Kyndryl shares fell 5.38% today after the company posted a bigger sales decline than analysts expected for its fiscal first quarter. Even so, the numbers underneath the headline tell a more mixed story than the stock drop suggests, especially once you look at how fast Kyndryl’s cloud business is actually growing.
Revenue came in at $3.61 billion for the three months through June 30, down 3% from a year earlier and 1.2% below what analysts had forecast. That’s the number that moved the stock. But look past it, and the parts of Kyndryl tied most closely to cloud computing are pulling in the opposite direction.
Kyndryl spun off from IBM in 2021 with a business built mostly around traditional infrastructure management, work that tends to carry thin profit margins and hasn’t historically involved much cloud work at all. Since then, the company has leaned harder into Kyndryl Consult, the unit it launched in 2022 to handle bigger, higher-stakes technology projects, including migrating workloads to the cloud and building AI applications on top of it. That bet is paying off so far. Consult’s sales grew 10% this quarter, helped along by ten deals worth more than $50 million each. Over the past 12 months, the unit brought in $3.6 billion, up 16% from a year earlier.
The cloud partnerships specifically are where the real acceleration shows up. Revenue tied to hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud jumped 35% year-over-year, reaching $530 million in the quarter. Kyndryl also expanded its AWS partnership recently, aiming to train more of its 11,000-plus AWS-certified employees in AI and cloud modernization work, alongside joint engineering projects run directly with AWS.
Still, the profit picture isn’t pretty right now. Kyndryl swung from a $90 million adjusted profit a year ago to a $26 million adjusted net loss this quarter, working out to a $0.12 per-share loss, though that’s actually better than the $0.17 loss Wall Street expected. Part of the loss traces back to a $152 million charge tied to a workforce restructuring plan, which Kyndryl expects will save between $400 million and $500 million annually starting in fiscal 2028.
CEO Martin Schroeter pointed to strong signings this quarter, especially in cloud consulting and hyperscaler partnerships, as evidence of “increasing demand for AI-led modernization solutions.” Kyndryl now projects full-year revenue between $14.8 billion and $15.1 billion, with adjusted pretax income landing somewhere between $600 million and $700 million.
