Your next presentation is Unisys, traded on the New York Stock Exchange with ticker UIS. Representing them today is VP and Trader Shalabh Gupta, and VP and IR, Michaela Pewarski.
Hi everybody, thanks for joining us to learn more about Unisys. We're going to start with a quick overview of the company, and then we'll move on to a quick discussion of the strategy. We'll end up with Shalabh, who's going to talk about some of the recent pension actions that we've taken to really accelerate the removal of liabilities from the pension and ultimately the full plan itself, which we expect to be able to do in the next three to five years. Let me quickly go through kind of who we are as a company. We're a global IT services company. We operate in a $1.6 trillion market that's growing kind of high single digits. On this slide, you'll see some of the client priorities and how varied they are, and how critical they are to the enterprise and governments and higher education.
We'll get into some of the solutions that we provide to help drive innovation in AI, data governance, manage cybersecurity risk, all the things you see on this slide. We're about 16,000 employees, 8,000 engineers. We have 100, roughly, technology partners that we leverage when we architect our solutions and deliver them for our clients. We have about 700 clients, and we serve more than 50 companies and countries. We are roughly $2 billion in revenue, just shy of $300 million in adjusted EBITDA, and a little more than $50 million in free cash flow we generated in 2024. I think one thing that really sets us apart within the industry is the depth of our client relationships. We're a 150-year-old company, and our top 50 clients have been with Unisys for more than 20 years on average.
These are some of the largest public sector financial services and commercial enterprises in the world, which you'll see on this slide. This is just a select listing of some of the clients whose names we're able to share with you so you can kind of get a sense of the quality of organization that the organizations that we work with. We are organized in three segments. The first is cloud applications and infrastructure solutions. Within that segment, we are providing services like managed cloud services where we are maybe migrating workloads to the cloud, managing clients' infrastructure across hybrid environments, whether that is in a public cloud, private cloud, on-premise. We also have application development. We help clients modernize legacy enterprise applications. We may build new ones. We may implement software and kind of custom engineer platforms that software powers.
There's a good base of application developers, and that came to the company in large part through an acquisition we made sometime around 2020. We also do cybersecurity. That's a big area of growth for the industry and for this segment. We help clients design things like their SOC centers of excellence. We have solutions and partnerships with companies like CrowdStrike where we're helping them deploy the solutions, and then we manage that on an ongoing basis. A lot of our revenue is recurring in this segment. The same in digital workplace, which you can think of as largely outsourced IT support for service desk where employees have issues with technology and field services where we're going out in the field and servicing technology. We have a very large field services organization. It's unique, and many of the players in our space don't have that.
I think it kind of sets us apart. In some cases, we will even work with them on contracts where they can't provide those capabilities. We also manage devices, the tech stacks on the device, the experience, the technology experience, whether that's in an office with workplace kind of conference room technology, whether that's on a factory floor with a technology vending machine. There's all kinds of technology that we touch in the workplace. I'm going to move on to enterprise computing. That's our third segment. Roughly, each of these is a third of our revenue, roughly. Enterprise computing is a bit unique in that two-thirds of that segment is a proprietary software operating system called ClearPath Forward that is ours. It's deployed at a global kind of base of really blue chip companies, banks, governments.
They use this operating system for transaction processing, whether that's running their mortgage processing, running their airline reservation systems, or cruise line reservation systems, processing tax returns. There's a number of applications for this technology. In general, these clients are using it for mission-critical workloads that really need to be on kind of 24/7 uptime all the time. They can't fail. They need to be very secure. There's sensitive data on there, and they need to be able to process a very large number of transactions. That part of the business is something that we'll go into more in a couple of slides. The rest of that segment, about a third of the enterprise computing segment, is specialized services where those systems are legacy. We have modernized them, but certain elements and aspects of them are very unique.
Companies having to maintain a base of employees that understand those systems can be difficult. We provide services where we will manage that infrastructure that's running our systems. We also have some proprietary industry applications that run on ClearPath Forward that we have developed over decades. For example, a cargo management system or applications in retail banking. Clients in those industries in which we have deep expertise and which ClearPath is supporting will also use our applications as well as their own that they have built. This is just a quick, this bar chart kind of shows you the revenue and kind of gross margin of the past couple of years of that one-third of that ECS segment ClearPath, which we call license and support.
Some of the characteristics of why clients choose to continue using ClearPath Forward are security, they've built up customization over decades, and it's extremely expensive to try to migrate off or maybe move certain workloads into the cloud. The cloud's gotten more expensive. We've made it easier to modernize around ClearPath, and that business is incredibly sticky. One thing to understand about those contracts, about 85% of an L&S renewal is license revenue that is recognized upfront for a full multi-year contract in the quarter in which that renewal is signed. The remaining 15%- 20% that support is recognized over the term of the contract. It does create some lumpiness depending on when certain clients actually sign that renewal and which clients are renewing in a given year. There are some really great trends going on in this business.
These contracts are for a certain term as well as certain MIPS, so consumption. Clients are using these systems more and more. Over the past several years, that trend has really picked up. That means more revenue for Unisys. If you think of an airline running a reservation system, there's more people changing seats on an app and reticketing that seat. That's driving consumption. Companies pulling valuable data off of our systems to move it into a data lake and run analysis is also driving consumption. When a client hits their consumption, if it's before the end of their term, they will renew early. That means you get another four-year term or three-year term of revenue six months or a year sooner.
Turning back to the services portion of the business, this is an overview of some of the partners we work with in each of our segments to give you a sense of the high quality, some of the best tech companies out there. We're always evolving our partner ecosystem to make sure we're bringing the best technology to our clients. This slide is just a quick timeline to give you a sense.
I'm not going to really spend time on this now, but I think it will help you understand some of the things you see in our financials and some of the positive things we've achieved with our rebranding of the company, reorganization, expanding our Alliance Partner Program, and really moving up the rankings with industry analysts and advisors, investing in innovation, and returning the business to a point where it is attracting new logos to the company, which are providing a strong pipeline of expansion for the future. This is just some of the accolades we get from the industry analysts. You can see how many new and improved rankings we've received just over the past year or so. Turning to the strategy for growing the XL&S business, this is very much a land and expand strategy. Like I mentioned, we've really reinvigorated new logo growth at the company.
I believe we sign more new logo TCD, which is total contract value, last year than we did in the three prior years combined. It's really been a strong inflection. I think that's due to the investments that we've really been making in innovation, marketing, sales, all of these things to the analysts and advisors to really bring more awareness and visibility to kind of the transformed Unisys after making some of those acquisitions we made in 2020 into higher growth areas of the market and really educating people about who we are today as a company. The Alliance Partners, as I mentioned, that's really key to the strategy of making sure that we're bringing emerging disruptors to our clients, that we're expanding how we market and co-sell with these partners.
As we talked about on our last earnings call, we're starting to see more of a two-way street with many of our partners where they're coming to us and pulling us into deals that are in their pipeline versus the other way around. I think that's a really positive sign that some of the innovation that we're delivering with things like Service Experience Accelerator, which is a framework for our next generation service desk in Digital Workplace Solutions or Intelligent Operations in Cloud Applications & Infrastructure Solutions, our technology partners are beginning to see Unisys as an asset that can bring new capabilities to their clients. Elevating awareness and relevance and continuing to invest in sales remains a big focus.
Expanding our addressable markets, whether that is in the mid-market or broadening the types of things that we do, those are all kind of elements of just getting into more parts of the market with our solutions. We're looking at doing that, especially in specific industries, going deeper and kind of building broad relationships with those mid-market clients who maybe a larger competitor can't give as much time and attention to. We can really give that white glove service but bring that global scale and reach, enabling emerging technology. Developing scalable, flexible AI-embedded solutions, leveraging our capabilities, our partners' capabilities, our industry knowledge, that's a key part of our growth strategy. Modernizing the edge, leveraging our scaled application factory and partner ecosystem to kind of help modernize application layers, adopt AI on the edge, elevate the customer experience. That's all a very important focus area of our innovation.
I just want to briefly touch on AI. I think it's, you know, one important point I want to make is I really do think Unisys gets a disproportionate benefit from AI. There's a potential for us now to kind of compete with some of the much larger players in our space whose business models have historically kind of centered around having hundreds of thousands of employees and kind of billing for their time. You know, now we can, and I think Service Experience Accelerator is like a great example of this. We can significantly increase the delivery of service desk in an automated kind of fashion to improve the experience for the employee and to reduce our costs and improve our delivery efficiency. You know, in general, for us, AI means that we can scale delivery of our innovation without needing to have 200,000 employees.
I think that's allowing us to, you know, it means that competing for these very large contracts is no longer out of reach. If we're bringing that innovation, you know, we have the technology that we can now scale that more efficiently. This slide, you know, just covers kind of the ClearPath Forward strategy. Quickly, that's just, you know, continuing to evolve our applications and certain capabilities to get data, you know, from our systems to power front-end applications in the enterprise, you know, to really bridge skills gaps with our specialized services and support.
All of these things are really going to drive consumption on our platforms, but also make them stickier because it's bringing, you know, more capabilities and kind of making it, you know, a more modern experience to use our operating systems so that, you know, there's no push factor of, you know, I can't get my data, I can't use it to power my applications. We're increasing the mobility of that. We're making sure clients have Unisys associates who can bridge skills gaps for them. We're continuing to innovate with new industry solutions and applications that run on ClearPath Forward as well. Gross margin expansion. Moving to margin expansion, we're basically targeting 150 basis points annual gross margin expansion in our XL&S solutions. Since 2022, we've achieved 600 basis points of expansion.
That's a combination of mix shift and improving delivery efficiency, whether that is workforce optimization, leveraging lower cost labor markets, upskilling and reskilling employees, and backfilling internally. All of that workforce optimization, leveraging technology to get more efficient automation, strategic account management. It is a combination of that shift into the higher margin, faster growing areas of the market and improving that efficiency largely. I think going forward, that's going to be more technology led. This slide talks about the levers to improve our free cash flow. We have an SG&A program that we have been diligently executing. We've taken significant costs, probably $30- $40 million, out of our SG&A base that will get a full year of benefit next year.
We also have had the past few years legal environmental costs that have been unusual in nature that are winding down and a couple of one-time inflows here that we also expect, one of which we got on the $25 million legal settlement on July 1. We have about $30 million that we'll get in 2026 or 2027 when we complete the remediation of an environmental site. This is just a recap of the strategy we went through. I'm going to pass it over to Shalabh now to quickly go through the pension items.
All right. Which button is it? This one?
To the right.
This one?
Yeah.
All right. As you know, back in June, we refinanced an upsized amount of debt to address some of the pension overhangs. Before I get there, I just want to spend a few minutes on our strategic objectives. What we did in June was part of our long-term capital structure objectives. Specifically, when you look at these objectives, the first and foremost is reducing the size of the U.S. qualified defined benefit plans and ultimately, over time, remove those plans. That's one of the key objectives for us as far as capital structure is concerned. Additionally, we want to reduce the uncertainty of our cash flows, the volatility that we have. Part of it is driven by what's driven by pensions. The key objective is to reduce that volatility. At the same time, we want to maintain strong cash balances and liquidity.
That's very important to get us through any macroeconomic headwinds. It's important for that. The next one is improving net leverage ratio and credit rating. That's really important for us because right now we are at the credit rating we are. We are limited in terms of what we can do as far as capital structure is concerned, taking out pensions, etc. As our ratings improve with the improved leverage ratios, we should be able to borrow and retire our pensions. That will completely remove the overhang we have in pensions. As our debt capacity improves, we should be able to then invest more in our growth. As the growth improves and cash flow improves, we should be then in a position to return some of the capital to the shareholders.
That is our long-term objective, to get to a point where we have sufficient liquidity, sufficient cash leverage capacity for us to be able to return capital to the shareholders. Now, coming back specifically to the transaction, back in June, we issued $700 million of senior secured notes. Part of it was to refinance our existing $485 million notes, which were maturing in 2027, but we took that opportunity to refinance it at the present moment. We upsized it by $200 million. We took $50 million of cash from the balance sheet and contributed $250 million to the pension plans. That reduced the deficit in the pension plans, the U.S. defined benefit contribution pension plans, from $500 million down to $250 million. At the same time, we also extended our asset-backed revolver, maturity of that revolver, so that it's in line with the extended debt.
Our next step for us is to execute annuity purchases. The rationale for executing annuity purchases is it reduces our liabilities. I'll get to it a little bit later, but it helps us to ultimately remove the pension plan at a much lower cost. It's important for us to get to executing annuity purchases. Finally, where we need to get to is generate sufficient cash flows. As cash flows, as our EBITDA improves over the next few years and our debt goes down, we'll have a lot less leverage and would have capacity to fully remove the pension plan. These are, you know, I won't go through this. The only point I want to make on this leverage detailed slide is the fact that when we increased the debt by $200 million, we contributed to the pension plan.
The rating agencies, the way they look at it, they look at our leverage. They combine funded debt with pension debt. Literally, it's taking $200 million of funded debt and reducing $200 million of pension debt. No net impact on leverage. Actually, leverage came down a little because we took $50 million of cash from the balance sheet and contributed to the pension plan. Net leverage actually reduced, the leverage actually reduced a little, gross leverage, but net leverage remained the same. What are the benefits of us contributing this $250 million into the pension plan? The additional thing that we did when we actually contributed the $250 million into the pension plan was also changed the investment philosophy in the pension plan. We took all the assets instead of, you know, targeting higher returns on the assets. We took those assets and literally hedged the liabilities.
The benefit of that is that going forward, we would not see the volatility in contributions at all going forward. Very little de minimis volatility in contributions. That's really important because we heard from our investors that they cannot stomach volatility of contributions because it could be a significant headwind given our cash flows. In addition to removing the volatility, it reduces the deficit. Deficit in the U.S. qualified plans is now $250 million instead of $500 million. It also enables us to do annuity purchases. If we had not contributed the $250 million, we would not have been able to do annuity purchases depending because it's a threshold that we have to achieve to be able to do annuity purchases. By contributing the $250 million, we were able to get to that threshold.
As I mentioned to you before, as we do annuity purchases and we plan to do about $600 million of annuity purchases in the next two years, starting this year and next year, what that will do is reduce or lower the liabilities and ultimately reduce the cost to terminate the pension plans. This transaction, when you look at this transaction, by contributing $250 million to the pension plan, reduced our future cash contributions. If you were to calculate the impact on cash flows of these reduced contributions and netting it with higher interest rates, there was a $70 million benefit over the five-year period to cash flows. Our cash flows, the reduction in contribution to the pension plan, more than offset the increase in interest expense for incremental debt.
With that, we think, I mean, on July 24th, we had given the details in terms of over the next five years, what happens to our gap deficit and what happens to contributions. Based upon that, we also said that in the next three to five years, we would be in a position to terminate the pension plan because the deficit, the cost of terminating these pension plans would be roughly $250- $300 million, which if we are generating the cash flows that we are projecting, we should be able to either from cash flows or from incremental debt to be able to terminate these pension plans. That's all I had. Any questions? Any questions?
Yeah. I was looking online and those numbers aren't always totally accurate. Looking at the compounded annual growth rates that you guys provided with the % of your revenue streams that it comprises, I ended up calculating from those numbers around a 6.1% compounded annual growth rate. If I put a 0% growth rate for that third part of the business right there, that it's just like being maintained and it comprises the software and all that kind of stuff. I know that you were talking a lot about the AI potentially decreasing costs and particularly decreasing personnel costs.
The thing that I'm a little bit confused about, though, is that because there's a lot of specialized support and specialized engineering and it's such a very, very important thing for people to always be able to rely upon their cloud solutions and their software solutions to be going no matter the time of day, no matter what's going on. Do you think that implementing AI could open the possibility for little errors to come through when people are contributing most?
Again, we are not new to AI. We have implemented AI. It's not called agentic AI, but we have been doing AI for the last several years. It's not that that's something not new for us. What's new is the buzzwords of agentic AI that everyone talks about. We are looking at various ways to implement those agentic AIs as well. The big benefit for us is reduction in delivery costs. That is the biggest benefit that we get. Yes, when we implement these, customers or clients are always looking for cost breaks, right, or price breaks. Effectively, the benefit is from delivery savings.
Yeah, I mean, I think that you're making a valid point. You're saying we're using more AI in the delivery and, you know, there's still human oversight. I think it's just about making the employees more productive. I do think training data that is up to date, full-sum, not redundant, doesn't have gaps in the knowledge, like is the, you know, thing that everybody is like striving to create. That bad training data or errors in and issues with it is, you know, a big challenge for enterprise adoption because it's leading to like hallucinations. I think a lot of clients not finding being able to achieve the ROI that they thought they could when they, you know, started that pilot or deployed that thing.
I think that is why we're so excited about the knowledge management capabilities that we've been developing in DWS because we do see eventually like broader potential applications for that. In DWS, for automating some of that service desk, you know, that's really deployed in the client's network, leveraging their data. It's not like training off the internet or anything. We have created capabilities like if there's an issue with somebody's computer in the office in Asia and then it pops up in the office in the United States with somebody else, if one of our, you know, agents helps somebody handle that, we're using generative AI to help them resolve that.
We're using generative AI to like create a knowledge article about like how to resolve this issue and to get that into the training data that then the automated, you know, agents are learning off of and to kind of constantly be intaking, you know, information from the device performance and from, you know, what's going on with people around the organization. To identify gaps in knowledge, like where we need to create content or this is out of date. We are doing a lot of work around that. I think that, you know, this service has not been perfect even with people and the challenges, the tools that they have.
Even when you have like a person trying to help someone resolve an issue, it might not be, you know, it might have a long handle time or, you know, they might take up a lot of that employee's time and distract them. We view AI as just like something that can help our people be more productive, but we're not going to like go have AI like generate, like go do the application development by itself.
It's really difficult too because, I mean, the amount of savings and the benefits this could have for your guys' business. I mean, it's obvious how great it could be. Just speaking from a place of experience, when I was working at a financial institution and we were trying to use generative AI for IT help and that kind of stuff, having a small training set caused a lot of hallucinations.
I'm so excited for the technology, and I think it's going to be fantastic. I just get a little bit worried right in the back of my head that something could go wrong and, you know, this is the.
Were you guys, and what were you using, like a copilot?
It was something developed, third party. I mean, I didn't sign an NDA, so I can't even talk, but I worked at U.S. Bank. We had a generative AI sort of like assistant that dealt with our IT stuff. We would go to that for all of our questions, and sometimes we would get completely wrong information. It starts with the actual training data.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm guessing it was probably static data, kind of like wasn't constantly being cleansed and stuff like that. I like, do we agree that is a big challenge.
The quality of the data is really important. One of the things that we strive for is cleansing the data, having quality data, knowledge base, et cetera, to make sure that what you put out is accurate.
Yeah. On the front end, the interface really with that user, like if I'm the employee, the chatbot uses natural language processing. I could say, "Hey, my computer broke," or someone else might say, "My computer is not working," or they might be speaking in another language and it understands this person is saying this and that sounds a lot like this issue, things like that. I think we feel like we're getting closer. We're not there yet to delivering on that promise of having automated customer service that can understand and adapt and give you the right answer when you need it to actually solve that problem so you can get that forward.
I understand we're excited to see where it goes because the potential is really, really open.
Any other questions?
Are we looking up six years to try to understand the sort of current form of uses of EBITDA and other entry? We now have a $255 million market cap. Let's just say there's $300 million of EBITDA in the past, which is very low. If we calculate that free cash flow generation without any pensions.
Right now, our debt is significant, $1.2 billion, if you include the pension debt, right? Pension goes away. It uses the cash flow that we generate over the next few years. Currently, our forecast is what is $100 million of pre-pension cap.
Yeah, we're going to raise it to $100 million.
Yeah, something like that. Roughly $100 million. Our EBITDA is roughly, what is $280 to.
Yeah, that's what it is today.
That's what it is today.
did not have the pension contributions. We hope to improve that. We've really improved our free cash flow conversion. The environmental and the kind of legal, those were big drags.
Yeah, because we still have about $80 million of CapEx. Our free cash flow is $100 million on $280 million of EBITDA. If we have six years out, we have EBITDA of $300 million, and we are generating $130 million, $140 million of free cash flows. Our first step would be, I mean, there are a few things we will have to do. First of all, take care of the pensions. It's out five years. We still have $250 million to $300 million of requirement to take care of the pensions. Part of the cash flows, either cash flows or incremental debt, would be required to take care of the pensions. Beyond that, it's more about initially more about reducing debt, right? It's still going to be highly levered at that point in time.
Lowering debt, looking at M&A opportunities, investing in organic growth, and then obviously also looking at, as I mentioned to you, one of the objectives is to return capital to the shareholders. It's a combination of all of those things that we'll be looking at in terms of how to utilize that cash base.
What are you asking specifically about, like our entire?
We now are six years ahead and there's no mention. Your free cash flow in total is probably about 50% compared to where you're trading right now.
Yeah, I mean, today our free pension and free cash flow is $110 million. You're saying the EBITDA maybe grows $30 million? That seems like that's your base case scenario that you're tuning. Yeah, I'm saying today it's $110 million. Yeah, the pension contributions.
Right. If you say the pension contributions are done, pension overhang is done, the cash would be utilized to de-lever because we still have, I'm assuming at that point we still have significant leverage, de-lever, invest in the business. That would be a discussion as to what opportunities do we have to invest in the business, whether we do M&A or organic growth. At the same time, we'll be looking at returning capital to the shareholders at that point in time.
Yeah, just also one other thing I wanted to touch on. The interest is going up. There is going to be a shift. Like we're basically shifting pension contributions into converting it into interest because we issue some debt to put funds in pension. The contributions came down, interest went up. Actually, you know, this year relative to next year, that incremental interest does impact your pre-pension free cash flow. That's just a shift of those.
That's why I said, I mean, six years out, we probably would want to reduce our debt because the interest cost is significant. We reduce the debt, and then we look at what are the opportunities. Like every company looks at your growth.
You're just trying to get a free cash flow yield, right? Like it'd be.
Yeah, that's currently 110. I mean, if we have $300 million of EBITDA, we're looking at $140, $150 million of free cash flows. The majority of a big chunk of that free cash flow is coming from our ClearPath Forward business, which is a 70% margin business.
We will be doing an event sometime in the next two months, probably before earnings, but hopefully a little earlier in the cycle than we did the pension event to allow you to get a deeper understanding of ClearPath Forward, some client case studies. We have been talking a lot about the upside that has been delivered from that business. We want to help you understand what clients, what is ClearPath, what are clients using it for, what is the threat from AI, all of these bigger questions as well. We want to really give you some tangible client examples of case studies and help you understand that broader ecosystem that is really driving consumption through those platforms. Look out for an invitation to that. Anything else before we wrap?
Anything else.