Good morning, everyone. Welcome to SAIC's 2023 Investor Day. We are genuinely excited to be with you today and talk about our strategy and financial targets. You know, we've made a lot of progress over the past couple of years. We feel like this is occurring at a really exciting, positive time for us and obviously positive for our shareholders as well. Hopefully you got to take a look at some of our demos next door, and the next time you see a drone up in the air, you'll think about it a little bit differently. We're gonna make forward-looking statements today. I refer you to our SEC filings for a discussion of those risks.
We will start with presentations from Nazzic, our CEO, Bob Genter, and Michael LaRouche, who are two sector presidents, and wrap up with Prabu discussing our financial targets. We'll have a lunch to finish up the day. If you wouldn't mind, this event's being recorded, so if you could mute your cell phones and MP3 players, that would be that'd be great. With that, I'll turn it over to our CEO, Nazzic Keene.
Good morning. How many folks got to stop in to the demo room? Great. Fabulous. Fabulous. Thank you all for joining us. Thanks for joining earlier this morning, and thanks for joining us today. We're really excited, as Joe said, to be able to share with you a bit more about SAIC. As I mentioned in the call last week, for those of you that listened in, we have three objectives for the day. One, to provide all of you with a better understanding of who we are, our key leaders, and our differentiated capabilities and solutions. Two, to provide you with a view of our longer term strategy and our multi-year financial targets. Three, you're going to hear this term a lot today, discuss our commitment to being an asset-light technology integrator driving shareholder value through focused capital deployment. Those are our three objectives.
Hopefully, at the end of the day, we've met those for you. That's our intent, if we bundle in what we accomplished, earlier today as well. Before we jump in, I want to take a moment to introduce the executive leadership team at SAIC. One of my goals, and I was very public about this, when I took on the CEO role almost four years ago, was to build the best leadership team in the industry at all levels of leadership in the company, and I believe we've done just that. I'm a little biased, but I think you'll find that we have exceptional leaders leading this company for you.
As Joe mentioned, you're gonna hear from a few of us today over the course of the next couple hours, but since we don't have time for everybody to present, I'd like you to put a face with a body, a real, live breathing body. I'm gonna ask that the ELT please stand up. Thank you very much. It's a privilege to work with you all every day. I thought I'd take a minute to introduce myself. Many of you know me, but I've had the honor and privilege of leading SAIC, as I mentioned, as the CEO for almost four years. I've been with the company since just before we spun out from our former parent, so about 11 years.
I spent my entire 30-plus year career, pretty soon I'm gonna have to add another digit to that, but I'm still saying 30-plus, in the technology services profession. I started my career with what was a pioneer in this industry. Does anybody in the, in the room remember a company called EDS? Anybody that old? Not very many people, so me. And I started off as a software engineer, believe it or not. But I wasn't very good. After a week of crashing Blue Cross Blue Shield systems, they're batched back in the day, you had to do batch systems, and I wrote some code. I did a fix that didn't work, and the system was down. But I was able to kinda rally the team to solve it for me 'cause I couldn't solve it.
My supervisor and me both decided that technical engineering wasn't gonna be my forte. I was much better at bossing people around. My realm as a leader started in my mid-twenties, and I've been in leadership ever since, and absolutely love it. I've had the privilege of leading organizations in professional services that really have focused on almost every industry vertical you can think of. I have to say that leading SAIC is my greatest honor, my greatest privilege, and the best job I've ever had. This organization is driven by mission, driven by purpose, and that makes us different than any company I've been part of. Let's jump in.
Given this audience, we thought we'd start with the financials 'cause that's what you guys wanna hear about, and we're gonna do it by jumping forward about 3 years. I'll provide the summary view, and you'll see it here on the slide in your deck, of where we believe we're gonna be in fiscal year 2026. Prabu is gonna provide, of course, much more of the detail on how we get there as an asset-light technology integrator. All of our assumptions that we're making in my presentation and in the following presentations assume the successful divestiture of our Supply Chain business, which we spoke about last week. Every time I look up to look at you guys in the back, I cannot see anymore, so I apologize. It's very bright.
As you can see, we expect to deliver 2%-4% revenue growth over the next 3 years, while also improving our margins from 8.8% in fiscal year 2023 to a range of 9.5%-9.7%. About half of that improvement comes from the portfolio items that we discussed in the last call, that's principally the Supply Chain divestiture. Half is coming from a continued mix in our portfolio, driving greater GTA to reaching about 40% of our revenues and other organic internal margin improvement initiatives. Ultimately, we expect that to result in about $515 million of free cash flow, which should translate to roughly $11 a share. Most importantly, especially for you all in the room, we'll allocate that to drive long-term shareholder value.
As our guidance for fiscal year 2024 reflects, we expect that to be biased towards our share repurchase program while also maintaining sufficient capacity for capability or solutions-oriented M&A. As Prabu we'll discuss, we expect the path forward around our targets, our revenue, our margin improvement to be fairly linear over the next three years. We're starting out strong in fiscal year 2024 with 3% organic growth and 50 basis points of margin expansion and over 10% increase in free cash flow. Given the sales and business development success that we've had and the energy and the enthusiasm that I see and I feel across the enterprise, we're excited, and you're going to hear that from all of us. We're really excited about the opportunities we see to drive meaningful value for our shareholders.
Let's jump back to today and talk about the path to get there. We are fundamentally a services company, so our company success has to start with our people, our culture, and the values that we live by every day. You're going to hear this constantly as a theme throughout the next few speakers. We have clarity of purpose, clarity of vision, our mission, and our values. Hopefully, you got a chance to hear a bit of that from our speakers in the other room earlier today, as everything we do and the culture we're so proud of is underpinned by these attributes. It's what makes us who we are, it what makes us SAIC proud, and what drives the trust and the confidence that our customers place in us every day.
You've seen this slide for the last few quarters. We continue to show it because it's such an important part of our strategy. It's a strategy to be a leader in our industry. We have focused in all these areas over the recent years. I'm going to highlight just a couple of things. We're focused on providing differentiated employee benefits while keeping healthcare premiums costs for our employees flat. That has not been an easy task these last couple of years. We had a couple of conversations earlier in the day with a couple of you around our flexibility model. We continue to pro-promote flexibility and very much make work from home an option when it works for the employee and it works for the business. We believe this provides unique value for our employees and ultimately our customers.
Our shareholders, of course, benefit as we continue to rationalize our real estate footprint. We continue to drive labor efficiency while ensuring that we look for ways to improve our hiring practices. This could take the form of hiring to a skill set versus in a specific job rec or finding ways to proactively transition talented employees off of programs that might be ending to new programs where we need great talent. We've been purposeful in our drive to create an inclusive and diverse company. We developed and communicated ambitious goals, and we measure ourselves against these every day. This past year, I'm so proud to say that we achieved parity in our women leadership ranks as compared to our general population years ahead of our schedule. We've increased our leadership in people of color by 21% over the last three years.
A strong and deliberate people strategy is a critically important part of our business strategy in driving profitable organic growth. We see measurable results as this part of our strategy, as demonstrated when we check our employees and employee engagement, and we measure our retention scores. I want to transition now from our employees to the journey we've been on with our shareholders over these past 10 years and a bit about our strategy going forward. As some of you may recall, and I mentioned, we completed our spin-out from our former parent in 2013. It's hard to believe it's been almost 10 years. We were incredibly fortunate to retain the SAIC brand and the SAIC name as it has been and remains a trusted brand with our employees and our customers.
Jumping back 10 years, we were roughly $3 billion in revenue and around 6% EBITDA margins, give or take $1, of course. We used M&A over the next several years to broaden our customer reach, broaden our market access, increase our scale and capacity, and improve margins. As we sit here today in beautiful New York City, we believe we have sufficient scale in our market and don't see a significant advantage from any further scale. We expect our capital deployment strategy over the next few years to focus on returning capital to shareholders through our repurchase program while maintaining capacity for more solution-oriented M&A, as we always look to strengthen our competitive advantage in this market. This is how we've approached M&A these last couple of years, and it served us very well.
We've seen some encouraging traction with customers as we've been able to bring innovative new solutions and capabilities to advance their mission requirements. Hopefully, you got to see a couple examples of that in the room next door this morning. It's really a great way to demonstrate our understanding and our strategy in this area. Our strong free cash flow and balance sheet flexibility will allow us to continue to invest internally and in M&A and ventures while returning substantial capital to our shareholders. Over $1.3 billion planned by fiscal year 2026. We expect to reduce our share count by roughly 10 million shares by fiscal year 2026 since our repurchase program began in fiscal year 2022. Again, we expect to execute this while continuing to invest in capabilities that will help us drive growth.
The investments we've made in recent years and the strong heritage of SAIC contribute to the broad alignment we see across the portfolio in markets with strong demand and enduring growth. Going forward, you should expect to see us continue to invest in these areas. As an example, we've talked a fair amount about our secure cloud market and our CloudSend solution. That's been a critical differentiator in some of our recent sales success and most recently TCloud, which Bob will touch on shortly. CloudSend is a solution where we see continued opportunities to invest and further differentiate ourselves in the market. Importantly, these are asset-light, software-based solutions where we can leverage our role as a technology integrator to quickly offer our customers what they need, the technology, the solutions they need to support their missions today. We don't intend to differentiate with hardware.
That's not what our customers want from SAIC. They want technology at speed and a trusted integrator, so that's where we're investing. The good news is we continue to see a solid addressable market with stable long-term growth to invest behind. It's really easy to get caught up in a lot of the concern and the noise and the drama around the near-term budget dynamics and the political uncertainty. We all do. Behind that is a market that has historically been very resilient, particularly in times of macroeconomic stresses. We're not naive to believe there won't be any consequences from some of the fiscal pressures facing our customers and our nation. However, we see strong alignment with enduring areas in the market where we continue to take actions to align our portfolio in just that manner.
As we've outlined over the last several quarters, we expect our GTA areas of our business strategy to grow at a faster rate than our core over the coming years. That's a function of the market and the spending trends that we're seeing our customers take on, and it's a function of where we're investing to win. We also want to highlight how our focus areas directly align with our innovation factories. These are our internal R&D functions tasked with building the solutions and capabilities the business needs to differentiate to win and to execute more efficiently. You got to see many of these in the room next door this morning. One thing to highlight is these revenue metrics aren't a perfect science, much to our CFO's frustration.
For example, there's secure cloud contracts where, of course, comes with it some enterprise IT. Of course, the opposite is also true. We're doing our best to measure this particular aspect of our strategy because we know what gets measured gets done. We'll continue to share with you our progress over the coming years. As I mentioned earlier, we see a great path towards driving our GTAs to roughly 40% of our revenues by fiscal year 2026. You're gonna hear some of that, of course, from the sector leadership as well. It's supported. We have great proof points and some recent wins. We also look as a leading indicator, the composition of our pipeline over the next three years. We have great confidence in our ability to do that.
We believe this strategy is right for our shareholders as well because it offers the best long-term returns, the potential for great differentiation in our market, it's positioned, as I mentioned, against the enduring demand of our federal government space. In addition to the higher margins that GTA offers, it is consistent with our commitment to maintaining our capital light business model and being a best-in-class technology integrator. We believe the competitive dynamics in our industry have created a great opportunity for SAIC as this technology integrator. Now, some of our peers have elected a different path, more focused on products, more focused on hardware, of course, the capital intensity that comes with that. We don't believe we need to rely on that particular aspect of the strategy.
We believe and are confident that we can do it with technology, with our speed to market with the technology, our deep mission knowledge, and we're proving we can be successful. As I wrap up, I want to leave you with my top priorities. First and foremost, our culture is critical to our success. You'll hear that from everybody who speaks, and we're gonna protect the best parts of our culture while advancing and strengthening the core of who we are. We will never stand still. We want to use incentive compensation as a tool to drive performance and create this owner's mindset that we're developing inside of SAIC. Because when we win, when the investors win, we win. You're gonna hear a great deal more about this from Prabu, and this has been something that we've been transforming over the last few years.
We're gonna continue to drive profitable organic growth, but not growth at any cost. In addition to this being critical for our shareholders, it's fundamental to our employee experience and in advancing our customers' mission. You should expect us to remain capital light. If you take nothing away from these next couple hours, remember that part. We believe we can differentiate this model, and we're proving that we can. You should expect our capital deployment to be focused on the highest ROI. We're gonna remain very focused and very disciplined when it comes to M&A, with a bias towards our repurchase program. I look forward to the next couple of speakers. I look forward to joining you back on stage as we take Q&A here in a few short minutes. With that, I'll turn the stage over to Bob Genter.
Thank you, Nazzic. I think my job is twofold. One, to introduce myself and explain where I came from and what I lead. The other is to try to provide a bridge between the strategy statements and the financial statements that Prabu will make a little later, make some context around the contracts that we have and how they relate. You know, what is the GTA? How does it relate to winning jobs and providing value to our customers? All right, I will start with the team and I'll give a little background about me. The team overall, I've got 4 leaders that run P&Ls inside the organization. Michael has 3. They run the full P&L for SAIC. It's all of the customers.
We are designed on a customer-based model, all work that we do with the Army as an example, rolls into an organization that Josh Jackson runs. It's a mix of people that came from outside and people that have long histories within SAIC. We have leads for business development, looking at large scale programs, making sure that we take the best out of the overall enterprise, and we go after those giant programs that can't be looked at at the individual account level because they're just too big for those individual accounts to handle on their own. The enterprise needs to take in everything that's needed for the company, everything that's needed for that account, and we choose which large programs to go after.
Deep history inside of each one of these organizations, the relationships with customers, and the program delivery sit inside of here. I'll back up. I'm responsible for the Defense and Civilian business. I came from CGI, and before that AMS. I started my career out of grad school in the finance organization. We did a bunch of restructurings, and in the restructuring timeframe, it was all the BUs that were underperforming. I'd step in, I would help do the restructuring. We'd get it back onto a stable path for performance, and then we'd replace that team with business leaders. After 12 or so of those, I asked to step into a P&L role. I wanted to not be the hatchet guy. I wanted to actually grow something.
Eventually I was allowed to take over some of that organization. Started in commercial, in the South. We were geographically based. It was mostly telecom, insurance companies, manufacturing. It was primarily IT outsourcing, global delivery models, BPO, and it was on that side of the house that we really grew up in kind of running this business. My last job at CGI, I was in the Northeast. I was responsible for the work in New York and Boston. Lots of banking, lots of insurance companies.
Again, it was global delivery and some exciting stuff where we had a lot of Indian pure play competition, and we figured out how to kind of refine that model and build a platform that could go across multiple customers and deliver kind of at scale. I was asked to join SAIC right before the spin. We knew the spin was happening. They needed to round out the management team, and I think that the intent was to bring in that commercial mindset to be able to run pieces of the business. Came in, ran a small portfolio for a couple of years, then moved into the Federal Civilian business. Took that on in 2016. That was about a $900 million business at the time.
We ran that really well for a period of time from a growth perspective and then stepping up margins. It really was hitting replay on the commercial side of delivering IT services to customers. The federal government didn't have deep knowledge, didn't have a history of doing managed services. We showed up with a managed services platform that we built on the back of our State and Local business. It was this revolutionary way of delivering that some of the civilian customers that came from industry for a stint in the government, they were interested in seeing this because they saw it in their commercial entities and now they were in a, you know, 2-3 year run with the government, and they were interested in trying to make a mark inside the government.
Some of them were interested in playing this. We did well. We won a few of these jobs, and we started to pick up a couple of deals per year that were good size. You have $300 million-$500 million a pop and started to put up really good growth numbers. They also were first-generation outsourcing of that type of work, and that first generation comes in with good margins. It's where you're teaching the customer how to accept a delivery model as opposed to counting the numbers of people that are sitting inside of the organization. The more efficient you get, the more money you make.
It then turns into second generation, it gets a little bit more tight over time, and that's the model that we are in now with lots of our customers. Inside of that, we also had the integration of Engility. I was with partner, with Mark, I was responsible for the synergies on the Engility integration across the company. That was a really fun exercise to be able to get a bunch of costs out of the organization, but it was back to kind of restructuring and getting cost out. A couple of years later, we did the Unisys integration. Unisys came fully into the civilian business. We integrated there for about a year.
Did full integration there, after that year, we divided it up and moved it into the proper homes with the individual customers. At that point, Nazzic decided that she was going to move the defense portfolio over, and I was responsible for both defense and civilian. The defense side of the equation had a 4 or 5-year run where it was kind of low grade, negative growth rates. Civilian was running at a relatively positive growth rate. The very fast statement was, "You need to get this back to growth." We did that. Last year was the first time we put up growth out of defense. We did it again this year. We've got a projection that we will be able to grow it going forward as well.
It's really cool to have an organization that was this low-grade anchor that was challenging for growth, to be able to turn that and turn it into something that at least is contributing, and we can see if we can amp that up over time, which is real exciting for the team to be part of that. Inside the organization, the P&Ls, each of those P&Ls, again, are responsible for delivery of the programs, customer relationships, sorting through pipeline to ensure that we have the best opportunities, and for the growth inside of the accounts themselves. If you look at the portfolio, there's about $4 billion of revenue overall inside this portfolio. We run at about 9.3% margins. And we've got a pretty high backlog relative to the company.
It really is based on that Huntsville business that we have. You know, you guys would probably remember it being called the AMCOM business. It's now called S3I. There's a real big base of business down there that we've got, very long tails on those contracts, and therefore it gives us a nice backlog on that. It's a little bit larger backlog number. The GTA number at 35%, this is really on the back of us moving some of the commoditized work that we've had in the past, getting more and more into delivering solutions for our customers, delivering managed services on IT contracts, and then delivering a thing of value to a customer on the DoD and engineering side. If you divide it up into the civilian, Army, and Navy, they're reasonably even split.
The civilian business, previous slide, there were two people that run civilian. We've got the Healthcare business, state and local, and federal financials. That's a separate organization for us. Those are three really outsized opportunities for us that we've underserved historically, therefore we wanna make sure we've got focus on that. We pay attention to it, we've carved it out. We've got it elevated, so that way we look at it differently from an investment profile, a return profile. It makes some of the highest margins inside the company, it's got the largest kind of protected markets, if you will. A lot of those markets are in the entitlement space, which means they don't have as much budgetary swing. You hear a lot about the dynamics inside of healthcare.
Those dynamics politically really do swing left to right on individual programs inside of healthcare. If you look at the overall healthcare, that's usually not touched. It usually has a nice healthy growth path. The politics really is, you know, left pocket, right pocket within those same accounts. The growth rate is, again, stabilized last year. Nazzic talked about the overall budgets and whether or not those should be concerning or not. Obviously, any kind of macro challenge in the budget creates more pressure for us.
As an example of how we can thrive in a market that has challenges at the macro level, but at the micro level, we can do well, the Army business unit was our fastest-growing business unit in the company, and that is one that historically has been known to be the bill payer inside of DoD. We have the ability to be able to grow inside of each of these markets as long as we pick the right missions and we're aligned to what is the enduring side of that budget line item. We're not too big that we only resort to whatever the budget line item is, but we're not too small that it doesn't have that pressure. The pressure does have an impact on us on a macro level.
The organization also, an easy way to think about this, it's roughly 50/50 engineering and IT. Our historical base of business on the civilian side is the IT side of the house. We grew up there. The recent wins are on the IT side. And that has built the foundation for the company, for our IT quals. The opposite is true on the DoD side. This is the deepest engineering expertise inside the company. And the opportunity really is how do you cross-sell across the two of those? Putting together defense and civilian isn't necessarily a normal thing that's done inside of our industry.
If you think about some of the big recent wins that we've had inside of the DoD, they are on the IT side of the equation, where we took all of the really cool people that have that IT knowledge on the civilian side. We applied them to the DoD mission challenges on the IT, we've won some big jobs over there. The other part that's really good is that's the capitalization of the Unisys acquisition for us. Unisys came in with a couple of really big quals on the defense side. Those quals have opened up that market.
They've opened up that door, and therefore, even though we're a $7 billion company, if you think about the new markets for us, the IT side of this over the last three years in DoD, it's really the first foray that we've taken into that space, and it's got a lot of opportunity for us long term. I'm getting used to these numbers, because this $4 billion, it was $4.8 billion recently. This is where the Supply Chain business was. This is also where the FSA deconsolidation was. Probably we can give you a lot of details on that. It's about $800 million combined between the two of them on an annual run rate perspective. The FSA one is perfect, right? It's right on the fiscal year and therefore very clean, easy for you guys.
The Supply Chain really does depend on when we close, right? That's just a timing-based answer as to what'll happen this year. Long term, you should think about it as about $800 million between the two of those that came out of this portfolio, and it's a 100% impact to the enterprise that way. The next slide, I'm gonna tell a story down the center of the next slide on the wins, and this is the translation of the strategic themes on the left and the differentiators on the right. I'll pick a handful of these that are gonna be the most interesting to you. Army S3I, it's a little bit dated, but it's a big enough one that you guys would care about it. So $8.1 billion across 4 contracts.
This is the Huntsville portfolio, again, used to be called AMCOM. Great relationships, really good depth of customer mission. The team did an incredible job outperforming all expectations. All of our work was being broken up into 4 different pieces, so it's a real nerve factor when that happens. We expected to be able to pull off 3 of them, the question was: how do you, how do you figure out which piece of this is the most important, which piece is the least important? It's not just about the scale either, it's about the importance of the work.
The team ran the table, therefore locked down really good work, great quals, some of the biggest past performance in the entire company, and these go out to 2025 to 2029, depending on the contract, you know, a very good stable base of business there. Treasury T-Cloud. I did my prep yesterday on this, I was told I was only allowed to say T-Cloud 5 times. I love this program. It is super exciting for us. This is really capitalizing on the pieces of IP that we brought in with Unisys, the investments that we've made through our organization and IRAD and other programs that we have in the cloud space. This is our vision of the multi-cloud future inside of all of our customers.
We do not believe that many customers will have a single place to put things. They're not gonna go to Amazon and just do Amazon. They're not gonna go to Microsoft and just do Microsoft. There's going to be specialty built environments inside of each of those, and someone, us, will need to be there to be able to help adjudicate where the right place is for each one of those software packages, and then we can do the work to be able to move that work along. That work is super cool. It is based on that sliver of technology that we have called CloudSend. That is an asset light model, but it's not asset free.
It is a really cool sliver of technology that differentiates us against our competition, as we have something that is useful and tangible for the customer to be able to use. The RITS contract is a good one to explain. How do you take a customer that's not ready to buy, in a managed services way, but they want to get there over time? A lot of times our customers will talk to us about this long-term journey where they want the outcome to be the answer on the IT contracts. It takes time for the acquisition shop, and it takes time for contracts to be able to follow that. This is a contract that was done LPTA in the last iteration. It was not done LPTA this time.
It was cost plus. We shaped it. Inside the contract, there is the ability to convert individual scopes of work over to a fixed price. It's a crawl, walk, run. In theory, we'll see if it happens. In theory, the next iteration, they'll trust us enough to be able to take it fully fixed price. That's when all of a sudden you can get efficiencies for the customer, you can get performance differences for the customer. We can start making a different level of money off of it because all of the efficiencies get shared with the customer. You get to keep some for the company. Mark 48 is a great example of one that we have today. Then I'll tie it back to counter-UAS as well.
This is the asset-light, platform-agnostic, where we are helpful for our customers, and we don't have to sell them our wares to make this work. This is the entire model, but it's usually said on the IT side of the house. This is for the engineering side of the house. This is where we have taken services, and we have gone to the customer and said, "Trust us to be able to build something for you and integrate those components together." Counter-UAS is an example of this, the demo in there that you saw, and what we do is software. All we're doing is integrating weapon systems. We're not building the weapon system. You can plug and play anybody's weapon system into this, but we're the software to integrate it to allow for a common environment, common training for a war fighter.
They understand the system and the dynamics of that system, and they don't have to understand the components and how they plug in. We make those components plug in. It allows for whatever environment to be, you can use somebody else's radar, somebody else's laser, somebody else's weapon, and ours is the piece that goes together. We've got the GUI, we've got the software, and we're the one that helps to pick what those technologies are to be able to go together. They can also plug and play whatever technologies they happen to have today, which allows for longer term sustainment of their current systems as well. The second to last one on there is Diamonds to Storm.
These are Army programs, and this is how you can take the land and expand model and be able to move up the food chain inside of a customer. The Diamonds contract in Army, it's engineering services, it's modeling and simulation, it is engineering services. The customer came out with a new contract with a new scope of work, and it was all in the classified space. It was all SCI work. We went after that contract because of the relationships and our depth on Diamonds. We were able to grow into this new contract, heavily competed, but it's an example of where you take one contract that's of a modest size, you can actually grow to a bigger contract as you start to leverage those things.
It's the starting point can be a smaller contract, and then you move into the bigger one over time. My closing one on here is U.S. Marshals Service. This is the sliver of technology that differentiates us to win bigger jobs. $148 million job. This is Koverse. This is using data to be able to make decisions. The original contract came out, staffing. They wanted great analysts, really smart brains, but that ends up with a commoditized solution. Not very good margins. You make, you know, a few dollars off of those resources. We sold also on top of this, the tool Koverse with it. It's a few million dollars. It's not an overly interesting component of the revenue stream, but it made it so we didn't have to compete on price.
We competed on technical, we won it on technical, and we weren't the lowest price. That's the difference when you have that sliver of technology that allows you to be able to stand out against the competition. It makes it so we are a better fit for the customer, and we don't have to dive on price to be able to win these types of jobs. The really exciting close on the Defense and Civilian Sector. For the last three years, we have been in defense. We have been going up against some of the largest competitors that are in takeaway mode for our contracts. I keep on using the word recompete wave. That recompete wave crested last year, and we are now on the back end of that. We are now on offense.
For the last six months and the next year, there is no question that we can go after new work in an aggressive way because a lot of those recompetes are now behind us, and we've got a period of time where we get to be able to hit the gas as opposed to watch the rearview mirror. I think the same level of excitement will come from Michael in presenting the NSS, and I think he's up next.
Hello, everyone. I'm Michael LaRouche. I'm pretty excited to tell you about the National Security and Space Sector. I joined SAIC after the last Investor Day, just after the close of Engility. I came to SAIC having been a Business Leader at Raytheon Technologies and at Lockheed Martin. Joe DeNardi reminded me as we were preparing for Investor Day, that part of this is you getting to know me as one of the business leaders inside of SAIC. It's a little hard to do here on stage, but I got an idea. Let me tell you a little bit about me. Let's go back. Way back. I graduate with an electrical engineering degree from the University of Michigan. Go Blue. I go to work at a company called Hughes, and I'm very fortunate. I'm working with entrepreneurial technical leaders.
I take my experience in digital signal processing and software development, and I advance in my career, and I get involved with developing these very complex algorithms to solve problems that have oversubscribed resources and they're interrelated. This is a very classical math problem, very hard to do, where the time it takes to get to the answer grows exponentially as the number of variables increases linearly. Basically, the time it takes for you to get to the answer is way longer than you have to make a decision. What do you do? You can get to an answer, you have to study the resources, learn about the resources. You have to learn about the constraints acting upon them, their interdependencies, and all the other forces that are involved with this system.
Once you understand all that, you develop heuristic algorithms that allow you to make high-value decisions within the time that you have. That's how I started out my career, was doing that. Let's fast-forward to today. I'm a successful business leader. I have led businesses in different markets. I've led businesses in different countries. I have developed technology and integrated a wide range of technology. In doing that in my career, I was always asked to, "Michael, would you step in, take over leadership here and deliver a better outcome?" I always said yes, even when other people were like, "You're crazy. That's like career risk. Don't do that." I always did it because I always believed that there was a way to achieve success.
You see, that early work I did in my career where we're trying to optimize the use of resources that are oversubscribed, interrelated, a lot of constraints on the system shaped me deeply. I look at the situation and these different roles that I've been in, customers have problems that are just like this everywhere. Businesses run like this everywhere, right? What I think about what I'm doing is really taking that early learning that I had and applying it in what I'm doing. Let's go to 4 years ago. I join SAIC because I'm busy doing something. I'm building an international cyber solutions business, Nazzic approaches me and bam, like, "Come and join SAIC in a big role." I'm really excited because SAIC has a great reputation, a great reputation with customers and in the market as a technical innovator.
I come to SAIC, and I look at my job now, and my focus is figuring out how to take that great heritage, that great talent that we have in this organization, all the available technology that we have, and deliver greater value for our customers and our shareholders. That's a little bit about me. I'm really excited to get into talking about the sector. In our sector, we have a great leadership team. Really love working with them. There are four key leaders that are represented here on this chart. Bruce Feldman leads up our business development organization. Together, we work to shape the sector to make decisions that align with achieving the goals and objectives of the company. We have three customer-facing organizations that win and execute programs. David Ray leads up our Space business.
This is everything that the company does in the space market. Vinnie DeFronzo leads up our Air Force, DoD commands and agencies. In addition to Air Force, what I'm talking about here is agencies are like Defense Information Systems Agency or the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, sometimes called the Fourth Estate, right? The commands like Central Command, Strategic Command, Special Operations Command. Our last customer-facing organization focuses on the national intelligence community. These leaders are strong business leaders. They come to SAIC having worked in different companies, worked in different industries with different technologies. They are incredibly experienced, and they have this vast know-how that they bring with a passion to think and act boldly with a sense of urgency. It is great to work with them. Let me tell you a little bit more about the sector.
As we finish out FY 2023, we're just under $3 billion of revenue. 35% of that revenue aligns to our growth technology accelerants. We start FY 2024 with a $9 billion backlog. Our margins are just under 9%. It reflects very strong execution across the team. Our contract mix, if you were paying looking at Bob's contract mix, there's a slight difference here. Our contract mix favors cost plus. We have a little bit of a higher margin than you might expect, and that's because of some of the sophisticated technical work that we do in our portfolio. The Space business, which represents about $1.5 billion of revenue, is equally distributed across support to the Defense to Civil and commercial and intel.
Our Air Force, DoD commands and agencies, and our intel organization really focus on those customers and are delivering great value, as I'm gonna tell you about in the next few slides. You heard from Prabu. Actually, you hear from Prabu, now I was like all the time about our company strategy and focus on organic growth and margin increase. These leaders, these organizations are executing strategies to deliver that organic growth, executing strategies to increase our margin. The strategies recognize the fact that it's a complex environment that we have to work in. The strategies are probably a little bit too detailed for me to go through in depth with you today. What I'd like to do is focus on some key strategic growth campaigns. Let me talk you through them here.
Our first strategic growth campaign focuses on the space market. While I'm sure this audience has gotten lots of presentations about companies' strategies in the space market, a plethora of companies, I'm sure are talking about it, I believe few can match the technical depth that is SAIC. I believe that we are the largest systems engineering technical assistance provider to the U.S. government space community. In that role, we learn and are involved with all aspects of space missions, all aspects of space suppliers, all aspects of space operations and systems. We have this great knowledge. In this role, customer intimacy sometimes presents some limitations for us, you know as well as I do that the space market is expanding greatly.
What we're doing is taking our exceptional abilities and knowledge of the space industry, and we're helping new customers in new areas where we're not conflicted. For example, we're helping customers modernize command and control, both on the ground and in the future up in space. Additionally, we have this great systems engineering background. We know all this stuff about all these different space systems. We're migrating and helping customers as their integrator of the space system, whether it be a very large system, which I'll give you a proof point on in the next chart, or very small, like commercial startups. One of the things that we've learned as we've worked in, on our strategies is that there are a lot of commercial startups in the space market. You know that, right?
What they don't have is somebody with the breadth and depth of an SAIC that can help them integrate the whole thing together. Now, very large companies, very large companies in the space market can do this, but they're asset heavy, and we're asset light, and that's why this market is attractive to us. They're attracted to us so that we can help them on their dream, and it's becoming a great thing for us as we go forward, providing opportunities for future value that we'll deliver to our shareholders. Let me go on to our next strategic growth campaign, and it focuses on moving SAIC into a leading role, delivering the vision of JADC2. Yes, SAIC, like many other companies, is involved with helping the DoD achieve the vision of JADC2.
I believe we're taking an approach that you don't hear about very often. SAIC is innovating as a secure data digital integrator between platforms and sensors. Let me say it again. SAIC is innovating as a secure data digital innovator between the platforms and sensors. Let me tell you why this is a great strategy for SAIC. Despite my youthful appearance, I've been doing this a long time. I've been doing the JADC2 when it was called something else a few years ago, and something else a few years ago. The DoD has to go through this because what happens is our adversaries advance their capabilities, and we have to advance our advantage, right? We're going through that cycle again. I think about it, and I think about, well, what was going on last time and the time before. I was involved with this.
Many companies were, right? We did great things, but what we were limited by was the technology that was available to us at that time during that last cycle. What's changed? What's going to make the difference now? Let's be honest. Last time we did this, there wasn't a thing called cloud. We all take it for granted. We're like on fourth generation derivative technologies from cloud. The last time we did this, it just wasn't there. Start there. Think of all the different technologies, big data analytics, moving into AI, machine learning, robotic process automation. All these things have evolved. They're the driving technologies of our market right now, and SAIC is great at them. Maybe we didn't build the platforms, and we don't build the sensor. We are masters of the technology that is going to make the biggest difference right now.
There will be new programs, they're needed for our country, the vast majority of capability is in the inventory. We're focused in our strategy of helping the government figure out how to do more faster with what they've got. We believe these technologies are the things that matter, and it's why we're focused on being the secure data digital integrator. I've got some proof points that I'm gonna share with you as to why this strategy is actually working out very well for SAIC. I wanna also comment that we're not reactive. We're not reactive to what's going on. I would say SAIC is out front, right? Years ago, we invested.
We realized, hey, you know, going to the cloud is not like, oh, I think this weekend I'll move my iCloud photos to back up into the iCloud, or I'll shift to a cloud-based email and calendar system. Moving the government's mission systems into the cloud is very complicated, right? We saw this early on with programs that we were doing with the government. That's why we created CloudSend, because we realized to migrate and modernize in the cloud is a lot of work, and we could automate it, right? That's why we created CloudSend. Hopefully, you saw in the demos we have Morpheus here. Today, we just did a strategic venture with Morpheus. They have a capability that aligns perfectly with our CloudSend, advancing our differentiation in the market, but also advancing the value that we bring to customers. It's really super exciting.
We also realized that when you go to the cloud, people are thinking, "Okay, yeah, but I have secure data." We did a venture partnership with Orca. Hopefully, you saw the demo here, right? Adding that layer of capability way before people were talking a lot about JADC2, we started doing these things. I believe, again, we're out front, whether it's those items or whether it's our Tenjin AI platform, and it was about purchasing Koverse. Right. You hear about it a lot. If you're gonna do this with the government, you're gonna do that secure data innovator, right? You gotta deal with lots of data. Koverse was out front in the market. They have this incredible capability to segment data at the data level.
We can create security boundaries around it and move it all into the cloud, creating an environment where we can develop new applications that work at greater speed so we can do more faster with what we have. I'll tell you some more about some proof points on the next chart. Our third vector... Oops. Can we go back a chart, please? Our third vector for our strategic growth campaigns focuses on leading customers with their IT modernization. You have been following SAIC, so this is not a surprise to you that IT modernization is a passion for SAIC. We do it across the entire portfolio. This sector's team focuses on doing it for our customers. It is a flywheel for SAIC's success. We're bringing in our sector, winning more programs, adding more tech capabilities, adding technical depth to what's already existing for SAIC.
I'll give you some proof points on the next slide. I've been promising you proof points along these three strategies, that they're not just ideas, they're delivering results for SAIC. Let's get to it. On the next chart. I've already summarized the campaigns, right? I wanna point out, we believe these are the right things to do because they align to what's going on in the market, providing a long-term growth value for SAIC with opportunity to expand our margins. Let's start where we left off with modernizing IT. We're working with our customers to shift towards more outcome-based contracts because we know that we can deliver more innovation and customers benefit more when we shift to that environment. We can bring in our AI, machine learning, robotic process automation. How about zero trust, right?
One of our programs, Cloud One, is out front providing this a zero trust secure cloud architecture. As you all know, Cloud One is out in front for the government of a mission-focused, enterprise-focused cloud solution. We're gaining traction, we're producing, and we're delivering great competitive wins. Let me tell you about some of them. First one on the list, Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, DCSA, One IT. You heard about this in the last earning call from Nazzic and Prabu. At that time, you remember we had won this program. It had gone through protest, corrective action for many months, re-awarded to SAIC, and we were in a protest period during the last earnings call. I'm excited to tell you we've made it through that protest period. Our team is off starting this program. It is a great program.
The agency has many IT networks. We're bringing them all together into one and modernizing at the same time. Why did they pick us, right? A lot of competitors do this, right? Why did they pick us? Well, I think what it comes down to is we had proven that we could do this type of work on many other contracts, whether they be for U.S. Central Command and their global network or for the State Department and their global network. We had proven to them that we could do this, operate and modernize and transform their organization. We also, I think what it came down to is we understood their vision of where they wanted to go, and we showed them a highly credible path to get there. I'm super excited for the team that won that.
We also won a program called Cloud Integration and Multi-Cloud Management. This is a program in the intelligence community, and as you're tracking the intelligence community, you know the intelligence community was an early adopter for cloud. Now they're transitioning to a multi-cloud environment. They've brought in us to help them orchestrating across all the different clouds and expanding further across the intelligence community. The third program on the list, we just won. You saw the press announcement, USTRANSCOM. This is an outcome-based contract. We're super excited about it because we're able to deliver transformation for them in an outcome-based way. In those three programs, all aligned to our IT modernization thrust, all three of them started within the last 68 months and are positioned to provide long-term growth for us and increase value for our shareholders. Let me talk about the next one.
Okay, I told you about how we're focused on modernizing C5ISR through the secure data layer, okay? I told you about our strategy. I think it's focused on giving faster outcomes with the inventory that exists, netting together all the data and making it accessible faster. We've had some great and impressive strategic wins that prove out that our strategy, the way we're looking at the market and how SAIC can add differentiated value for our customers, is making a difference. Let's talk about the next programs on the list. DARPA Advanced Capabilities Office and the Defense Innovation Unit, both two different contracts, have awarded us contracts to advance the state-of-the-art of integrated operations for data access, addressing accessibility, speed, security, size, weight, and power.
These are R&D programs by those organizations that we are working with them to advance the state of the art exactly aligned to our strategy. We also had a great year in the Air Force. The Air Force went out to compete their contract for operating their Global Air Operations Center. You might know of it as the Falconer Weapon System, right? We won that program. We're super excited about it. We're already underway. We're doing a great job on that program. We now are the provider of the U.S. Air Force's command and control system. The Air Force created... You know, as you know, the Air Force has the Advanced Battle Management System. That is their organization that's aligned to delivering the vision of JADC2. They created several contracts. First one was a digital integration contract. We are one of the contractors on that.
Really pleased by it, but we also won the highly coveted Cloud-based Command and Control program. Not only did we win the existing program to operate and modernize their command and control system, we won the future to build it up in the cloud. Tremendous trust that the Air Force has placed in us, but I believe we earned it clearly because we offered them a vision and a roadmap and technology that we integrated together to take them there in a reliable way. These programs, just huge success for our customers, are very important, and we know that they're gonna be very important for our shareholders too. Let me go on to the last section here.
I talked with you about, you know, although we're focused on doing more with the, you know, the capability that we have in our sort of JADC2 strategy, we do recognize there are new programs, right, and they're very important for our country. On one of those programs, SAIC won the role as the systems integrator. Right now, I'm talking like the architecture for the whole system and responsible for the performance measures of the whole system. We integrate with the Space segment contractor, and we deliver the ground segment that interacts with the military users. This is a great program. It's a new first-ever classified space program, so I can't get into it, but we call it Liberty Bell on the chart here.
I think one of the exciting things about this is think about where we are, the deep technical breadth of space knowledge, being that systems engineering technical assistance contractor across all of the government. Learning everything that we do, having all this wealth of knowledge, plus all this technology available to us. I told you our strategy was we were gonna find new customers. We were gonna expand to be a systems integrator. This is exactly a proof point, delivering on our strategy. We're well underway on this program. The team, we achieved the first program level milestone on schedule, under cost. It was great success for the whole program.
I highlighted over here on the far right side some key differentiators, but I believe I've woven them into my discussion with you about how we're using our SAIC branded solutions or our ventures with other companies to bring in that combined together differentiated technical value in an asset light environment, how we've built out our digital engineering capability. Next week at Space Symposium, some of you are going to it, we're gonna unveil some other key things that we're doing. You saw the ReadyOne demo over here today of how to actually, you know, build an environment, a digital engineering environment, just like the Space Force wants, scale it across multiple companies. We're gonna take it to the next level and announce it next week at Space Symposium. Hopefully you're there on that.
I have one last thought that I'd like to share with you, right? You see all these wins, and you know, winning, you know, means growth, right? There's something special about these programs that we won that I wanna highlight. Maybe you picked up on it, but let me make it clear. Look down this list of programs here, and I'll call them out. The Cloud Integration of Multi-Cloud, the DARPA programs, the DIU program, the Air Battle Management System, ABMS-DI and ABMS cloud-based C2, and Liberty Bell, they are all brand new programs. They're brand new programs in the government. You know that your technical innovation strategy is working when they picked you to trust with a technical vision to deliver some new capability that's not been there before. I'm really proud of what the team has done in this area.
It's also great value long term for our shareholders. I wanna thank all of you for listening to me today. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take a 10-minute break right now so that you can stretch your legs, but don't go too far, because in 10 minutes, Prabu's gonna take the stage and talk about the finances. Thank you all very much.
Good afternoon, everybody. Can you hear me okay? I'm trying not to look over there. again, really nice to see you all. on behalf of Nazzic and the leadership team, you know, sincerely, I mean, absolutely sincerely appreciate your interest in SAIC, the time you're investing in us, your ownership of the stock, and we want this day to be meaningful for you all, because it is a really meaningful day for us. I'm gonna focus on a handful of themes today. hopefully, we'll start to pull the thread between what you heard from Nazzic, and then Bob, and then Michael. The themes are really pretty simple. Performance matters. That consistency of performance is what defines great companies. Leadership matters.
What you heard from the group today is a demonstration, there are 25,000 of us over there, demonstration that leadership matters at every aspect of running a company. Ownership matters. That means you really have to manage this business for the long-term interests of your shareholders and all your stakeholders. When we perform well, our customers benefit. When our customers benefit, our shareholders benefit. Trust me, none of this would be possible without our 25,000 strong employees, so culture really, really matters in every large organization. Before I actually dive into the charts, maybe a little bit of introduction. Grew up on the southern coast of India, a place called Madras, India, on the east coast. Between the ages of 12 and 18, spent nearly every day on the beach.
I have no idea how I ended up in the Mid-Atlantic in Washington, D.C., of all places. Every day on the beach, that was my life. First job out of high school, I actually wrote COBOL. Was terrible at it. Fast-forward 25 years, the Social Security Administration runs, you know, 30, 40 million lines of COBOL today. I think I have my next job planned out here. It's really important because I've taken every part of my journey as a way to define myself. I woke up this morning as an SI, I had a, you know, couple of books on the shelf, it says here, "Complimentary. You're welcome to take these home." It had a bookmark in it had one of my most favorite George Bernard Shaw quotes. It said, "Life isn't about finding yourself.
Life is actually about defining yourself." The journey that I've been on personally as an individual, as a father, as a leader, mirrors the journey that the organization is going through to deliver outstanding long-term value and performance for our shareholders, and that's the story that I'm here to communicate today. After growing up on the beach, decided, you know, accounting was probably my fate. Didn't really like being a CPA. Decided to get a couple law degrees. With due respect to my esteemed general counsel friend, didn't really like being a lawyer.
I always fixated on being a business person because to me it was really a way to understand the mechanics of a business, to understand how you actually grow a business, how do you generate real value from the business, and how do you deploy value for the benefit of the shareholders in the business. It really was a theme that started to resonate for me. After not wanting to do this and not wanting to do that and the other thing, I decided to go work for an energy company after a stint in consulting where I did everything from Supply Chain management to IT migration and all of it, went and worked in the Power business. And this was post Enron, and it was not an easy time to be in the Power business. Ran a business for a period of time.
it was carbon sequestration to clean energy to battery storage at scale. Things we're still talking about 20 years later. But the most remarkable thing about that organization was every finance person was expected to be a business person, and every business person had to be a finance person. By that I mean, you've got to have the capacity to wear other hats inside your day job because it actually makes you a better leader. I think one of the most underrated skills as a management person is really having a sense of empathy. And I truly, sincerely believe that when you've actually walked in somebody else's shoes, you have a much better appreciation for what it actually means to be in a leadership position in a large or small or medium-sized organization.
To me, it was a life lesson I learned probably 20 years ago, and it stays with me today. From there, I decided if I was gonna do something different, I was gonna do something completely different. Went to aerospace and defense. Northrop, my former employer, wonderful company, remarkable set of friends, was moving from Century City over to the East Coast. I was an East Coast hire. Came at the very end of the spin of the ships business and went through this remarkable transformation. Everything from the 2013 buyback of 25% of the stock to the Orbital ATK acquisition and a variety of different hats over the course of the 10-odd years at Northrop. 7 different jobs, actually.
Gives you a sense of really wanting to be a good corporate athlete, really figuring out how the business worked from a P&L perspective, from an operations perspective, candidly from a back office perspective, from a finance perspective. You truly understood how decisions get made, how to make good decisions, and how not to make bad decisions. I think you truly learned all those lessons. And to me, when Nazzic called me about this particular opportunity about 2.5 years ago, this was a no-brainer. I came here because I found an opportunity to really contribute to this culture, to be able to say, "Here's what we think performance ought to look like for the next 3-5 years under Nazzic's leadership," and making sure that we are establishing the building blocks of credibility 1 quarter at a time.
My former employer was just relentless about have a three- or a five-year plan, but just execute every quarter like your life depended on it. To me, hopefully what you all have seen us demonstrate over the last couple of years is that consistency in performance, especially in a market that's remained somewhat turbulent. We've been pretty uniquely differentiated, offering, I think, top-notch performance in a very difficult market. It's a trend that we are hoping to continue and obviously we're gonna pitch a story here for you all to focus on. My work philosophy is very simple. It's I'm not a complicated person. Speak with clarity and have conviction. Do not make low-conviction decisions. When you make a decision to go execute, do it with conviction.
When you are not fully into the job, your teams will be the first to see it, be really careful about your body language when you're communicating with a group of folks because your teams will see it. Don't take anything for granted. This is performance. Hubris is absolutely the worst thing for management teams. I sincerely believe that. It will take you down, in some businesses faster than others, but it will take you down no matter where you are. Do not take anything for granted and find ways to make the team better. What do I mean? I actually believe you've got to define what great outcomes look like for the team. You have to have the capacity to then let them walk right to left, right to left every single day as you're delivering performance and then push them harder.
Last year's performance is going to get you 80% of last year's scores if that's what you deliver next year. We need you to deliver 5% more EBITDA to this business, 20% more cash out of there. It is that relentless capacity to set incentives in a way that actually drive meaningful change inside an organization. You really have to do that. When your team sees your level of commitment, your conviction, and the clarity, and it's not, let's pick the audience to communicate the message. It is the same darn message. When what you heard from Nazzic, Bob, and Michael today is almost exactly verbatim the message we communicate internally. We are perfectly calibrated between internal expectations, obviously, which are always higher, and I know Cai is itching to ask me a top-line organic growth rate question. Internal ambitions are always going to be higher.
They have to be higher by definition. The teams understand exactly how we are going to measure their performance a year- out, three years out, or five years- out. To me, that is the consistency in the message, and you've got to stay always calibrated internally and externally. I've shared this with investors, so I'm gonna go on record in saying management teams have an unfair information asymmetry, which is we, by definition, see more, hear more than most folks on the outside. It is really important to get the message calibrated between what the teams see inside and what we're communicating externally. What you all are seeing here today is a symmetry, a calibration that's complete in terms of our expectations of our teams. Again, our expectations will always have to be higher for our teams.
We want more for our teams. It's the same qualitative alignment of the messages, internal and external. Onto the charts. Areas of focus. I get asked this question all the time: What are you really focused on? I said, culture matters, leadership matters, ownership matters. You heard from Nazzic about the priority of talent development inside the organization. I am a child of having lived in cultures where I had 6 to 8 jobs every 10 years. 6 to 8 jobs every 10 years. If we don't invest in our people in a way that's active, that they see the potential for themselves in the next 3 to 5 to 10 years, it's very hard to persuade them to stay with the organization. Talent development matters.
Michelle and I go at it passionately about talent development, about making sure that we are investing in areas that is truly differentiated. We cannot please everybody. This is part of the job that I don't like, but I have to do. We cannot please everybody. We then say, "How do we ensure that we are keeping the best talent inside the company? What are the most critical skill sets for us for the next year, the next three years, the next five years?" Let us make sure that we hold that talent inside the company by defining ahead of what the competition is doing to hopefully be able to say, "Here are the key talents that we want inside the company, and let's start to redefine what this looks like." Second area of focus. You all have heard this in one-on-one conversations.
I talk about habits and hygiene. This is literally a game of inches. It's a very mature business in a very mature market with a very traditional customer. How do you actually perform on a quarter-to-quarter basis, and how do you actually get the most out of the investments you're making inside the company, out of your measurement of returns from the business? How do you not get Pollyannish about where the growth is going to be? How do you remain crystal clear about where the potential is for the business to make sure that we are actually delivering what we have to deliver on a quarter- in, quarter- out basis? Vigorous attention to detail. Details matter more than one ever thinks. It matters because your teams notice when you notice.
Rarely does a review, for example, go by without me picking up 3 things on a chart. It's the most impactful way to communicate to your teams that what they do matters, and the details and the thought process that they're putting together to put charts together really matter. What is the message, and are we sure that we're delivering the right message here? Rotations for critical roles. You know, we talk about this actively. We cannot afford to play in the free agent market on a day in, day out basis, which means you've got to get the talent ready, developed, ready to take on the next role before the next role comes available. Therefore, we have to invest in our people, in our capability well ahead of where the needs might be.
One of the most impactful things we've done the last couple of years is incentive comp. I'll actually talk about this in some detail over the course of the next 20 odd minutes or so. We are really proud of the work we've done in this area. In a very traditional organization, in a very traditional market, people get comfortable. How do you create just enough discomfort for people so that it doesn't feel too comfortable where they are? Yet, how do you do that in a positive, resonating way that allows them to hold on to a vision that you're painting for them 3 or 5 years out? We are really proud of the changes we've made.
We still think that we're in the first third of a nine-inning baseball game. Therefore, we think there's plenty of potential for this company to go achieve over the course of the next several years. Capital deployment. Top area of focus. You all have seen this very conscious, methodical, steady return of capital over the last couple of years. You've heard crystal clear from Nazzic Keene that we're gonna have a healthy level of skepticism towards scale-driven M&A. Make this about differentiation. Game of inches. Details matter. When you start to pin a corporate development strategy that is focused on adding differentiation to the portfolio, and you can pull that thread across the pipeline into your submits, into the way you're calibrating your investment decisions, you tend to see outsized returns over time. None of this, to be clear, is going to be linear. We will have setbacks.
If you had told me a year ago that on the verge of losing NASA NICS, we would lose two other recompetes, and we would still end up delivering about 2% organic growth, underlying growth was about 5%-6% of this business. We think the details matter. That threading all of this together in a coherent package allows the team to think not just about the next recompete win or loss, but to say, "Am I grinding higher in a market that is gonna remain tight for the foreseeable future?" Capital deployment, our bias is going to be to remain shareholder-friendly. You heard some of this on the earnings call about a week ago.
We said $350 million-$400 million of buyback capital allocated this year. You'll start to see some elevated levels of spend on our buyback program over the next couple of years. Finally, we want to deliver on the financial commitments we are making. Nothing is more important to us than making sure that our guidance is viewed as a covenant inside the company. I shared this with some of you all yesterday. When we put a set of public guidance metrics out there, the organization needs to galvanize around delivering that commitment on an annual basis, on a quarterly basis, frankly, on a monthly basis. It's that rigor, it's that attention to detail, and it's getting all of the basics right, the habits and the hygiene that I talk about, that truly drives top-tier performance in organizations.
Onto the 2024-2026 organic targets chart. Nazzic showed our financial targets for FY 2026. A reminder, Bob said this quite well. It excludes about $800 million in revenue from the divested Supply Chain, soon-to-be-divested Supply Chain business, as well as the deconsolidation of our FSA business. Round numbers, we're about $800 million down compared to whatever last set of numbers you saw. Our financial metric is, on the revenue side, 2%-4% CAGR. You know, we said, a couple of earnings calls ago, actually, we said about 3% at the midpoint is a sensible target for a business like this. That's candidly what we're projecting on a 3-year basis, 2%-4% continue to grind. EBITDA margins.
Back in FY 2022, on the March earnings call, we had guided to an EBITDA target of 86%-88%, and we're now projecting EBITDA targets to be about 80 basis points higher over the next 3 years. Relative to the start of FY 2022, that initial guide, we're up nearly 100 basis points. We can dial top-line growth, we can go pick up a couple of large programs that generate a lot of growth, but it's likely going to be dilutive to margins. We can go drive growth at the expense of working capital. Here is a company that is candidly committing to trying to do all 3 things. I call them self-balancing inside of the metrics. If you dial too hard on revenue, you end up suboptimizing working capital, probably dilutive to margin.
If you're dialing up margin, you're probably doing that at the expense of growing the company and probably at the expense of generating cash. If you're just harvesting cash, you've probably suboptimized the first two metrics. It really is about getting this balance right over the course of time. Now, our guidance for 2024 is 3% pro forma organic growth. We expect to sustain that in FY 2025 and 2026, Bob and Michael just talked to you about the big wins we've had as an organization towards the end of FY 2023, starting FY 2024, and we think there's continues to be real promise inside the pipeline. There's a chart further back in the presentation that'll tell you all why we think that this is achievable.
We plan to do this, grow the business 3% at the midpoint, improve margins 80 basis points while remaining capital light. You heard this from Nazzic over and over again. You heard this from Bob and Michael. Remain asset light. We think higher margins, lighter asset position turns into higher return on invested capital for your shareholders. It is something we measure inside the company, and we are committed to that business model. With our capital deployment, we committed $350-$400 on the guidance call for FY 2024, and we are expecting to stay at those elevated levels for the next couple of years.
With our commitment to the buyback program, on top of the free cash flow per share we're generating, we expect a CAGR of about 10% on the free cash flow side and $11 of free cash flow per share by FY 2026. I would remind you, this is adjusted for roughly $250 million that left the door or will soon leave the door over the course of the next 3-4 years on Section 174. All of these numbers are about $1 higher in the world prior to Section 174 kicking in fully. Fiscal 2026 targets, if we can go to the next chart. You saw this in Nazzic's presentation. I'm gonna focus on the GTA elements and why I believe that's an important focus for us.
You saw all the demos this morning, GTA is expected to be roughly 40% of the sales in FY 2026. It's currently sitting at about 35%. We've shared with you all, Nazzic had a chart that said GTA is roughly 200+ basis points higher profit than the core part of the business. This is part of the strategy to grind margins up in this business. For all of you that have lived in this business, you know how hard it is to grind margins up. Most of our peers are talking about compression in margins, flattening margins. We believe we are truly differentiated by saying the best of SAIC is ahead of it in terms of its capacity to annually grind margins a year at a time. We have a pipeline that is biasing towards higher GTA. We said 50/50.
T-Cloud and DCSA One IT are not in the numbers yet, so we will start to bias this number up higher. The most important thing, this is how, you know, the team thinks about this, is when someone comes to talk to us about an opportunity, the ability to explain why SAIC is critically important. We have gates for investment reviews inside the company. Every gate is an entry point, but just as importantly, it's an exit ramp for a lot of people. For folks that cannot communicate why the investment dollars of this company, scarce as they are, have to go into those areas that allow us to drive outsized return. It is the same metric we track inside the management team. We actually share a deck with our board.
Every quarter, they see the dashboard, they actually see how we're doing relative to our GTA ambitions in a given year. Again, symmetry of thought and symmetry of action gives you really good performance, that's where the focus is for this management team. We are reinvesting dollars. We call them two-by-twos inside the accounts. We move money from, you know, bid A to bid B because we think bid A is not as well-differentiated as bid B. We think there's a higher P win on bid B, it is always with a lens of what is the GTA component inside bid B? Does it actually allow us to bring something truly differentiated for that customer? To the extent we find the competitive seam inside, pick your area, cloud, security, AI, systems engineering and integration work.
If we find the competitive seam inside of that, I think you will see us likely be more successful than maybe the last five years. To me, this is the objective, this is the goal for the company. Margins. We recognize. If we go to the next chart, please. If we recognize where the margins are right now, this is an important chart. I get excited about it. We recognize our margins are lower than where our peers are. Some of that is mix, some of that is hardware. We get all of that, and you all know this better than I could ever communicate it. The fact that we are trying to bridge the gap between us and our peers while maintaining a very asset-light model is highly impactful for return on invested capital.
To me, this is the focus, and these are actual peers. This chart isn't to talk about our peers as much as it is to say that we are going to continue to demonstrate that we can grow margins without growing CapEx in this business, and that remaining asset-light is a pretty sensible, healthy way to do it in a business that tends to be more gladiatorial than not. Therefore, really remaining asset-light is a critical part of the investment thesis as we think about resource allocation and how to drive long-term, you know, value creation. Next chart is the multiyear financial targets chart. You saw some of this in your PowerPoint charts. I saw a few of you actually open the deck to check. This is what truly we are committing to.
Steady growth, 3% a year for the next 3 years. This company grew, because we keep score track, this company grew about 3% in FY 2022. We grew about 1.5% in FY 2023, and I'm leaving the extra week out. With the extra week, it was about 3%, but 1.5% last year. At the midpoint, we're committed to about 3%. You see margins improving. Our guide, you all saw us provide our guide last week, 9.2-9.4. The low end of that 9.4, rather the high end of the 9.4 for FY 2024 becomes the low end of the guide for FY 2025. The midpoint of that guide for FY 2025 now becomes the low end for FY 2026. Internal ambitions are always higher. Internal ambitions are always higher.
This is the multi-year view for margins that we can continue to move margins up. Obviously, we've made a number of moves on the portfolio side that inorganically will help margin. There's a chart in the back which will actually demonstrate that we can do this organically as well. We expect to generate about $10 of free cash flow per share in 2025 and $11 in 2026. As I reminded you, we lost about $1 a share. Repurchases assumes about, let's call it roughly $1 billion, just over $1 billion over the next 3 years, and you all do the math. It translates to an elevated level of buybacks for FY 2024, 2025, and 2026.
You heard this unequivocally from Nazzic that at a leverage target of 3x, which we will expect, which we will get to as soon as we close the Supply Chain sale, we will have the balance sheet capacity and the firepower to continue to do the tuck-ins that are helpful for us to continue to build the differentiation. We have the plumbing in place. We understand what the pipeline looks like. We understand what the needs are inside of the pipeline to differentiate our bids. This is a function of making sure that we are not trying to build everything on our own. You saw Orca there, you saw Morpheus there. They were there for a reason. This business, writ large, if it's not built here, it's not worth having. That culture is there in almost every aerospace and defense company.
What we are trying to do in a very small but important way is demonstrate that when we find good capability, we need to be able to bring it to the mission faster than anybody else can. When you take on the role of a trusted integrator. It becomes a very powerful signal inside of the market. We're planning to maintain leverage at 3x. I've said this over the course of 2 years. If the right thing comes along that is differentiated, that is capability-based, and the hardest question, I think, for M&A, you know, entrepreneurs to answer is what is the scarcity value in an asset? Sometimes you get an asset that's 50% core, 50% GTA, if you will, and you have to pay 15 times.
Is that the right trade for an organization that says, "Look, I'm going to focus this on capability-based acquisitions." We think we have enough balance sheet capacity. We've demonstrated we can get to leverage that are higher than 3.5 on a consistent basis, 3.5x. At this point, you know, we're pretty comfortable that the right allocation model for us is to bias the investment to our buybacks, continue to deliver that value for our shareholders. We're gonna be opportunistic when the right thing comes along, but again, recognizing that that's where the future is. If you go to the next chart, solid revenue growth.
This is a chart I won't brief every bit of it other than to say what you are seeing here is a consistent, you know, kind of, you know, let's call it 3% growth rates over the last few years, and that's effectively... You know, we're encouraged by the revenue performance we've delivered. Obviously, you know, as we start to win newer programs, you start to build a fair amount of momentum inside the company. You know, just focused on let's make the right decisions for the long term for the benefit of our shareholders. I want you all to remember that this team wants to be known as the most shareholder-friendly team in government services, as the most shareholder-friendly team in government services. That means making sure that we are smartly managing our financials, that we're delivering to our commitments.
Shareholders don't like surprises. We're trying our best not to surprise them, except on the upside, and make sure that every quarter matters, and we can deliver this commitment on a multi-year basis. Let's go to the free cash flow bridge, please. 2025-2026. I'm gonna pick up the speed just a little bit here. You all saw this on our earnings call. No real changes with it, but I'm gonna maybe, you know, go under the covers, double-click a little bit, and tell you why I think this is doable. Sometimes when companies don't grow top line sufficiently, you wonder how much you can get out of just optimally managing working capital. Let me give you a for example. Average DSO, 58-62 days. Every day of DSO is worth $20 million-$25 million of cash.
We have incentives calibrated inside the company that people know exactly what they have to do to get that DSO down. It's not just about DSO. It's about inventory management. It's about DPO. It's about terms and conditions on our contract as a prime with a customer. It also matters what our terms and conditions are with our suppliers who are subs to SAIC on a vast number of SAIC programs. There is an extra enhanced level of rigor around terms and conditions, managing these things to the long-term best interest of our shareholders. It's not just working capital management. We think there's plenty of gas left in the tank for us to continue to drive improvement in working capital.
Although we recognize that growing the company at higher growth rates is going to put a little bit of pressure on working capital, we're trying to get ahead of that by ensuring that we are doing all the right things, the habits and the hygienes that I talked about, to ensure that we're taking on the right contracts with the right terms, and it gives us the elbow room over the period of performance to ensure that we are consistently able to deliver ahead of our expectations. I have to say, you know, about a year and a half ago, we instituted rigorous monthly cash reviews. This is an aside, I share this because it always helps to understand how companies think about cash flow management. We have our program managers, folks that typically don't care about terms and conditions or cash.
We have our PMs now dialed into net working capital at the individual program level, something that used to be unthinkable probably a handful of years ago. This is how important that cultural element is when they see me showing up for these monthly calls and asking program-specific questions on why is working capital higher or lower on a particular program relative to a baseline we may have negotiated, it puts the eyes of the organization on the problem that they're trying to solve. Start with what problem are you trying to solve, and that's how we dial the conversation inside the company relative to working capital. At Q4, we shared this on the earnings call, we had the largest amount of cash we've ever collected in the history of this company. At the start of Q4, our objective was very simple.
We needed to collect somewhere between $2 billion-$2.1 billion of cash in Q4, operating cash. Last, you know, the month 10, P-10 we call it, came by, $705 million. P-11 came by, $725 million. P-12 came by, it was a little over $800 million. We delivered a record amount of cash in Q4, a significant amount of attention inside the organization. At the end of Q3, the message to the organization was simple.
Nazzic and I sent letters to our employees at the end of the quarter after the earnings call, we said, "The message is collect every dollar." That performance culture that focuses on what needs to get done and does it like its life depended on it, that is an element of intensity we have inside the organization that is truly driving performance inside the company. We go to the next chart, there are a couple of things here. There are 2 charts and then a chart to finish this discussion off. Incentive comp. I talked to you about ownership matters. Let me take a couple of minutes to talk to you all about what we've done here. Everything in blue here is a metric that's changed in the last couple of years. Nearly everything on this page is a blue right now.
We've truly modified the incentive metrics, so we've created enough skin in the game for the leadership team, not just the ELT, but it's rank and file, managers, PMs, business development folks, incentives aligned to performance. We want the metrics that drive long-term value for our shareholders. As you can see, earnings per share is not on this page. It's revenue, it's EBITDA growth, and it's cash. It's not EPS. I was a tax guy for a long time, and I recognize sometimes you can have EPS without having cash. Not real economics necessarily. This says we are focused on the things that drive long-term value for our shareholders. I talked about self-balancing. If anybody drives a particular metric particularly hard, it ends up suboptimizing the other two.
This is a way for us to communicate that all of these three things matter, revenue, EBITDA growth, and cash matter for the entire organization. That's how we've set the plan. The other thing we've done inside the company is, and I've seen this in other organizations, the best negotiators get the best internal plan. The best negotiators then actually get the best incentive comp because you do the best job sandbagging your plan. What we did was, look, it's not good enough to just beat your own plan. We wanna measure ourselves. We recognize our shareholders have the choice of investing a relative dollar in SAIC or someplace else. How do we make these more peer-based, peer-informed, such that we're always calibrated against what our peers are either guiding to or what The Street expects that they will deliver?
I've got an illustration of how we actually mechanize this, if you will. It's really important to make sure that you're grounded in the reality of where you are inside of the market, recognizing you cannot be top tier for every one of these metrics. We pick depending on which sector is being reviewed, which business unit is being reviewed, which program is being reviewed. We pick the metric we wanna dial for them because horses for courses. That's a really important part of the story because that is how we manage the business to make sure we are dialed into it in a way that each of the team members can deliver what they're singularly best poised to deliver in a given year. Ultimately, we also added TSR as a metric. This is for Nazzic and for me and the leadership team. Skin in the game.
We've got more performance units inside of the comp now than we used to. Instead of just time vested, there's more performance-based shares. Therefore, aligning consistently towards what better performance now looks like. If we go to the next chart, and I'll actually demonstrate this. This is a hypothetical chart. I don't want you to call this an EBITDA chart or a cash chart, this is how we think S-curves inside the company. Some call this dog ears too. At the bottom, you can see the peers, the three tiers, third tier, second tier, first tier. This is sort of roughly where we think the peer set is going to be, and we know where our peer set is. You all know it's disclosed in the proxies. That's where the peers are for a particular metric.
What we're simply trying to do is linearly interpolate from the flat part of that curve, right above where the 2nd tier mark is, all the way up to the right side. We have a green star there. That's a modifier. It says, if your performance starts to drive you up the incentive comp curve and you hit the modifier point, again, depending on the metric, it could be different. That modifier gives you an extra 10% on your curve. You might say, "So how do I make the team uncomfortable to make sure that they're not just thinking upside but not worried about the downside?" Look at the red star there to the left. That star effectively says, if you don't deliver on your commitments, again, corporate, enterprise, sectors, and then business units, that's the real downside here.
Look at where the ranges are, 95% at the bottom and 105% at the top. This is about as compressed a performance range as you can get. When you make it really real for people that a 95% achievement of your target results in a 0% SDI incentive score, that forces them up to the right side of the curve. This is part psychology, it's part plan economics, and it's partly how we incentivize the management team to never get too comfortable. This is a very methodical, conscious change. We engage in these very deep conversations with our board, and they've been incredibly supportive to ensure that we are allowing the teams to drive towards what is top-tier performance. At the end of the day, these scales change year- in and year- out for every one of the metrics.
What used to be target performance for FY 2023 probably gets you an 80% score next year in FY 2024. This is consistently moving the bar to the right. Again, I said clarity, conviction, paint a three-year picture, help the teams drive there, give them the tools, give them the leverage to drive top-tier performance. The financial performance chart. Let's go to the next one. This isn't a chart to brag. You know, I recognize you all have access to resources that'll go back two years to the left, and things won't look as good. This is about us saying we are committed to what we are doing right now, and we know that the message is resonating. That a company that keeps buying shares without growing isn't going to be viewed as a good investment.
We know what we have to do with this business, but we also happen to think, and we've demonstrated this for two years, that the market has consistently underappreciated our capacity for organic growth. Part of the investment thesis around the capital deployment is let us go capture the dislocation, because we're still in a little bit of a penalty box. You know, I'm not from Missouri, kind of the show me state. The market is waiting to see if we can deliver this on a consistent basis. We think we are poised with the capabilities you saw with the pipeline that Bob and Michael demonstrated, with the culture that Nazzic is putting together inside of the team, that we're actually poised to continue to execute to the strategy. The last chart, focus on long-term value creation.
This is the same chart that Nazzic ended with. I'm gonna end my presentation this afternoon with the same. We are trying to do what is the right thing for our shareholders, things that will drive value over long term. We do this by advancing our culture, because none of what we've heard from us today is going to be possible without creating an environment that allows people to thrive, pointing the way, giving them some guidance, and then holding everybody inside the feet. That includes the management team, holding ourselves accountable to the things that we are committing to, because as I said, that is our covenant. We're committed to our business model. To wrap this all up, we are committed. We are deadly serious about this business model. We wanna be a premier technology integrator, shareholder-friendly and remaining capital light. That is our investment thesis.
We're excited about the next three years. We're excited to get on with FY 2024, and we're gonna jump right into Q&A. Happy to take questions then.
Just step down for 1 minute while we put the chairs up. Sorry.
Before we dive into Q&A, someone who has sat in your seat, your seats for many years, I probably underappreciated how much of a team effort this all is, and we get to kinda take credit for the performance and the presentation. We've got an amazing events team that helped put on all this, an amazing design team that made the slides legible for you all. Most of them are probably not watching 'cause they're tired of looking at these slides. I just wanna say thank you to them for all their help. Now I get to call on people. Seth.
Morning.
Morning.
Thanks for the presentation.
Morning, Seth.
Morning. Wanted to ask about the split between GTA and non-GTA revenue. You know, the reason why those are the growth areas, I think is fairly clear.
Yeah.
I think probably a hundred-ish, maybe slightly over a hundred-ish % of the dollar growth in revenue from 2023 through 2026 comes from the GTA areas.
Mm-hmm.
How do you think over time about the other, you know, the 65% of the portfolio in 2023?
Yeah.
Does that grow over time? Are there, you know, slugs within that portfolio that might actually be growing very nicely but other things that, you know, that are offsetting that? You know, how should we think about that non-GTA portfolio and what it means to the company over time?
Sure. I'll start.
Yeah.
Maybe invite the others to join in here. You know, fair question, Seth. I think, you know, as I tried to explain, you know, we try to think about the pipeline over a period of time. We are seeing growth opportunities inside of core and inside of GTA. Our win rates are pretty good in the GTA bucket, so hopefully this continues to allow us to improve that part of the portfolio. As we think about the core, you know, we've done the parts that were obvious, the consolidation of FSA and obviously the sale of the Supply Chain business.
Where there's, I think, opportunity inside of the core part of the portfolio is really kind of a 3-to-5-year view of where that particular business is heading and just making sure that if we cannot answer the why SAIC question inside the core parts of the portfolio, if we cannot shape it to create a little more differentiation inside the core, if we cannot continue to grind margins up higher inside the core parts of the portfolio, that's where the energy gets spent inside the company. We actually see both parts of the portfolio actually growing and gives us a little more capacity to think longer term in the core areas as we actively think about the portfolio.
Yeah. I'll add the Core business, the more we can grow in the GT areas, the more we can put up good growth in the core areas, it gives us the ability to walk away from lower-end commoditized work that's inside that Core business. If you over the next few years, if you saw that, you know, probably keeps on using the word grind. It's not a super sexy word, but it is really important inside of our Core business because it's compressed margins, compressed growth rates, and therefore tenths of a point matter.
Inside that portfolio, if we can get a nice big piece of work that's meaningful to our customers, we provide value, it opens up the ability for us to be able to walk away from something and not tank the company from a growth perspective overall. It's the way we look about the core side, whereas GTA is just all growth all the time. It's a great area for us to be expanded.
I'd like to add something to this.
Yeah, sure.
You know, earlier today, Nazzic, our Prabu was talking about how every Monday we have a review and we look at the bids, right? Some of those bids are three years out, right? The process that we are executing inside the company, at the top of the company and then on down, is that three-year look at what's in the pipeline. We're fortunate. We've built pipelines that are beyond what we could invest in everything. We go through these reviews, our teams below us go through these reviews, and we're starting to set the criterias that we're really interested in that's driving those GTA percentages that you're looking for.
Yeah, I think you heard it loud and clear, but I think growing the business provides us optionality that we don't have when we're not growing the business. With consistent growth, we, you know, there are going to be deals where we're the incumbent, where we may elect to walk away because we know it's gonna be a cost shootout, we know it doesn't differentiate it. We don't bring, you know, incremental value. By growing the top line and the bottom line, we have the ability to make that choice where you can't make that choice if you're not. That's the one difference as we sit here today versus a few years ago.
Bert.
Maybe just to follow up on that, on the GTA side, you do have two contracts, T-Cloud and One IT that are worth over $2 billion in ceiling value. Prabu, I just wanna make sure I understood. You said those are not contemplated in your targets. As we think out to 2026, you know, it sounds like One IT is moving forward, T-Cloud in protest, but more likely to move forward than not. Does that number start to move up to something closer to mid-single digits just by virtue of sort of doing the basic math on what those could equal?
Yeah. Hey, Bert, fair question. I think we said it's not materially factored into the FY 2024 guidance. You know, as we sit here and maybe a little bit of kind of the inner workings of an organization, you've got 1,000 variables at the start of the year. It's over the course of the year executing to the plan you have laid out that allows you to say, "Have I harvested the opportunity? Have I retired the risk?" This is sort of a multi-year effort. All things being equal, you would think that FY 2026 and FY 2025 would be higher than the 3% if you just added 3% of growth to the company. The reality is, in a business with very high recompete rates, we all lose our share of work on recompetes.
This three-year projection you have encapsulates the range of possibilities. As we get into a particular fiscal year, like we did for FY 2024, hopefully we'll have momentum to be able to deliver at or above the midpoint of our guide range on a consistent basis. I could sit here and tell you we're gonna grow 5%. The reality is there are a million variables between now and the start of next year. Again, we wanna stay calibrated between what we're driving to internally, which is higher, what we're committing to externally, which has to account for the risks because it's very hard to communicate all of the variables that are involved in that decision. That's how we think about it.
Cai.
Yeah. Thank you. I have a green eye shade question.
Okay.
Which is looking at your model-
Yeah.
you're assuming you're buying back 3 million shares a year.
Mm-hmm.
Do the simple math, that's basically, you know, $110, you know, more or less where your stock price is now. In the real world, hopefully, your stock price moves up.
Mm-hmm.
In the real world, presumably, you're gonna pay some incentive shares out to your employees.
Yeah.
What has to give? Are you gonna basically spend $400 million? I mean, is what you're aiming for is the 3 million shares, and you'll spend more, or do you spend, you know, $350, and then if it's, you know, the share count doesn't go down as much, that's what you get?
Sure. On average, over time, our dilution is about 0.5 million shares, give or take. We're targeting, you know, spending effectively between $350 million-$400 million a year. We run the model at different stock prices, and it gives us comfort that we can retire about 3 million shares on a net basis every year. 3.5 before the dilution, give or take. To me, that's what's encapsulated in the model. Obviously, if there's volatility, we'll set up the grid to make sure that we are taking advantage of the dislocation if we see some acute dislocation in stock prices. There's a commitment to retiring because to me, this is partly a message about where the commitment of the organization is on capital deployment.
As we think about it, I think you get to a net 3 million share reduction on an annual basis. You'll see that do that on a consistent basis while maintaining leverage about 3x.
What does that imply in terms of your M&A hurdle rate?
Yeah. That's a good question, too. The way we're thinking about it right now is in the absence of something compelling on the M&A front that is again, differentiated, not scale-based M&A. That there's enough headroom from, let's call it, the 2.8 to the 3.5, 3.6 range on a consistent basis. We're comfortable running leverage at, you know, let's call it 3.25, 3.5, to be able to take on something that provides real capability inside of the organization. I think part of the conversation, you hit on one of the more important things, which is the hurdle rate on M&A relative to, you know, other uses of capital. I think it's a conversation we're dialed into as an organization inside to make sure we're making the right decisions longer term.
In the back.
Hey, guys. Vijar from Golden Door. Great numbers. I didn't hear too much about what's going on in, like, the wartime right now and in the space race. My question really comes to the fact that maybe 2%-4% is very good in terms of growth. I think you guys will hit those targets. What are some externalities that might accelerate, you know, the 3%-5% positive externalities?
Sure.
I could see the need for more in ter-times of wartime, like the need for more contracting and in terms of the space race, because both of those areas seem to be actually accelerating, not decelerating. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Sure.
I'll start with the wartime side of things. I think there's 2 statements inside of it. One's not, a great answer for us.
Mm-hmm.
That is the primary spend is gonna be on weapon systems and the replenishment of our stockpiles. That's gonna be not services-based companies as much as us. I think there's less of a correlation there for us. On the other hand, there are certain missions that are getting significant new influxes of money as we start to pivot towards the near peer threats versus the historical threats that were nation-states and things like that. That was those were bespoke things that we went after. Now, this near peer threat really does change how we look at the traditional branch military and how that's getting supported. That can absolutely play on the services side. That's where we see, you know, the upside for us.
The two very kind of pinpoint solutions for us that I think are really tied to what's going on in the world, the counter-UAS system, and then the Mark 48 torpedoes, both of those we see as opportunities for us to be able to grow at a faster rate than we have in the past, as those stockpiles need to get refurbished.
I'll address your question regarding the space race. If you remember back when I was talking, right, we've got this huge expanse of knowledge. However, a lot of the work that we've done historically has been in the systems engineering, technical assistance area, which does present some constraints for us, right, to actually be a provider for those customers. Our strategy, as I articulated, is to move into other spaces, right. We're benefiting from the fact that there is an expansion of the market, right. Technology, market players, both private, and government funded. Our strategy is aligned to tap in to that expansive expanse in the market. As far as you're forward-looking, right, I think we're gonna continue to move forward on our strategy. We're confident, and we're bringing in the proof points for it.
As long as that continues, right, We're gonna see growth there.
Yeah. I think just to kind of put a bow around it's something we pay attention to every day. We have conversations, whether it's on the Hill or whether it's in the Pentagon, on these topics as the nation and the, you know, and the budgets associated with those priorities go through their processes. We pay a lot of attention to it. We do believe we can bring differentiation and solutions to bear if and when monies go to, you know, a unique area. You know, there's no secret that the government is dealing with its own issues on inflation and with budget and prioritization, and so, you know, we engage in those conversations as well. It's absolutely part of our strategy to be forward-looking, to play a role where it makes sense, to support our customers' missions.
Sometimes just because there's discussion around money going in a certain area, it doesn't always happen. Great question.
Louis.
Nazzic and team, thanks for the great event. Bob and Michael, you both discussed how SAIC is running several multi-cloud programs. What inning is the federal government in for the migration to the cloud? They just announced that a few weeks ago that they started implementing the JWCC JEDI 2.0 cloud. Are there another, like, 20 or 30 T-Clouds available in your pipeline that you can win? There seems to be four other competitors in this area that are, like, aggressively bidding for these, and you mentioned these in the discussions of the recompete. Like, in terms of this pipeline and the total addressable market, like, what do you think your win share can be next?
Yeah. I'll hit it. Everyone's very nervous about what I'm about to say.
Yeah, I'm very.
I'll ballpark it at, you know, second, third inning, right? It is early days. There is a ton of talk, there's a ton of pent-up demand, and there are some big programs that are starting. The throughput that's flowing through here, it's not anywhere near what it can be and should be. There's a lot left in this game for the entire industry, right? Are there dozens of T-Clouds out there? Let me change the question. There are absolutely dozens of multi-cloud implementations. It could approach, you know, five dozen multi-cloud implementations, right? Every customer can have that type of a situation.
You get down to the smallest agencies, and it probably doesn't make sense for them to have a full suite to be able to go after all of that. Anything that's a mid-size agency and up, they absolutely should have a multi-cloud platform. They should have a multi-cloud strategy for their organization, and they should be migrating there, and they haven't gone there yet. Whether they're T-Cloud or not, it's a different story. T-Cloud's big, right? It's one of the biggest ones in the civilian market, and it's the reason why it's so exciting for us to talk about, 'cause that's the momentum snowball rolling down a hill, right? This is, take that, take Cloud One, there's a couple of others that are smaller that we have. You take that, and all of a sudden we start to have a base of business that isn't rivaled by those cloud want-to-be peers that are out there.
Great. One follow-up. Prabu, on the earnings call, you mentioned or you alluded to a real estate optimization. Nazzic, you began discussing how you try to give your employees the ability to work from home when the government agencies allow for it. I'm wondering, like what impact can work from home and real estate optimization have on the margins? It wasn't spelled out specifically, but it seems like it can be a source of margin upside for you.
Sure. Appreciate the question, Louie. Really big picture, we look at utilization inside the company by facility, restricted, unrestricted, indirect, direct, all of it. We have a sense for where utilization is across the company. We then have a view of what a waterfall looks like over the next 3 to 5 years, which is to say we don't always have the capacity to leave facilities just because utilization happens to be low today. Getting the waterfall incorporated, think of this as a Venn diagram, utilization on 1 side and then waterfall on the other, and then the ROI conversation in the middle to say, what is the perfect convergence of optimization and cost reduction, which is a very long-winded way of saying we think there's potentially cost synergy there inside the real estate facility footprint. However, comma, this is really important.
We've actually underinvested in parts of the future of this organization, whether that's differentiation, talent. Our objective is to make sure that inside of the construct which we outlined for you today, we are continually creating elbow room, I like to say, inside of the investment framework, so we're actually investing inside of the company to build capability that will help this company over the next five, 10, 20 years. Near term, yes, most teams can take cost out. In our business with a predominantly cost-plus mix, you know, it's a little bit of a sugar high. It's hard to hold onto the savings, so we're just very carefully, methodically thinking about what the right reinvestment rate is, because sometimes, just to be balanced about this, you can convince yourself that every investment is a good investment.
Sometimes returning the investment as bottom line margin may actually be the right answer. It's that yin and the yang, and Mark and I have this conversation almost all the time across the portfolio with the sectors in total.
Louie, I'll add a couple things. across, you know, the broad spectrum of how all companies are approaching back to work, right, or back in the office, you know, I know in the banking industry I hear anecdotal information that, you know, they're mandating you're back in three days or four days, and they even dictate the dates. We want you in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. If we did that, we'd never be able to rationalize real estate 'cause you have to still have a seat for everybody to sit down in.
We are taking probably the hardest approach to this, and we're learning as we go, but we are saying, you know, "We want you in the office when you need to be in the office." Some people, that's every day, and some people, it's zero days. Most people, it's some days. We don't wanna dictate the when, we wanna dictate the why. We need you in to help solution or to help brainstorm or whatever that might be. We're taking a very flexible model. Our employees seem to appreciate it. To your, you know, the kind of the genesis of your question, because we do want to save money on real estate. I would rather take $1 of a cube space or an office space and invest it in employee development or invest it in talent.
We do aspire to save money. We have done some of that rationalization. We're going to continue to do it and continue to learn as we implement our approach to the flexible work model.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Tobey?
Tobey Sommer, Truist. I had a question about recompetes, obvious source of risk for anybody in the industry. Over the period, could you quantify what those looked like in the last year or year and a half that you had some losses? What did you learn and/or change that may help mitigate the sort of persistent risk that everyone in the industry faces, but yourselves particularly over this period?
I appreciate the question. Maybe I'll do the quantitative, kind of the. Then maybe have Nazzic, Bob, and Michael kind of talk about the qualitatively what are we doing to fix it. Kinda big picture, if you look back, and I'm not a fan of looking at any 12-month or 24-month period, just look back 3 or 5 years, the recompete win rates in this business are very high, upwards of 90%. Bob talked about S3I. Nobody, I'll say nobody expected us to win 4 out of 4, and we did. This company can hold on to large recompetes when they really matter. Last year was hard. Last year, lots of soul searching inside the company, inside the team to make sure that we are learning the right lessons from our recompete losses.
I'll maybe boil this down to one thing and then really want the others to chime in on this one. The answer as to why we lose is actually not a lot different than why we win. When we understand the mission, when we understand what differentiation that the customer expects to see over the next 3-5 years, as opposed to what we deliver over the preceding period of performance, hubris is the worst thing for management teams. When you can avoid hubris and you can fixate on fixing the things that truly matter to the customer for the next period of performance, you tend to see win rates start to creep back up. I shared on the earnings call that our recompete win rates are actually reverting to a mean to where the historical means used to be for the business.
We're encouraged by the trend we're seeing in this area. The reality is, I think we're going to be, you know, as acutely focused on this as any metric inside the company to make sure that we are doing the things we're supposed to do as a management team. Bob, Michael, and Allison.
I guess one of the things that I was gonna bring up, your questions about, you know, so what have we done, you know, to apply that? Of course, we do all kinds of deep dives into why did we lose, and as Prabu said, why do we win, right? We have laid out a whole bunch of things and changes that we're doing that will position us, and we think actually, when executed right, will set new standards for win rates. You were asking about recompetes, and one thing that I thought I would share with you and everyone here is, if you think about a large portfolio like SAIC, across all those different customer accounts and the BUs and the 2 sectors, we have cycles.
Everyone's running through different cycles based on how big the contracts are and what their period of performance is. It just sort of lines up certain ways, right? You'll see in our portfolio, you know, we see this, we study it, we work on it. All of a sudden, somebody's coming down from a recompete wave, but somebody else is coming up on a recompete wave. We're constantly working at factoring in those lessons learned from one account into another account, because a lot of them, as Prabu was commenting, you know, apply across the whole portfolio.
I guess the lesson learned that we took out of our group very specifically is, our history is at that 90% level. You go back, two years, we were at 90%. Last year, we lost two deals right up front in my group. I'd say that the lesson learned was different on each of those. One of them was we consciously decided not to dive on price. It was a commodity-based job. It was lower margin, and we decided that we're gonna try to hold the lower margins that we had on it, and somebody undercut us in a pretty heavy way. If that was the only one that we lost, we would've been fine. It was a conscious decision, and it was fine.
The compounding issue was that we did lose one, and I'll call it incumbent bias. We were loved by our customer. We performed incredibly well. The procurement went through a cycle with a third party doing the doing the acquisition, and they decided not to to take into account love. They took into account stats, and they took into account the delivery of a new proposal. From that, we learned that we need to figure out how to disrupt ourselves more often on recompetes. We have an outside team now that looks at each one of those large-scale recompetes, and they they build up the solution differently, and it's not the same team that can rely on that relationship as the sole thing. Of course, we want that relationship.
Of course, we wanna be able to prove that we are loved inside those customers, but we also need to figure out a way to deliver better each time on every one of these, regardless of where we are. Prabu uses the word hubris. That sounds awfully negative on this one. That one might be we were too comfortable, and we should not have lost that one. One deal.
I think at the macro level, just a couple things. obviously agree with all the commentary. I think there's two areas that I would just add to it. One, we all as a leadership team, every Monday review those most critical deals, and they can be recompetes, they could be new. we've gotten laser focused, probably more focused than we were. that has been a change in behavior. really, for either new or recompete, the goal isn't to stump people. The goal isn't to check their homework. It's to see if there's anything in the company that we can do to advance their ability to win. That's the purpose of the call. the second, quite candidly, I touched on this, and you heard this from everybody.
We, you know, we also do a continuous review of our talent, and we wanna make sure we have the best talent focused on the best deals. Again, that can be recompete or new, but I think it heightened our view and our ability to look at talent inside the broader organization pursuing things. I just wanted to add those couple comments.
The only thing I would say, Genevieve, is I think from 2024 to 2026, we don't see any year as being unusually high or low. If we do, it probably won't turn out that way. Timing will change...
Yeah.
things will move. I think what we have said is we got a two-year extension on Vanguard that'll help. the portfolio shaping we did also helps on the recompete side.
That's a really good add. That wave that I talked about in my earlier presentation around our recompetes, it shouldn't be underestimated. It was a massive wave that ran through us for about an 18-month, 24-month period, that really did kinda come to a crescendo at the midpoint of last year. We are super excited not to be just playing defense. Going forward, it is really fun to be taking things away from other people now.
Rob?
Bob, just to follow up on that comment, when you look at your pipeline, especially on cloud, can you give us a breakdown of maybe what the mix is between civilian opportunities in cloud versus DoD?
I'd say the volume of civilian opportunities is higher. The scale of opportunities in DoD generally is bigger. Therefore, I think on balance, it's probably more civilian if you put those two together. Less opportunities, but bigger in DoD. More opportunities, smaller, and when you multiply that out, bigger in raw dollars for civilian. There's just more agencies. If you think about the markets themselves, IT is a general answer. Civilian does deliver services to citizens, right? They don't deliver things. There's not a lot of weapons systems. There's not a lot of machines that we built. There's not a lot of bases inside of the civilian organization. It's all about an apparatus that delivers a service. That apparatus is all run on IT.
Therefore, if you look at the budgets that are out there, take out the payments to citizens, and the rest of it, what they're procuring, are people to run systems and systems themselves. The DoD side, you've got weapons and bases and military, and there's a lot that's in there you gotta parse, but it's really, an IT apparatus.
David?
Thanks. David Strauss from Barclays. Prabu, want to dig in a little bit more on this, some working capital issue. I mean, I look at your net working capital, it looks really good already.
Yeah.
It seemed like in your bridge, you've assumed some positive absolute working capital in that. How do you get that, especially in light of, you know, some growth, you know, revenue growth you're expecting? Then could you just also touch on, you know, I think from a cash tax perspective, excluding Section 174, you haven't been paying much in cash taxes, how that progresses over the next couple of years and how much of a headwind you're looking at there. Thanks.
Sure. Appreciate the question, David. Maybe I'll start with the question on working capital. Look, I said we spend a lot of time inside the company. Yes, big picture, we're, you know, pretty well run from a working capital perspective. As you double-click, you know, a couple of levels inside the organization, you see, you know, and we do our top 10 lists, the best generators of working capital and the heaviest detractors to working capital. We see sizable, chunky programs on the detractor side that we think are fixable over the next 2-3 years. They effectively allow us to continue to grow the business with additional working capital needs, but in a way that just methodically allows us to, you know, get more efficient on those harder working capital programs.
I talked about terms and conditions, both with suppliers. You know, we had a massive effort last year, it's not finished yet, to get suppliers on a portal. Just if you think about robotic process automation, if you think about kind of the AI tools that we bring to our customers, we're bringing that capability inside the plumbing within SAIC. We build dashboards that we can double-click and see at a very specific level to see what working capital needs are for a particular program, and we're able to dial the needs of the program based on what we see. Just a tremendous amount of visibility with Mark and his team that have built the dashboards to help support the conversations we're having with customers. I continue to be cautiously optimistic that there's upside from working capital.
At the end of the day, we're gonna have to grow the business, we're gonna have to grow margin dollars, and we then have to optimize the working capital for a growing business. I think I would not pick one of those three things. I think we actually have to do all three things, but I'm cautiously optimistic that we continue to see opportunity on the working capital side. You're exactly right. We've not often talked about how much cash taxes we pay outside of Section 174. Obviously, that was a big, chunky payment that we made last year. We have demonstrated, I think we've in fact shared with the street kind of a view of the headwinds from cash taxes because the tax assets are amortizing off.
We've shown what that headwind is from a cash tax perspective. Look, I just come down to cash flow from ops is an important metric for us on a long-term basis and a near-term basis. Our tax team is amongst the best in the industry. They know what they have to go do on cash taxes over the next few years, and they've got their work cut out for them. Between Section 174 and the headwinds from the tax assets burning off, they know what they have to go do on the cash tax side. The reality is, we are assuming a higher level of cash taxes in the next 3 years inside of the 3-year projection that you saw than we've paid as cash taxes over the preceding 3 years. That's the baseline, and hopefully, we get to do a little bit better than that.
Cai had a question.
Byron? Oh, Byron. We'll get to Cai next.
Oh, double dip.
Yeah.
Thanks for doing this.
Sure.
What are your baseline assumptions about the FY 2024 budget and how that all comes together? It's gonna be a pretty sporty year in terms of debt ceiling.
Yeah.
I mean, do you get appropriations by the end of this calendar year, and that keeps your plan intact? Is there a point from the outside looking in where you go, you know, start with a new plan?
I think at the, we're all trying to navigate this, obviously. You know, we assume that, we'll start the next government fiscal year with a CR. Now, the good news is we've done that for how many years now? We kind of know how to do that. We, you know, we're not going to be surprised if there is a government shutdown that spans 2 days. We've lived through that before. Obviously, if there's a government shutdown, you know, everybody takes their corners and doesn't come to the middle for an elongated period of time, you know, then we'll obviously communicate what that impact could look like. We're not expecting that. We're not planning for that.
As it relates to budget in general, we expect the normal back and forth and ebb and flow. We don't see a huge opportunity or huge risk as the governments continue to, you know, negotiate their budgets. Obviously, you know, we could all be surprised, we assume it will take a lot of noise in the system, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of partisan positioning, in general, take the posture that we've seen in years prior. Basically it's the FY 2024 budget proposal is kind of what will drive the plane, that you're not. I think that's fair.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
Okay.
The last time we had an elongated government shutdown, and we've communicated this in the past, you know, there was about a $30 million, $40 million impact to cash and probably less than a $50 million impact to revenue on a 35-day shutdown. That gives you a sense for, you know, what the magnitude looks like. I think we're feeling pretty comfortable about where the guide is sitting right now because, again, 1,000 variables, and we try to think about as many of these things as possible when we lay the guide. Nazzic's exactly right. Obviously, we'll be transparent about the actual impacts when we see them. We feel like we've got it reasonably well calibrated.
Cai.
Yeah. Thank you. You talk about the mix shift to GTA, which, I mean, personally, I have a little hard time wrapping my head around what does that mean?
Yeah.
Earlier, we were talking and you mentioned that Michael's business probably is growing, you know, a couple points faster than Bob's. Michael's business has much more cost-plus and has a lower average margin.
Mm-hmm.
How do you get the margins up when the mix is going the wrong direction? Is it by moving toward more fixed price or, you know, what do you do?
Maybe I'll start there and then have Bob and Michael participate as well. Really big picture, GTA tends to be higher margin, as we've communicated for a fair amount of time now. Our share of GTA wins will continue to help on the margin side, which will be, we believe, sufficient to overcome the inherent mix challenges in having a predominantly cost plus business. Second data point. Even though Michael's business is predominantly cost plus, the reality is there's an incredibly high percentage of award fee assumptions we have inside of his plan that allows us to continue to deliver real value, high award fee scores so that we are consistently delivering a little better margin than what would be implied in a predominantly cost plus business.
Obviously, Bob, you know, to his credit, you know, as the bearer of more fixed price and T&M work, yeah, he knows exactly how the math works here.
The word grind is tattooed on me somewhere. That probably it does expect that we're going to grind out those profits.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
It's, you know, read any management book and you hear about, you know, 80/20 and it's all about aligning the strategy and things. The reality is, in this business, the 10 basis points, 20 basis points on each of these individual programs
Mm-hmm.
We've got to grind each one of them my business, a good portion of that business is gonna get outsized increases in profit.
Yeah. Yeah.
On the cost plus point, Cai, I just, you know, I think about my business, several years ago, we got real serious about what's in the three-year pipeline, right? There's a lot of things that we could go after that are at the lower end of cost plus margins. We made a conscious choice and then executed the strategy that we were gonna prioritize going after work that was maybe still cost plus because the customer wants to buy that way, but we could differentiate and get the program at a higher margin than traditional cost plus.
Mm-hmm.
We've been increasing the margin, and that's what has been literally going on inside the portfolio.
Bert.
Thanks. Just a quick follow-up question, maybe on that budget question for you, Bob. You noted earlier in your remarks that Army has actually been one of your fastest-growing customers, and obviously budgets there have been sort of going the wrong way. Can you just sort of walk us through what has been driving that and maybe what you see as if you see that as sustainable?
It's about where we put our bets on individual deals and individual customers, right? It's this is not magic in the strategy. It's basic blocking and tackling. The customer in Huntsville, their terminology is open for business. They are doing more to be able to take care of their base of employees down there. We are their largest provider of services and therefore we benefit when they benefit. The more we bring to that contract, the better it is for them, the better it is for us. That's kind of piece one. Piece two was the part of us selling IT into the Army business. You've heard about a couple of awards over the last few months.
The RITS was a large scale Army Corps of Engineers IT program. We didn't have that. We didn't have access to that before the Unisys acquisition. That opened up a nice, big, new target area on that contract. There's another one called AESD, AESD, It's a Army service desk. It's a managed services contract with the Army. Again, nice new area for us to be able to grow into. Even though the Army overall is a bill payer, and it's got challenges with some of its budgets, we're only looking at a half, not even a half, a third of the addressable market. It was really anchored on Huntsville. Expand out of Huntsville, new market. Expand out of engineering and IT, new market.
That allows for us to be able to grow even in a challenged environment macro-wise.
All right. For those who haven't yet had enough time with us today, you're welcome to join us for lunch, just next door. Thank you, everybody, for coming.