primary things.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah.

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

One is we're gonna take advantage of best-in-class geographies from a.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Standpoint. Two is we're leaning into development partnerships that we have. Three is we're dramatically leveraging AI capabilities to improve productivity and throughput of our employee base. One anecdote I will offer in doing this is there are certain places where we're reducing headcount, is we've actually increased our engineering resources overall in the last year, and we're adding 400 to 500 engineers this year. You'll have more engineers a year from now than you do today for the enterprise because we hold R&D relatively sacrosanct.

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

In terms of the impact of the business over time. Innovation is fundamental to our ability to grow. We're reshaping this company for not the company we're proud of that we were, but the company we wanna be going forward and making sure that we have a cost profile that enables us to invest at pace. The consequence is we're gonna get more throughput going forward from an engineering and tech standpoint tomorrow than we did yesterday. Then we basically, as we've said, while we're holding costs constant, you'll see SG&A basically go down a bit this year, but be flattish over the next couple of years. Technology will rise slightly, but that's all on account of our expectation of volume increases. Otherwise, technology can be relatively constant. That allows our gross profit growth to flow right down, which we think is very important given our balance sheet.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Excellent. Let's talk about free cash flow, which you've guided to -$70 million, but that includes $60 million of restructuring costs. Sort of putting the pieces together, your top line is growing-- should, you know, expected to grow mid-single digits over multiple years. Your costs, we just talked about, are gonna be, you know, relatively flat, maybe some growth around hosting. You put those pieces together and so we should expect free cash flow to inflect in 2027. Like, what's the message, particularly to investors that, you know, are looking at across your capital structure?

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah. That's exactly right. Our expectations based on our internal growth strategy is that bookings, similar to this year, is likely to grow mid-single digits in 2027. With that, we'd see revenue generally growing in concert with that. As we've articulated, we're targeting to keep our technology, except for hosting cost and SG&A, roughly flat. We expect really good flow-through from gross profit to adjusted EBITDA. We don't have the repeat of the restructuring cost this year. With a growing EBITDA, we would expect to generate more free cash flow, and we would expect it to be positive next year. Obviously for us that's very critical because the most important use of free cash flow for us is to ultimately delever our balance sheet. We think this creates a really strong path to free cash flow generation in the future and further delevering on our balance sheet.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

You've accomplished a lot from a liability management perspective. Your maturities are pushed out. What's left to do? Is there anything left to do on your near-term to-do list?

Mike Randolfi
CFO, Sabre

Yeah. Thank you for the question. I think we're actually fairly well-positioned right now. If we look at how we ended the year, we had $910 million of cash in our balance sheet. Of that $910 million, $98 million is basically to pay off some debt in the Q1 as a result of the last financing. We really have $812 million of usable cash on our balance sheet. At the same time, as you just articulated, we have a clear path to positive free cash flow generation. Our next large maturity isn't until June of 2029. We think that the best focus right now for us as a company is really focus internally on our growth strategy, support our growth initiatives, focus on execution. We think we're in a really good place right now at the moment and aren't compelled to do anything from a capital structure standpoint.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

That's great. Any questions from the audience? Do we have a mic? Thank you.

Speaker 4

Yeah, a couple questions. First one is just around the dynamics on a potential bid for the company. Number one, are you guys going to sort of run a process now that you have this interest from Constellation, other bidders? Number two, do you think antitrust prevents Travelport or from getting involved here? Number three, with respect to the capital structure, can it roll over?

Kurt Ekert
CEO, Sabre

Yeah, I would, As I said at the outset, I'm not gonna comment on rumors or speculation. We're very focused on running the business. I think we articulated in the press release that we remain open to appointing Constellation to a seat on the board, subject to reaching agreement with them. I would just say, generally, we invite intelligent capital that makes sense for the company and for its shareholders, but that's something that we'll consider only if we receive it. We're not running an active process today.

Josh Baer
Executive Director and Software Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

All right. We're just about out of time. Want to thank you, Kurt, thank you, Mike, for the conversation. Really appreciate it.

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