“And our tax rate expectation for the year remains in the mid-teens.”

In context

“year. With our new mainframe launch, innovation across the portfolio, and capacity dynamics that could benefit our mainframe environments and storage needs we expect infrastructure to grow. While we feel good about the core growth drivers of our business, there are areas of our portfolio that could see greater variability in the event that the macroeconomic environment deteriorates. This includes consulting is more sensitive to discretionary pullbacks and Doge-related initiatives. Consumption-based services and software, including in Red Hat, and areas of distributed infrastructure. We continue to expect IBM's full-year operating pretax margin to expand by over a half a point driven by productivity initiatives, revenue scale, and mix, mitigated by the impact of dilution from acquisitions. And our tax rate expectation for the year remains in the mid-teens. As always, the timing of discrete items can cause the rate to vary within the year. For free cash flow, we expect to generate about $13.5 billion in 2025. Driven primarily by growth in adjusted EBITDA. The headwinds I discussed last quarter of higher cash taxes and higher CapEx remain the same. As I mentioned earlier, we have been accelerating our productivity initiatives to plan for various scenarios. And to protect our profitability and free cash flow. As we look forward to the rest of the year, we will remain disciplined about managing our costs. The strength of our balance sheet and strong liquidity position allow us to make investments in our business for the longer term. As Arvind mentioned, while still early through the first three weeks of the second quarter, we have not seen any”