“Actions taken in the third quarter helped accelerate our productivity initiatives, and we now believe we can achieve approximately $3.5 billion in annual run rate savings by the end of 2024, up from $3 billion.”

In context

“. This represents the weaker end of our prior expectations of low-single digit revenue growth for the year. And given we are at the end of a multiyear product cycle, we now expect the infrastructure to be about a 1 point impact to IBM for the full year. On currency, given the strengthening of the dollar, we now expect currency to be about a 0.5 point headwind to revenue growth in the quarter and about 1 point impact of revenue growth for the year. Now turning to profitability. For the full year, we are raising our expectation for operating pretax margin expansion to about 1 point year-to-year well above our model. The strength of this performance is driven by our revenue scale, portfolio mix and productivity initiatives, enabling operating leverage, while providing investment flexibility. Actions taken in the third quarter helped accelerate our productivity initiatives, and we now believe we can achieve approximately $3.5 billion in annual run rate savings by the end of 2024, up from $3 billion. Drilling down on segment margins. We expect Software segment profit margin to expand by well over 1 point for the year. Consulting segment profit margin is now expected to be flat, and we continue to see Infrastructure segment profit margin in the mid to high-teens. Consistent with last year, we are maintaining our full year view of operating tax rate in the mid-teens range. For free cash flow, given the strength of our performance year-to-date, we remain confident in delivering greater than $12 billion of free cash flow for the year, driven primarily by growth in adjusted EBITDA. We are on track to grow revenue, expand operating profit and grow free cash flow as we close out 2024. This positions us well as we look forward to 2025. We are confident in our portfolio and growth trajectory a”