Clarivate Plc (CLVT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

November 10, 2020

New York Stock Exchange US Industrials Professional Services investor_day 170 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Mark Donohue

executive
#1

[Presentation] Hello, and welcome to the Clarivate 2020 Virtual Investor Day. I'm Mark Donohue, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you all for joining us today. We'll hear from members of our executive leadership team, and we'll wrap up with a Q&A session following the conclusion of the presentation. But first, turning to the most exciting slide in our presentation. Yes, the forward-looking statement. You can read the information on the slide at your leisure. But to briefly summarize, our presentation today includes forward-looking statements. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, et cetera, to differ. Please refer to our Form 10-K and 10-Qs filed with the SEC and available on the Clarivate website for additional information. Our discussion will also include non-GAAP measures or adjusted numbers. Reconciliation of these measures to GAAP measures are available in today's presentation, which is also available on our website. With that out of the way, let's get to our main event. Turning to our agenda. As you can see, we have an exciting roster of speakers and topics for you today. Jerre Stead, our Executive Chairman and CEO, will lead us off in a moment. We'll take a 5-minute break, following Jeff Roy's presentation. Richard Hanks, our CFO, will close out the prepared remarks. Then Jerre and the team will return and address your questions. [Operator Instructions] We'll read your questions out loud and direct them to the appropriate individual. With that, let's get to show in the room. It's a pleasure to turn it over to Jerre.

Jerre Stead

executive
#2

As a reminder, I'm Jerre Stead, Chairman and CEO. I've never been more excited to be able to present to you all today where we are, where we've been and where we're going to go. I do want to tell you that the recordings you're seeing have been pre-video-ed. We did that to minimize any issues as we do this virtual conference with you of any technology issues. However, we will be live at the end of this afternoon for our Q&A, and we look forward to that very much. I'm delighted in being able to share with you the most exciting company I've ever been fortunate enough to be part of. As you know, this is my 41st year as Chairman and CEO of public companies. Each of them I'm very thankful for. Each of them, I've been very proud of what we've done. And none has the opportunity to do what we're doing today for our colleagues, our customers, our communities and for our shareowners. So let's get started. We truly do have world-leading assets serving large and very stable markets. You're going to see that as we go through it today, tremendous intellectual property and scientific information. I want to just step back a year ago in November when we were together, we talked about the need to make sure that we brought the businesses together. We were operating historically with the carve-out from Thomson with 6 stand-alone businesses. We brought those together last year under Jeff and Mukhtar into the intellectual property business and the scientific information organization. I couldn't be prouder of the progress. You'll see that as we go through. Products that we provide are critical. They're inside our customers' work streams, which is where we want to be. And I always think of how do we help our customers help their customers. And we're unique from that standpoint. You're going to see in a few minutes our vision, mission, values and our purpose. We're closer to providing that purpose than I had ever hoped we would be a year ago at this time. Today, we have 30,000 customers. We'll talk more about that soon. We added 12,000 with CPA, 30,000 customers around the world, incredibly important customers for the entire world. And we have amazing, you'll see a lot of their proprietary databases. We have more databases brought together as we introduce those into data lakes around the world. I'm excited. Now let's move to the next slide that lets you see the magic of this company. I've been blessed, as you'll remember, leading IHS Markit for 17 years before we had the opportunity in May of 2019 to do the reverse merger with Clarivate and CCC, Churchill Capital Corporation. And it fits the model. It was so exciting to be able to make this happen. Remember, a highly recurring revenue that goes all the way down but through profitable incremental growth, I'm going to talk about that, an amazing strong cash flow. And by the way, at the end of the day, I'm going to give you my views of where we'll be in 2023, 2024 on each of those areas. That allows us to have the capacity to reinvest, which we've been doing, as you've seen with the 2 large acquisitions. So it's an amazing machine that's focused on great customer delight that we'll talk about, led by incredible, just wonderful colleagues around the world and returning to our shareowners the returns that you deserve and expect. This happens to be maybe my all-time favorite churn. A year ago, I said, here's where we were going to be -- we'll talk about that in a minute. But this chart lays out where we were a year ago, $920 million, $919 million of revenue, $292 million of EBITDA, 32%, by the way, up a lot from the margins the year before, 32% margins and just over $100 million of free cash flow. We had 4,500 colleagues. We have 18,000 customers, and we had a market cap that we were proud of at $5 billion. Now let me show you where we're at today. Of all the companies I’ve been blessed to lead, none has moved quicker or more successfully than this one. Today, on a run rate basis, we're at $1.717 billion. Or think about the EBITDA. Think about that shift from $292 million to $766 million, and I'm going to talk about where we're going to go later on that. We moved from the 32% to 45% EBITDA margins. By the way, a quick comment on that. You'll hear a lot about it. We should be thinking about those margins continuing to increase. There is no ceiling on those margins in the future. I'll come back to that in a minute. And adjusted free cash flow of $617 million, 6x where we were a year ago. Today, we have 8,500 colleagues. We have, as I said earlier, 30,000 customers and a market cap that has touched $20 billion, and we're just getting warmed up. So that slide that could stay on forever. However, what I’m going to talk about is the purpose we set when we came together in May of 2019 is, we believe human ingenuity can transform the world and improve our future. And actually, we're doing that. You're going to see today how we provide it end-to-end with the acquisitions and the other great work that's going on inside of our company, end-to-end solutions like no one's ever had. We set out a vision that will improve the way the world creates, protects and advances information. We're well down that path. Vision to me is a beacon to the future of how we're going to get there. Our mission. We are a trusted, indispensable partner. I also always say that we're an independent, trusted, indispensable partner because that's the one that we are delivering to help our customers. Our values, aim for greatness, value every voice and own your actions are ones we're living. You're going to see in a few minutes where we measure the results. Our colleagues tell us of how we're doing on that. But they are ones that we live with, we operate with both -- in my case, I try to be the great role model that we deserve for every one of our colleagues. So think about that purpose because that's where we're going. This is what I've used for years. You've seen it before, the virtuous circle. And I'm going to talk at some length about each one of these pieces. Everything starts with great colleagues. If you don't have focused, outstanding, highly trained, highly competent colleagues, the rest won't happen. So we measure -- this is our third measurement that you'll see in a few minutes. And I couldn't be happier. Our goal is 80%. That will put us in the upper 5% of all of the companies that measure colleague engagement. And we'll get there. You'll see the great improvement we made this year. Then that leads to customer delight. Customer delight is something I've lived with forever and focused outside in. I'd say today, as we bring the companies together, DRG, CPA and Clarivate, I'd say today that we've -- if we were a 4 last year or 5, we're a 7 or 8 and focusing together outside in, and that's where the world has to be, outside in. Our customer delight score, you'll see and our stretch goal is 82. That will put us in world class, and that's where we'll go. I'll come back to that in a couple of minutes. Then if you think about what that leads to, strong bottom line growth, strong top line growth. A year ago, I said my personal goal in 2021, 2022 was to take that $900 million we were at, make it $1.5 billion, to take the $218 million of EBITDA we were at, make it $600 million EBITDA, $600 million. We've gone way past that, and we're just getting started. Long, long way to go. I've never been prouder of an organization than this one. So let's go and look now what that leads to from free cash flow, $400 million. Great progress. We can feel good about that. That $400 million, I also said would be in 2022. We're way past that, as you would expect us to be. So the goal that we'll talk about, how the progress we've made is 80% world-class colleague engagement, 82% customer delight. We're close to that today, and we'll keep working on it. And then I'm going to say at the end of the meeting, my personal goals for the company on revenue, EBITDA and true free cash flow. In the middle of all of this, we kicked off sustainability this year. That's the glue that brings us all together. Sustainability starts with creating a sustainable, high growth, profitable company. Then all the other things that come together allow us to have a common goal as an organization for our communities, as an organization for all of our colleagues. But sustainability, ESG, is critical for us. So think about the virtuous circle, those 4 measurable goals that we'll report on every quarter and then sustainability is where we'll be in the future. So let's go back now. As I said, here's our colleague engagement survey, 90% participation. I couldn't have been prouder. Think about back in March 15 of this year, we shut down every office. We sent everybody home. We -- in 2 weeks, I've never been prouder of an organization. We had everybody at home on Internet with new laptops if they needed them, and we were off to the races. I didn't know how we would do. I was not sure because all the things I've gone through before, I wasn't sure how we would respond. And this is incredible. It's so heartwarming for me. The score is 77. As you'll see, benchmark means all of the companies that this upside company that uses -- we use is 74 average, and we're up to 77. You'll remember the goal I set, 80, we will be there in a year or so. The strengths, we got the feedback. By the way, what's so important with this is not just the survey, but all the write-ins that we get back that tell us what our colleagues want us to keep doing, stop doing and start doing. I've read them all. It's amazing, a great feedback. So our strengths was feedback, communication, action taking, felt so good about that. That's just couldn't have felt better if we're going to ask for anything. When you think about all of our people remote in their homes all over the world, thousands of people in India and every other place, and we were able to continue increasing the colleague engagement. Where we'll work to do better is quicker decision making. We've made great progress there. I'd say we're about a 7 out of 10. We'll be a 9 out of 10 by this time next year. Growth, that's meaning personal growth, the opportunity to grow personally and then belonging, which we expected, if you think about how many of our folks are at home, belonging means they aren't getting the opportunity other than seeing each other over a screen to be together. It's been interesting for me. Many of you know, I've traveled usually 400,000 miles a year for the last 40 years to visit people. I had traveled 125,000 miles in January, February. I have not been on a plane since February 29. So I too had to adjust, and I feel very good about it. We're probably more productive than we've ever been in the history of an organization, even though we're working remotely. Every other week, I do a town hall for all of our colleagues, open it up for questions, et cetera. So we feel closer together, but belonging, and we'll talk about that, you're going to hear Mel talk about that in a little while as we changed the way of working from home and office. So felt very good about it, couldn't have been prouder. Now you'll see that we're doing the same thing on customer delight. This was amazing score. Last year, we did 77. We set the stretch goal at 79 because it was a new effort for us. We said earlier, best practice is 82. So you'll see that we moved from 76 to 79. You'll also see that the strength, I've never seen this, those that I've talked to together with you before, I've never seen the quality of products and services, our information and insights this strong. What this says is our thousands of customers, we sent surveys over 800,000 users and customers around the world. They came back with various statistically relevant rewards for us to understand, rewards meaning the highest scores I've ever seen, 87% in the quality of products, 86% in information and insight. The same thing we said last year, we have to do now. I'll talk about it more in a minute. Easy to do business with. But it's amazing to me. And by the way, I've read all those inputs too. We have thousands of inputs handwritten in by our customers. It was so interesting. Price is not a discussion. Price is not a discussion. You see this high of score from quality and the information and insight and almost no comments. Out of the thousands of comments we got, there was less than 120 that mentioned price. So feel very good about that. And we're going to work hard to continue to earn that for years to come. Like I said, over 70% of our positive comments came out of product and information. Ease of doing business is the biggest opportunity we have. You're going to hear Mike in a few minutes talking about something that's going to make an incredible difference for us, and that's our 3 Global Business Centers where we pull in an enormous amount of our customers today. We have a very long tail of customers, and I'll talk about that in just a minute. But delighted. And one other quick comment. As a reminder, we put in place the same thing I had done at IHS, IHS Markit. Every colleague in the company, every colleague in the company has the opportunity to earn restricted shares, not options, restricted shares if we meet or exceed our goal. So this year, every colleague received shares that are valued at $2,000 of shares, every place in the world. Those were announced last week. You can imagine the excitement, and I hope we're able to deliver that year after year after year. Quick comment while I'm on that subject. We will never exceed more than 1% of outstanding shares in any year as we grant shares to all of our colleagues and executives around the world. So very proud of customer delight, just wow, it feels great. So then let's talk about sustainability. This is our first year, and I'm immensely proud of Julia Mair and her team of what they've done to get us off and running. Governance, 95% of our colleagues have passed, have gone through all of the tests that we've asked them to. Ethical business, 100% of our colleagues participated as we expect, code of conduct. By the way, we also had 100% of our colleagues participate and earn a special award for understanding customer delight. So that felt really good. From governance, we then go to social. 95% of our colleagues completed antibias training. I'm very pleased with that. By the way, think about our company, we have people in dozens of countries. So antibias applies across the board in all ways as it should, not just in the U.S., but every place in the world. And we've moved into a wonderful diversity program committed to making us -- and why do we do that -- one, because we should to be a great corporate citizen; but two, it gives us the ability to attract the highest talent. And I'm going to talk about that more in a couple of minutes. Then finally, the environment, working on supply chain, establishing data collection, which is a huge job, by the way, in the first year, long way down that path. We will release our first document early next year that lays out where we're at and all the progress we've made with governance, social and environmental. Our goal there, we'll make it happen, is to be listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the FTSE4Good Index. And we will be there. And of course, that opens us up for many, many investors that will not participate in investing in companies like ours if we haven't done that. So that impacts all of us, and we'll make that happen. Now if you think about where we're at, when we talk about delivering strong top and bottom line growth through organic growth and revenue enhancement. I said in January of 2019, Richard and I announced that we were merging the 2 companies that we would exit 2020 at 4% to 6% organic. Obviously, did not expect the pandemic. But I got to tell you, I couldn't feel better. We've had some softness in the transaction business. We're starting to see that come back. And I expect us to end in that 4% to 6%. Perhaps even more importantly, as we said, we'd be in the 6% to 8% when we exited 2021. I have a very strong belief that we'll be there, and it will be at the upper percentage of that because the addition of DRG and CPA gives us great strength in end-to-end solutions no company in the world has. So you're going to see that. And when you listen to Mukhtar and you hear Jeff, you'll understand what magnificent opportunity. The white space in our company is enormous. My guess is there -- we could double, quadruple, 10x the size we are today and still have a lot of white space left, which is a great way to feel. So 2 of the things we did. Just as a background, DRG, it's a great company. It was owned by a public Indian company. And it was actually one that I looked at back in 2012 when we thought that IHS, we would have the opportunity to acquire Clarivate. At that time, it was actually right when the India public company was acquiring it. It's a wealth of information, and you're going to hear much more about that from Mukhtar in a few minutes. But it lets us provide the only end-to-end solution in life science today. And it sets us up with the next acquisition that we just completed, CPA. That one is also an amazing step forward for us because we now have end-to-end from the very beginning of an idea to the end of a successful idea turning into product, every piece of that to serve our customer, something that's wonderful about being a true provider inside the work streams of our customers to help them be able to do a better job than anybody has ever done. CPA, wonderful addition. By the way I looked at them back in 2012 and thought, wow, what a magnificent organization and where it will go. Global leader, serve 12,000 law firms, corporate customers. So think about us at Clarivate with 18,000, including DRG. Think about us adding CPA global with 12,000. They had 3,000 customers. That's how we got to our 8,500 customers on a global basis, by far, the leaders in life cycle management. It's just so exciting to see if you were on yesterday's show-and-tell time, you saw some great demos of what an incredible product offering they have. So 2 critical acquisitions that puts us on a road to move forward more than ever before. We've realigned, as I said, our whole commercial infrastructure as we take advantage of the changes, we're now for the Americas in Chandler, Arizona, Belgrade; Serbia and for the Mid-East and Mid-Africa; and then Penang, Malaysia for the Asia side of the business. Three incredible centers. We've set those up from 0. And I will tell you, one thing that helped us is the pandemic because we were able to hire incredible talent. So what you'll think about 30,000 customers and think about 80-plus percent of those customers now being served by inside sales organization supported by customer service organizations in each of those locations 24/7. And that frees up our outside sales folks to be able to focus much better. Before if you do the math, 30,000 customers, 400 sales folks didn't work, this changes the game. That's why I have such confidence as what you're going to see from Richard in a bit when he talks about why we'll increase our renewal rates. Why we'll increase north of 95% with our renewal rates, why we'll be able to provide 8% to 10% organic growth for years to come as we get this all in place. So we're on point. Despite -- by the way, all of this was done remotely, couldn't be prouder of everybody for doing it. And despite being remote, we're off and running. I've had the pleasure of meeting remotely all of our new hires, and it's so exciting to meet them and greet them as part of this great company we have. So much more to comment on that, but that will change the game. Technology that you're going to hear from Stef about in just a few moments, is critical for us. It really is. It's not people, process and technology. It's actually the backbone of our corporation. It's all of those plus some. I would I'm on the edge of saying we're a cultural revolution, revolution, but certainly a very strong evolution. Let's leave it at that. Optimizing the enterprise for growth in growth sake. Think about us spending 5% to 5.5% of our revenue for years to come, developing, improving and creating new products with world-class organization, one that we've worked hard to put in place and continue to work hard to add to that. And then creating customer value, huge customer value. I talked about the data lakes. One was introduced last quarter. There'll be many more coming, some this quarter, but it will allow us to provide work benches to our customers that nobody has ever been able to do before. Again, thinking about end-to-end, end-to-end solutions from the very beginning of an idea to the successful creation of world-class products, always thinking about how we help our customers help their customers. So exciting time for us there. Now if you think about where we're at, if you think about what we'll do to continue to optimize our savings, Richard is going to give you details. But we'll get through $185 million of actual cost takeout. We'll be done with that by the end of 2021 for its headcount, rationalizing facilities. Mel is going to talk about that, an enormous permanent change for us. We brought in a lot of our -- it was interesting, when I first got here, about half of our development people were contractors, which is not a game to get productivity, not a game to get the kind of passion that we needed. So we're a long way down that path today, a long way down that path of bringing all except 4% or 5% of them inside, making an enormous difference, both from a cost efficiency standpoint, [ both ] from speed. And then project singularity that I hope you saw yesterday with Armughan. It's a single most exciting project that I've seen, where we were all manual with everything just over a year ago. And today, with intelligent use of products that we've never had before, including machine learning, it's just taken us miles ahead. So today, we're not only faster, we're much more cost efficient. And we compare ourselves to the outside world with that. Couldn't be prouder of what we did with the COVID. We saved $30 million this year. And a way to think about that is we changed our revenue guidance, which is unusual for me on our annual basis. We changed that in May of this year, we took $30 million out of the revenue guidance. So -- and we thought that all would be a result of, as it turned out, true of transaction business being down. So we figured out a way to offset 100% of that with cost savings in 2020. And now at least $5 million of that is permanent going forward, probably more. So think about us, like I said, exiting 2021. In 2 years and 4 months, having saved about $185 million. Again, you'll hear from Mel very shortly, what we're doing for our workforce of the future to make them ever more productive, more excited and more successful than ever before. Synergies with 2020 acquisitions are $105 million. We announced to you all $75 million savings as we brought CPA in. We're on target. We're actually ahead of target with that. Couldn't be happier. You'll hear more about that later. And then the $30 million we committed to last February when we closed on DRG, and we're ahead of that too. So think about what we've been able to do, while at the same time, investing and building for top line growth. And as we finish the top line growth story, which will never end, we'll see that over time, and this is my own personal comment and goal is, over time, we're going to see a business you should be thinking about it growing 8% to 10% organically every year and 2% to 4% through acquisitions, 2 [ kinds ], tuck-ins. We've made some wonderful ones. You're going to see that in a little while. But we should run on average 12% growth year after year, all in. That's excluding the very large ones that we've made. There'll be more of those to come at the right time. The cost savings, very straightforward. I couldn't feel better about what we've done and what we are going to do to make our colleagues more productive than ever before. So pandemic helped us a lot. And as I said, we were able to -- we've been able to hire incredible people. So I'm very happy. Think about my job as one of the top things I need to do is we've doubled the business in a year, we'll double it again in 2 to 3 years and double it again then in 3 to 4 years. So I've got to make sure that our top organization is capable with great leaders like we have today that can double the business, that can take it forward, can drive down responsibility and accountability as close to the customers we can get and allow us to be ever better with colleague engagement and customer delight. It's an amazing story that we've undertaken, but it is going to happen. So I thank the pandemic for that. This is something that I have the pleasure of sharing with you, and then Richard will give you more color in a minute. But here's our annual guidance. Adjusted revenue, $1.78 billion to $1.84 billion. Midpoint, you can do the math, see where that's at. Here's what's exciting. 39%, 40% -- 42% year-over-year growth, at least 6% to 8% -- take out the acquisitions -- at least 6% to 8% of that will be organic revenue. And I feel so good about that. The thing to remember with the model, the more we repeat the model, build it once, sell it over and over. But once you get north of 5% or 6% organic growth, about 150 basis points of improvement in EBITDA drops to the bottom line every year. That's why I said at the beginning, there's no limit, no upper limit of what we can do with EBITDA margins. Adjusted EBITDA, you can see -- remember, I said we did $218 million a year ago. And think what we're now saying in 2019 (sic) [ 2020 ], think what we're seeing in 2021. Just think about that. And that, at the end of the day, I'll give you the number. I expect us to be as we exit 2023. The margins, we said last year that we'd exit 2021 at 38% to 40%. We're going to deliver to our shareholders, 44% to 45% margins in 2021 with more to come. We'll finish and get out to you in the next week or 2, finishing the process of adjusted diluted EPS, which is a very critical one for us. If you remember, I've never done -- when we use shares. I've never done one that isn't at least 10% accretive at the end of year 1. We announced when we did CPA that we would be 12% accretive as we exit 2021 and 20 -- or 15% accretive as we exit 2022. So we're on track to do that, and I'm eager to be able to share that. And you'll see our adjusted free cash flow of $450 million to $500 million, feels great with more upside to that. Just remember, think about us spending 5% to 5.5% of revenue. Simple way to say it, multiply $1.8 billion times 5%, that's what we'll spend in CapEx. That's it. And then we'll pay $45 million to $46 million cash tax, that's it before interest costs. So we're going to see that machine that we've created of return with high cash flow deliver amazing results in the future and get us on point to go far, far away ahead, reducing the debt ratio, making more acquisitions and moving our business ever quicker. So there's a quick summary of where we're at. There's a quick summary of where we're going. And I'm so excited to introduce our entire team to you. As I said, one of my top jobs, I -- my success has been simple. It's really surround myself with really great people, do everything I can to help them and keep out of their way, and that's what we're doing. So you're going to see 5, 6 of our very best next. Remember, incredible business model, the only kind to have with the free cash flow machine. We've got all the critical levers in place to drive organic growth, profitable growth and increase the margins. We're inside of the customers' work streams. Very few people ever get to do that as customers. And it's a privilege to do that as we do. I mentioned already the white space, you're going to see and hear a lot more about that is probably the most exciting thing I've seen because as we move much more aggressively to upselling and cross-selling, we'll expand our market share enormously with time. Then we have a great culture that we're working on, and we'll make ever better. So all in, I couldn't be more excited. I look forward to the Q&A later today. And I very much look forward you meeting our team now. So it's a great pleasure to introduce Mel, if you will, Fitzpatrick. Mel comes to us from CPA. By the way, at the end of the day, the most important thing for me with the acquisitions, yes, revenue, yes, profit, yes, customers, but it's the people. People is the only sustainable competitive advantage any organization has. We brought in wonderful people with DRG. We brought in wonderful people with the tuck-ins, and we brought in a magnificent group of people along -- Mel being one of them, for sure, as we bring CPA in. We always try to pick the best athlete when there's room for one in positions that we're placing into. We're delighted. And Mel, it's all yours.

Melanie Fitzpatrick;Digital First Transformation

executive
#3

Thank you, Jerre. Hello. I'm Mel Fitzpatrick, and I will be talking to you about how we're transforming our workplace. In my 25-year career, I spent a lot of time traveling which, as many of you know, takes a lot of time and energy. March 8 this year was no different. I was flying from France to Jersey after attending an executive off-site. That week in France was surreal. As a team, we watch with angst how the markets were fluctuating in response to COVID-19, concerned about the impact on our business, the health of our colleagues, friends and family, and of course, how we'd get home before the boarders closed. If there ever was a time for decisiveness, it was then. This was also a massive turning point, an opportunity to change how we work forever. And it was one that I seized, seeing the potential of how we could help our colleagues work better and change our business for the better too. The next logical question you may have is, how are you going to do that? It's a fair question. In the next 10 minutes, I'll share with you our bold ambition for 2021 and beyond. I'll show you how organizations must fundamentally change, and I'll tell you about our circuit breaker approach to leverage this opportunity. This transformation has been fast-tracked by several factors, and we are creating a path that is untested and unknown. When I conclude, you'll have a better understanding of why we must capitalize on this opportunity, what we've accomplished so far and how the digital workplace will unlock increased value for all stakeholders by creating a culture that empowers our colleagues, build engagement and ultimately improves business performance. So let's get started with our North Star. Where are we heading? We have performed well in these difficult times. But the fact is we are at an inflection point. Our intent is to continue to take the next big step and to turn the massive challenges we face as colleagues, as a company and as a society into meaningful change. At Clarivate, we believe that having a digital mindset will be key to forging our future and our workplace model. We have an opportunity to strengthen the competencies we talked about for some time, to be more digital, more data driven, cloud-based, better leverage variable cost structures, automation, agile operations, AI and tech enablement and to build stronger capabilities in e-commerce and data security. Our North Star, which you can read here for yourself, requires a program of reinvention. This is how we'll accelerate our vision to improve the way the world creates, protects and advances innovation. It's the magic formula that unlocks value, creating a high-performing cohesive culture and a sustainable organization. Where our people are more engaged and empowered, our customers experience a new level of delight, and our shareholders see previously unimaginable growth. So why now? With so much uncertainty around us, why is this the right time to reimagine our organization? COVID-19 kick-started the surge in digital transformation. It forced the leveraging of new technologies and created new ways of working overnight. Cultural and operational barriers have been pushed aside, allowing projects to be implemented in weeks rather than months or years. This unique moment has provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we need to grasp. It's now or never. There's no turning back. The way we live and work has changed forever. This is our new reality. To ensure success in the new reality, we must accelerate the adoption of new ways of working and technologies to keep pace. Even the biggest institutions and companies can fail in times of rapid change, we will not. This will take time, and it's a journey, so let me outline the direction of travel for me. Becoming a digital workplace is a journey, and we've made a great start. Back then, the way we used to work was admin-heavy, relying on manual processes and an overreliance on paper. The majority of people were office-based and spend a lot of time traveling between locations across a large global footprint, having a big environmental impact through our office energy consumption and high business travel. And we recruited local talent, built around target customer markets rather than the best global talent. Today, we're making changes in months previously taken years. We're looking with fresh eyes at our business practices, challenging conventions and status quo. And remote working has improved accessibility, decision-making, collaboration and cross-functional working. Our future will see us being able to scale our business without scaling our cost base, recruiting the right talent at the right time in an agile way, making the way we work faster and more efficient. We'll travel less and spend less on fixed and unnecessary workplaces. We'll increase automation and AI to drive productivity and efficiency. Our digital-led approach will remove the current friction points in antiquated ways of working. To ensure success, we need a considered and planned approach to managing this change, led with engagement and informed by data. We are taking a data-driven and engagement-led scientific approach to evolve our culture and redesign our organization for the future. We're engineering and rewiring how we think, feel and act to operate in a fundamentally and radically different way than we do today. We're taking a structured program-led approach with a dedicated team of change specialists. We will constantly measure and track and pivot when necessary to ensure we're achieving success. We are changing where and importantly how we work. For most of our people, remote working will be the norm. Our current office footprint will be dramatically reduced and replaced with flexible space for purposeful collaboration. We will release people from location restrictions and inefficient travel to unlock new and more productive ways of working. How we do our work will also change with every process and workflow optimized for digital improvement. The benefits are significant and are aligned to our business model and goals. Sustainability is the heart of everything we do. Environmental benefits through less travel, social benefits through improved well-being and the opportunity for more diversity in hiring. 73% of our Clarivate people have liked or loved working from home and the majority have indicated their well-being has improved. We believe our new digital workplace and ways of working will help build engagement, improve well-being and ultimately result in happier and more fulfilled colleagues. Digital enables us to get faster feedback from customers and in context, the feedback from within products, allowing us to innovate faster. Digital will make us easy to do business with and make us much more responsive. The new workplace model allows us to serve our customers in a new virtual way to drive a better customer experience and to drive cross-sell and upsell. And ultimately, delivers superior investor returns, adopting a digital-first mindset allows us to scale without adding additional headcount, improving margins, reducing expenses on overheads like flights will further improve our cash flow. A key focus for us is rationalizing our workplace footprint, of which we will be bold and move at a pace. This transformation presents a significant opportunity to realize tangible business benefit from a new workplace model. Our plan is to exit offices and right-size others, delivering in excess of $23 million of saving. We are actively exploring a further opportunity to rationalize the remaining sites through 2021 with further technology enhancement across business processes and functional teams. We're taking a blank page approach to designing our future, and we'll only keep locations required for critical business activity or legal reasons. Our operational hubs will be locations for operational teams to work together from the office for now. We'll create new collaboration hubs where people can come together, work as teams and create the magic. To implement these changes, we will develop a policy for our new workplace model. This includes a setup package across IT and workstations and an ongoing support to help with additional costs incurred by colleagues who are working from home. We will communicate to all colleagues the global footprint plan and expected implementation time line. We will exit offices, which are currently empty, underutilized due to COVID-19. Finally, the human element of this change is important and will help us increase engagement, be more productive and give us access to a new pool of diverse talent across the globe. This transformation requires a step change in how leaders lead and it needs proactive teaching. For our leaders, the key areas to leverage value are leading with hearts and minds, being authentic, empathetic and accessible, connecting our colleagues to our purpose with opportunities to be part of a culture that's more adaptive to change and learning new habits and sourcing the right skills no matter where they are. And the benefits to our colleagues are significant. We will create a workplace that is human caring and were flexible, empowered and inclusive behaviors are the norm. We'll be transparent and connected, where it's easier to share information, knowledge and expertise. We'll be frictionless, allowing innovation and creativity to thrive and productivity to improve. It will be a workplace that lets our colleagues have a balanced approach to work and personal life. Thank you for listening. Our destination is clear, and we will get there at a pace. Now it's my pleasure to introduce you to my colleague, Mukhtar Ahmed, the President of our Science Group. He will be updating you on their progress and detail the exciting opportunities the Science Group is focused on. Thank you. Mukhtar?

Mukhtar Ahmed

executive
#4

Thank you, Mel. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mukhtar Ahmed, and I'm the President for the Science Group at Clarivate. I'll begin by just sharing with you one of my favorite quotes from John F. Kennedy, one that really resonates with me. This quote encapsulates the rather unprecedented circumstances that we're all facing both in our personal lives and in our working lives. And it's not just amidst the ongoing pandemic, but it's also keeping one eye towards the post-COVID era, where the new normal may require organizations to reexamine or potentially readapt their business models, where accelerated decision-making may be required, but also pragmatic and rapid change may need to be embraced. And our strategy is one that really places us on the critical path for these evolving dynamics, certainly within the industry sectors that we serve and why we continue to be deemed as an essential partner for our customers. We remain fully committed to being the premier provider of analytical solutions for both multi-industry and multidisciplinary research. And our value chain solutions span right across the continuum of research from the very outset with the ideation and conceptualization of research, whether that research is grant funded or whether it's sponsored by corporates through the cycle of conducting the research and all the way through to whatever the research outcomes may be. And those outcomes could be in medical innovation. It could be recognition within academia, perhaps a breakthrough scientific discovery, perhaps the creation of intellectual property or the attainment of commercialization goals for organizations. What are some of the macro socioeconomic market forces that are supporting our strategy and underpinning our growth momentum? Well, firstly, the global response to the current pandemic, if anything, has demonstrated just how important the data is. And not only should that data be accurate, contextualized, relevant, timely and so forth, but that the right actionable insights have to be derived from the right data. In the post-pandemic era, we think there will be a need for decision-makers perhaps in government, in health ministries to review their health care infrastructures and patient care pathways and to also consider regulatory reform. Similarly, medical research, especially within drug and diagnostic research and development, be that in innovation or the associated research and development processes, they will likely also need to change and be accelerated. And all of this hinges upon decision-making intelligence are the types of unique assets that we offer. The velocity of technology innovation certainly continues to increase. It's not decreasing. And we're into that next phase of having even more robust and proven artificial intelligence and data sciences at our disposal. And these in turn are creating tremendous opportunities to provide the next generation of analytics and really put those in the hands of our research customers. New end user digital communities are forming, and each one of them come with their own specialized set of needs for online engagement and collaboration. And the sharing of data and insights is really interesting because geography and physical presence are no longer a barrier for those research groups that wish to combine their resources to conduct groundbreaking research. Academia continues to evolve, certainly with most universities around the world adopting digital learning and knowledge sharing methods rather than the traditional lecture centers and physical libraries. And this also means that the needs of researchers are also evolving as they seek a more personalized experience and certainly a better mean to access and use integrated resources to conduct their research. Please allow me to just briefly remind you of our business and operating model, one that I should add is highly scalable and highly flexible. We fundamentally monetize our value through what are 3 underpinning commercial sub models. Firstly, we sell analytical subscription software in the form of Software-as-a-Service or cloud licenses. Secondly, we sell commercialized data assets. And thirdly, we sell expert advisory consulting services that complement our products and our data. So we source large volumes of structured and unstructured data, and against that data, we apply our unique data science tools and our transformative curation to essentially create what are highly enriched, highly differentiated and unique insights and intelligence. Then our customers can gain access to those insights through our subscription software products. So Web of Science that serves our academic researcher communities, our funders, academic sponsors and publishing partners; Cortellis that serves our life sciences customers, and most of those are predominantly drug and medical device companies; and our Decision Resources Group portfolio that extends our footprint in life sciences into commercialization, into market access into health outcomes and real-world data across our broader health care landscape. Our proprietary Research Intelligence Cloud provides our customers with a really secure and highly scalable means to access our subscription software. It also provides our customers with access to our ecosystem of really innovative technology partners and all of whom have been certified and integrated into our platforms by our alliances and channels line of business. And all of our partners complement our analytical products and data. Our cloud also gives our customers the ability to access the underlying data. So this is the metadata. It’s the same data science tools that we use, and it really creates a wonderfully rich environment for self-service analytics should that be the route that our customers choose. We continue to focus on our specialty core markets, academia, government, biopharma and regulatory, medical device and technologies and, of course, the broader health care landscape. We also provide our customers with some really deep subject matter in data science expertise. And this is through our specialist advisory consulting line of business. This is where we help our customers to interpret the analytics and insights and to make those insights actionable and really to maximize their value from our products and data assets essentially really to help our customers accelerate their time to peak adoption. And our consulting is a fantastic means to upsell into customer accounts but also to pull-through new software subscriptions and data sets. So our growth centers around our 4 strategic goals. Firstly, to focus on our core market segments and to drive organic growth in those markets, especially our top 100 key accounts. Where we can accelerate our market share or where we can leverage the adjacent markets through acquisitions, then naturally we'll consider doing so. Secondly, to continue with the evolution of our product platforms. And this is important for us so that we can continue to unify and integrate the research experience, especially for our end users. Alliances and channels continues to be critical for us. We expect 20% of our incremental business to come through the channel and especially as we offer our customers access to our growing ecosystem of certified applications and our data partners. And last but by no means least, our focus is on our customers really being at the core of our business, right across all of our products and service lines. We naturally want to be the partner of choice for our customers, and we want our product to be truly designed for the end user so that we can continue to drive even more value for our customers. Please allow me to just share some further examples of the progress that we've made over the last year against each one of these goals. Our acquisition of Decision Resources Group, DRG, was completed earlier this year. It's essentially expanded our portfolio to comprehensively cover the entire end-to-end value chain for both drug and medical device development. Cortellis is a leader in pre-approval research intelligence, so it spans drug discovery, preclinical science, clinical research, all the way through to regulatory approval and what DRG has brought is really tremendous breadth and depth by allowing us to go beyond post approval into commercialization and market access, into health economics and outcomes and real-world data, especially across the broader health care spectrum. And it really places us in a unique position as being the only provider in biopharma, med tech and health care that can provide these types of integrated analytical and data offerings. I'm also pleased to share that we've fully integrated DRG into our business. We're fully on track to achieve the committed cost synergies. And we're now just starting to realize some of the cross-selling revenue synergy opportunities, especially through the bundling of our offerings. DRG also sets the operating blueprint for the integration of any future acquisitions, where we'll be able to very smoothly but effectively integrate them into our business and then very importantly, is to gear them up for further growth. You only need to observe our press releases over the last year to see that we've made really substantial progress with all of our new and our enhanced products. Generics Intelligence, which is a replatformed version of the former Newport product. This new version really serves our traditional generics and active pharmaceutical ingredient customers. But it allows us to go beyond them and really serve new use case personas, for example, in biosimilars. And I'm pleased to announce that we've migrated over 200 of our customers to this new platform. And of course, in 2021, will continue to do so. Drug Discovery Intelligence was launched. This is the new version of the former Integrity product. This supports the needs of preclinical and discovery scientists. It supports precision medicine specialists. And I'm really pleased to announce that we've experienced fantastic adoption by our customers with some really impressive year-on-year growth. We've also released a major version of Clinical Trials Intelligence, and this product provides clinical trial planners and designers with access to key opinion leaders. So these are physicians, primary investigators that participate and conduct clinical research. It also helps clinical trial planners to identify clinical sites that can participate in clinical trials as part of the feasibility and site selection and initiation processes. Our Web of Science portfolio continues to undergo tremendous investment, especially as we place the researcher at the center of our strategy, and then we can connect the researcher to funders, to academic sponsors, of course, being the universities and drive that next-generation of evaluation and impact metrics. Above and beyond are very powerful and industry-leading citations and our general impact factor. We've also launched a modernized interface for Web of Science and it vastly enhances the end-user experience for our customers. In addition, we've just released the early adopter version of our new groundbreaking My Research Assistant mobile app. This is currently available directly from us, but we'll soon make it available through Apple's App Store, and of course, we'll support the other mobile platforms. But it really brings the power of websites to the researcher. It personalizes the experience. And it caters not for the researcher of today, but the researcher of tomorrow, where digital research, use of mobile technology, social media, electronic collaboration, these are all are given and an expectation. And it's really being validated by a number of early adopters. The feedback has been fantastic, and we're confident that this mobile app will continue to create digital research communities and really drive that new age of collaboration that we think the post-COVID area could become highly desirable and perhaps even set a new standard in how research is conducted. We also continue to invest in our commercialized data assets, and we formed a new and dedicated organization. We've named it our data, analytics and insights function, and the goal of this function is really to drive incremental revenue growth. And it really gives our customers access to our best-in-class data assets through a variety of means, so Data-as-a-Service, data on demand and, of course, catering for some really specialized analytics. This team have also released a highly specialized data lake, certainly for those customers that are interested in our very unique COVID, virology and infectious disease scientific research data. And for those customers that are interested in predictive analysis and research of both pandemics and endemics, and the response has been fantastic to this data lake. And in the context of post COVID, we think it'll provide a fantastic platform for evidence-based research analysis and decision-making for health care ministries, in particular, who can consider it as a means to perhaps improve health care infrastructures, to consider public health changes and very importantly, to improve care pathways for patients. We also think it will benefit biopharmaceutical and diagnostic companies by providing a platform for a more novel approach towards drug and device research and development. And through that process, streamlining the regulatory approval pathways. Our alliances and channels business continues to excel, especially as we add a variety of really innovative technology and data partners, some of whom you can see listed on this particular slide. And these partners are just a subset of all the innovators who are part of our ecosystem and extend our value. And so this is the value of our product solutions, our data assets for our customers. They all bring tremendous technological and domain specialization to the table. And in some cases, they address some really niche use cases for our customers. And all of our customers can use our certified partners with the full assurance that we've certified them and that they're fully integrated into our products and our business processes. We also continue to optimize our global network of agents and distributors so that our customers from all parts of the world can benefit from our data offerings and, of course, our subscription products. We are being very careful, though, to choose our partners so that they provide a seamless extension of our company. And of course, they represent our values and code of business conduct. And aside from the usual fiscal and commercial arrangements that you'd expect us to have with our partners, we shall be measuring them for customer delight as this is an important indicator of customer engagement and satisfaction for us. So creating an exceptional customer experience and really placing customers at the center of everything we do, whether that's our products, our services, which is how we do business, that remains our #1 priority. And we've taken a number of active steps to organize ourselves so that we can provide even greater value for our customers. So firstly, we've combined our pre- and post-sales organization so that we can share all of our best practices and all of our tips and techniques with our customers, thereby allowing them to maximize their use of our products. We've also established a dedicated value organization, brand-new organization, whose charter is to define, quantify and continually measure value creation for our customers right across all of our business lines and to ensure that we instill and maintain an internal culture of continuous process improvement. We've also set up a dedicated delivery center so that we can increase the speed to value for our customers, especially when we help our customers to implement a product or a complex suite of products or if they want to engage with us on a bespoke data or consulting services project. Our Institute for Scientific Information, ISI, continues to be right at the forefront of research innovation, certainly is an acclaimed think tank, and we're actively working on the next-generation of research evaluation metrics and rankings. And the quote that you see on this slide is from Dr. Tarek, who is the Education Minister for Egypt. He's also the executive sponsor of the Egyptian Knowledge Bank that we have exclusively built with them. And the core component of this groundbreaking release is the first and only Arabic citation index database. And our BioWorld team continues to receive really impressive industry recognition as a very rich source of industry thought leadership, certainly within the life sciences sector. Our markets continue to grow. And in that post-COVID world, we think they're important as -- if anything, it's going to become even more significant. Our original target market was just shy of $5 billion. So that represents about $4.4 billion in drug development and the remainder in academia and governmental research with about $500 million in medical device and post-approval research. And by acquiring Decision Resources Group, we've essentially expanded our portfolio deeper into data, into commercialization and market access and medical technology. And therefore, our addressable market has also grown to just over $20 billion. And within that $20 billion, there's still significant white space for us to pursue. And we're confident that with the investments we're making into our analytical software products, our data assets, especially our commercialized research and real-world health care data assets and also the expansion of our expert consulting services, we think we can continue to grow in these markets. Let me just add a brief word on software adoption. Typically, software adoption takes place 3 to 6 months after the release of a product. And we're scaling for growth by not focusing on that first release date, we're really looking towards speed towards widespread adoption of our products, certainly within our customer base. And within each customer, we look to really help that customer reach a point of peak adoption, and that's the measure by which we can have the greatest impact within a particular customer account. So to summarize, we do have a compelling plan for growth. Our customer base is loyal. We continue to enjoy fantastic retention from our customers. With all the investments that we're making in our products and in our data, we expect our retention to remain strong. Our depth in our core markets will allow us to drive an even greater share in the markets that we operate in. Our best-in-class data assets and analytical products and frankly, our approach to actionable insights and really placing decision-making analytics in the hands of our customers makes us a necessity for our customers as opposed to a nice-to-have. And as I shared in the previous slide, we operate in markets with significant growth potential. Our offerings, particularly our commercialized data assets are no longer deemed a commodity. And if I take the COVID data lake that I shared earlier as an example, this is a wonderful example of a data set that may become an essential companion for health care, regulatory and life sciences decision-makers. Thank you for your time. And please allow me to now introduce Jeff Roy, who's the President of our IP Group.

Jeff Roy

executive
#5

Good morning, and thank you, Mukhtar. I'm really excited about today because this event is always a terrific opportunity for us to update you on the great progress that we've made in the last year, but also to spend a little bit of time talking about how we expect to accelerate from here. So as a reminder, last year at this time, for those of you that were here, we're really just starting the process of integrating 4 heritage businesses that covered our patents business, our trademark business, domains and, of course, the standards business all into one business that we now call IPG, or the IP Group. Now while we were expecting to do acquisitions in 2020, we had a plan, it was critically important that we established one operating model across all of these heritage businesses. Our goal was not to simply layer features and functionality on the great products that we had acquired, but to build an engine of growth that could be driven from our unique content and really ease the integration of those new acquisitions. So for us to truly support our customers' needs, we needed to not just integrate the heritage businesses, but we needed to totally reinvent them. We need to basically deliver on our previous promises, but we also need to reimagine the business based on what direction the market is going and what feedback we're getting from the customers. Importantly, this integration process cannot slow us down at all. And I don't believe that it did. So last year, we discussed how critical it was to bring these businesses together for us to be able to capitalize on shifting geographic trends and to satisfy the evolving customer needs and also to free up our data assets to support more and deeper customer use cases. So I'll spend just a few minutes bringing you up to speed on our progress. So at last year's event, in addition to discussing the opportunity to bring Clarivate's unique IP assets together, I discussed customers' increasing need for things like improved analytics as well as the incredible shift in innovation spending from Western countries into the Asia Pacific market and as well as those geographic trends, we've also seen a demographic trend, where, what I call the democratization of innovation spending, where smaller players represent a much larger percentage of the overall spend. I outlined our need to leverage strong partnerships, to simplify our customers' lives and frankly, to help us reach more of the market. And of course, packaging and cross-selling opportunities continues to be an incredibly important part of our overall strategy. Lastly, we needed to be able to deliver on the promises that we made to our customers, particularly with regard to product usability and content. I'm pleased to report to you today that we've delivered on all of those promises. In 2020, we completed and rolled out the new Derwent Innovation user experience, which some of you were able to preview last year. We've also significantly enhanced the full text patent authorities now available in Derwent and add an industrial design content to our CompuMark suite of products. We separated our content from the heritage platforms as part of our efforts to decontainerize our content from -- and in order to fully unlock its value and to help us support a broader set of customer use cases. And we launched several key partnerships in the year and delivered on a fairly aggressive yet deliberate M&A program with the acquisitions of Darts-ip, CPA Global and recently, Beijing IncoPat, all since this time last year. Importantly, the underlying market conditions remain supportive, even with the temporary effect of the global pandemic. The need for market intelligence in the IP market continues to grow rapidly based on filing volumes across the board. 70% of patent applications occur in Asia Pacific with 46% of those in China alone. Utility models, where companies are really looking to improve on an existing invention has risen nearly 22%. Importantly, trademark volumes continue to explode, in particular, as Chinese companies move to monetize their innovations outside of the Chinese market, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes. Industrial design applications, which is where our company is focused on securing the features of a product that makes it visually unique continues to rise at the same pace as the market in general. Clarivate right now is the only company with the data assets, the broad product mix and the scale to capitalize on these trends globally. Because it's critically important to understand the geographic trends, I just want to spend a few minutes talking about the impact of Chinese investments on global trademarks. As I mentioned earlier, 70% of patent applications are coming from APAC in recent years, with 46% of that from China. All that investment in new innovation means nothing if you can't monetize it. So what this graph represents, and the red line in this graph, in particular, is the trend in Chinese applicants of U.S. trademarks at the U.S. PTO. So even as the pandemic spread around the world in 2020, what you can see here is that Chinese applications in the U.S. actually accelerated. And for the first time, actually passed the number of trademarks being filed by U.S. companies in the U.S. So traditionally, companies would secure a trademark in order to build brand recognition and to connect with their customers. With the proliferation of online purchasing, which has been accelerated during the pandemic, the same product from the same manufacturer can be sold on Amazon or on Alibaba under different brands using different market positioning. So a brand's reputation has become less relevant in the online world than the rating that it receives on the marketplace. So Chinese mid-market players have definitely recognized this trend and have really moved to capitalize that on -- in 2020. This is just one shift in the market. We are paying very close attention to shifts in market behaviors across the market and have positioned ourselves to help our customers navigate these trends. In Asia Pacific, this specifically includes investments in our heritage platform performance in the Chinese market as well as the localization of some of our key products. We've invested in partnerships, and we are now actually working with the Chinese government to offer some of our products locally. And of course, targeted acquisitions that enhance our ability to support global customers as well as give us better access to the local markets. So in order to capitalize on these trends, we have to continue to enhance our data products, and we continue to make new investments in our data ecosystem. So last year, I spent a fair amount of time explaining how unique Clarivate's data assets were and our need to decontainerize the content. We've made great progress separating our content from our heritage platforms, and this supports a more flexible offering for our customers while also easing access. And this is now allowing us to engage with customers on a broader set of use cases than ever before. The reason why this is so important to our strategy is because data has a similar characteristic to a liquid. And if you've ever spilled water on your desk, you'll instantly know exactly what I'm talking about. Once it's there, it goes everywhere and it gets into everything. Now IP data operates in the same way and but is useful by more use cases. So once we enable our customers to connect directly with our content, the data organically finds its way into other use cases and machine learning opportunities that we could never imagine. For example, we might sell patent intelligence into an R&D department and see the data get leveraged by a different team for market intelligence or to support litigation. In 2020, we rolled out 2 specific types of solutions that we expect to drive growth in 2020 and beyond. The first is a role-based solution aimed at bench chemists. This is going to help chemists innovate faster by leveraging our combined data and our AI to help the chemists understand, for example, the novelty of a new polymer that they might be working on. The second is a technology-based solution built around data lakes. The data lake strategy combines all of the data that we have regarding a specific technology, such as 5G, and all of the players in that space into one data lake. This will help our customers mitigate market risk and use innovation dollars more wisely. With the progress we've made, with our curated content and our proprietary content, including investments we're now making in new derived data products, we are better positioned than ever to not only support standard IP use cases in a more seamless way for our customers but alternative use cases of our IP content by nontraditional users. This has always been an important part of our growth strategy. I'll just take a few minutes to discuss a few examples. So freeing our content from heritage applications has allowed us to connect with partners more easily and has created opportunities for us to turn some customer relationships into partnerships that ultimately gives us increased access to new markets for our data. It's enabled us to shift our product mix to a more margin-friendly set of analytics and advisory offerings that helps us convert traditional one-off sales in the IP market into a more lucrative set of subscriptions of unique content and analytics with service overlays. We expect to see these investments really start to pay off in 2021. So today, our content is now starting to feed third-party risk applications. It's helping insurance companies analyze their risk profile. It's directly supporting online marketplace efforts to ward off bad actors and other use cases that previously were not accessible to Clarivate before we brought the IP businesses together and before we made the investments in our data ecosystem. Our business development activities, including the recent acquisitions of CPA Global and IncoPat have only really enhanced those opportunities by giving us more touch points with our customers. As I mentioned before, the IP Group has had for many years a very enviable set of assets. What it's not had is an integrated set of assets, and it has had certain gaps. We've worked very hard to close those gaps and have made tremendous progress in the last 12 months. The work done in 2020 to bring the IP assets together has really positioned Clarivate to focus on acquiring the scale that it needs to support customers in the broadest way possible. I'd like to take a few minutes just to remind everybody what we did in terms of M&A over the last 12 months. So first of all, with the acquisition of CPA Global, we now have an end-to-end solution for our core market that covers research and product development all the way through to the commercialization of a product. We're the only company in the IP space that can claim to be able to do that. Now this doesn't mean that all of our customers are going to buy every one of our solutions from us, but it does uniquely position us to solve customer problems in a very configurable way. We can assemble customer packages that nobody else can in the market. Notably, with the CPA acquisition, we acquired a robust renewals business that definitely plugged one of our gaps, and it is incredibly complementary to our other IP service offerings. We also acquired a set of software assets that will figure prominently in our future road map. Overall, CPA is a very complementary fit for Clarivate. It maps very well geographically, and there's an incredible overlap in several important markets, including pharmaceuticals and ICT. That is going to enable us to cross-sell even more, not just within the IP portfolio, but across the science and IP Groups as well. CPA brought us 12,000 customers with very strong retention rates in the mid-90s, and more than 90% of the revenue is either recurring or subscription-based, which is going to start to soften the impact of macro trends on that part of our transactional business. It also brings us a unique set of offerings that significantly enhance the IP Group's product mix. So while we've demonstrated our ability to rapidly integrate our internal assets and certainly, tuck-in acquisitions, we now have to integrate CPA, which is a much larger scale acquisition in order to capitalize on the opportunity. With that in mind, we've reorganized the commercial side of the IP Group into 4 groups to work together on 3 main objectives. We want to align the renewals business, which is a critical part of the CPA business with our other critical IP services in order to enable cross-selling. We have focused a dedicated team of experts and pooled our IP analytics resources and brought in some outside help to drive growth from new advisory offerings and to convert one-off analytics sales into broad-based subscriptions for our content and analytics. We've also maintained a strong product development team, not just to continue to enhance the core customer experience on our heritage platforms, but to begin to assemble the platform of the future, and I'll talk about that in just a few minutes. As important as the CPA acquisition was to our growth in 2020 and in the future, it is really only part of the story for the IP Group. And I want to make sure we don't lose sight of that. In addition to CPA, we acquired Darts-ip just 11 months ago. Darts-ip gives us a unique case law database as well as risk analytics that is extremely complementary to our patent and trademark data. The IncoPat deal, which we announced recently, is going to help us deliver on our promise to capitalize on regional trends, not just for the benefit of the local Chinese market as they grow both inside and outside of China, but also to help our global customers be successful operators in the Chinese and, frankly, the broader APAC market. The disposition of the Techstreet asset positions that company to better serve its clients under new ownership without undermining our vision in the IP market in any way. We can't rest on our laurels. The IP industry continues to evolve at an ever more rapid pace. I always tell my kids that there are really 2 kinds of people in the world. There's people who make things happen, and there's people who things happen, too. I think Jack Welch might have said it better, but the point remains. This point applies to players in the IP space as well, especially since the market is so dynamic. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for a single channel provider with one product to operate successfully in the IP market going forward. You just simply cannot offer one service anymore. It's not good enough, and the market has dictated that. Clarivate is the only company that has positioned itself for the broader market by focusing, not just on its core products, but through its investment in data and advanced analytics, and frankly, the addition of complementary businesses. Customers need to innovate and bring products to market faster than they ever had before due to increased competition. Every customer tells us the same thing, whether it's a technology company or a consumer products company, what used to take them months has moved to weeks or even days in some cases. The pressure on customers to do more and faster is unrelenting and unlikely to change anytime soon. The volumetrics I showed you earlier is really just one indication of that. Increased competition has increased the need to protect IP assets. This has resulted in the ballooning volumes, particularly in APAC as China and other countries see opportunity to expand beyond their traditional manufacturing role in the global economy. This not only creates challenges for companies and IP practitioners, but for the regulatory bodies and government agencies as well. These trends have significantly increased operating costs for our customers and has resulted in an ever-increasing need to optimize IP portfolios, whether you're talking about patents, industrial designs, domains or trademarks, most customers have all of the above. This is resulting in a need for greater intelligence across the entire innovation life cycle and importantly, across all IP types. Basically, the market is shifting from needing help within single silos to process transactions to needing intelligence in order to manage their IP assets more effectively. All of these pressures require an AI-enabled and fully digitized workflow across the innovation life cycle. Without seamless workflow and increased automation, companies will be competitively at risk. Clarivate right now is the only company positioned to help our customers take advantage of all of these trends, not just across the different IP assets, but across the entire innovation life cycle. And we are now uniquely positioned to pull it all together for our customers. Let me just take a few minutes to discuss what we're doing to support our customers in the future. The organizational priorities I mentioned earlier, not only position us to capitalize on our data assets and to enable more cross selling, but our technology and product teams are now engaged in building the next-generation of IP platforms. This is what I'm calling Clarivate's IP workbench. This approach is going to take us well beyond the point-to-point integrations that, of course, is important, and it's going to help support our cross-selling in the near-term to a completely modular approach that enables customers to access and bundle, in an integrated way, those aspects of the innovation life cycle that suits their specific needs to help them be more successful in the way that they need to be successful. Single channel providers simply cannot do this. But our partners can, if they continue to partner with us. they can offer their leading solutions through our workbench for the benefit of our mutual customers. Importantly, this will allow our customers to lower their total cost of doing business by letting them buy just the data, the services and the applications that they need without spending money on features and functionality that can create inefficiencies and noise in their internal processes. Again, Clarivate is uniquely positioned to offer these end-to-end solutions and can do it at scale. So what will you see in 2021? First of all, we're going to continue to focus on accelerators. This means investing in strong partnerships. It means creating unique packages for our customers that's going to help them solve their problems in the most cost-effective way possible. We're going to continue to invest in our content in order to maintain our leadership position and by developing new and innovative derived data products and by driving advanced analytics into the market in a more efficient way. We're going to continue to focus on strategies that enable customer access to our data and solutions, such as our data lake strategy, the IP workbench and the bench chemist solution I mentioned earlier. To summarize, the market dynamics continue to support our growth strategy. We've demonstrated that we have an incredibly resilient business, and we've really moved through the pandemic to invest in our business in a very intelligent way. We've demonstrated an ability to integrate both our heritage offerings and new acquisitions. And the combination of unique offerings and unmatched scale really does position us very, very well to help our customers in a way that nobody else can in the future. So I’d like to thank you very much for your time. And after a short break, and I think Mike Morhardt will bring you up to speed on the terrific progress that we're making with our investment in the Global Business Centers. [Break]

Michael Morhardt

executive
#6

Hi. Welcome back from the break. My name is Mike Morhardt, and I'm the Executive Vice President of Commercial Performance and Operations here at Clarivate. I'm very happy to be joining you today. As you've heard from Jerre and Mel and Mukhtar and Jeff, we have an enormous opportunity in front of us. I'm really excited to share how we'll optimize our sales and service organization to capitalize on this substantial opportunity. I've spent the last 25 years or so leading commercial organizations. And I have to say, I haven't come across a single situation where the opportunity is so significant. So we recognize that to grow our business, we need to differentiate how we sell and service to our clients. Typically, a B2B organization has a hierarchy of accounts. Clarivate is no different. There are very large accounts, what we call key accounts, followed by midsized accounts or what we call field accounts. And finally, small accounts or the long tail, which we call inside accounts. Each group of customers has a different set of requirements and expectations. By optimizing our operations and costs and improving our ease of doing business, we will grow each of these customer segments through better renewal rates, more new logos and through cross-selling and upselling opportunities. So a quick definition on cross-sell and upsell. They’re both key drivers in our growth plans. The best way to define them is to use an example. The gold standard for upselling and cross-selling is McDonald's. When you visit a McDonald's and you supersize your drink from a medium to a large, that's upselling. When you add fries and a hamburger to that same order, that is considered cross-selling. Both are important. So as you look across our customer segments, we have different strategies to grow the different customer segments. In key accounts, we're looking to develop C-level relationships, which will drive consulting and high-value solutions into these accounts. While many of these accounts already have sizable relationships with us, we can still grow these accounts through upselling. However, the single biggest opportunity in key accounts is cross-selling. That is for us to sell other products and services to different buyers within that same organization. More on that later. From a pricing perspective, we are always looking to optimize the relationship that we have with these clients to ensure that we are getting a fair price for the value that we provide. For field accounts, our goal is to grow them into larger customers and hopefully, in the future to key accounts. Field accounts are very similar in many ways to key accounts and that they're -- we feel there is an opportunity to grow the relationship through consultative upselling and cross-selling. Pricing-wise, typically, discounting in field accounts is more limited. And we again look to make sure that we get a fair price for the value that we provide. This customer segment also has the opportunity to grow through new logo acquisition. For inside sales, what we sometimes refer to as the long tail, a different model is required. Our focus here is growing this customer base through upselling, cross-selling and new logo acquisition. A significant amount of time of our focus with this group is on improving our retention rates. We also have an opportunity to optimize our pricing while moving these accounts into a very favorable cost-to-serve model. So in 2020, we started the process of aligning the sales organization to our various customer segments. We started with setting up 3 Global Business Centers, or GBCs. These centers will house inside sales in a centralized customer service organization and many shared services. They will provide operational excellence through a low-cost, high-value model. We've set up the inside sales team in each of the GBCs, which allows us to transition our small and midsized clients into these sales teams. This will do several things for us. It will improve our retention rates as these inside customers will be contacted more frequently through a programmatic automated customer life cycle management program. This consistent contact will not only improve retention rates but it’ll also drive more upsell into these accounts. It will also allow us to drive more new logos. We're hiring dedicated hunters and prospectors to drive new logo acquisitions for both the inside customer segment as well as the field. By reducing the number of accounts in the field, the field sales teams will have time to focus on our larger accounts and drive bigger, more consultative solutions. We will also launch a key account program, which will allow us to grow our very biggest accounts with a dedicated key account leaders. Underpinning all of these programs is an analysis that we've done to identify all of the cross-sell opportunities. We have developed a detailed white space analysis of our field and key accounts so that we can target those customers with the highest likelihood to be cross sold. We have also introduced specific sales incentives to drive the right type of sales behaviors and to promote cross-selling activities. In order to run these programs, it starts with getting our customers into the right buckets. Earlier this year, we began the transition process of moving accounts into the right segments. Our goal is to move our smaller accounts that represent 80% of our customer base, but only 20% of our revenue into this optimized inside sales model. That would leave our larger customers that represent 20% of our customer base, but 80% of our revenue in the field. We're moving these accounts thoughtfully, post renewal so that we ensure that we are not jeopardizing our renewal rates. This model has benefits beyond the obvious ones of improved retention and improved sales productivity. This will also allow us to build a talent pipeline for the field sales organization. Our expectation is that the majority of our future field sales teams will come from this inside channel. It also lets us integrate acquisitions more effectively. We are already planning to migrate both DRG and CPA customers into this model. And finally, we are leveraging the Global Business Centers as an incubator to roll out new sales enablement platforms and self-service tools across inside sales, field sales and the customer service organization. To do all this, we've built a cross-functional team to stand up each of the GBC locations. We began to hire, onboard and train new staff and then start to execute on the plan. As Jerre mentioned, we've stood up the 3 GBCs in Chandler, Arizona; Penang, Malaysia; and Belgrade, Serbia. Belgrade was a GBC location of CPA so we’re leveraging that existing location and investment as our European Global Business Center. Chandler and Belgrade are up and running and will be moving from our temporary space to our permanent space in Penang in December. We are on track to have 235 colleagues in these 3 Global Business Centers by the end of December. That doesn't even include the roughly 350 colleagues already in place in Belgrade. These locations are going to grow further in 2021 as we add in CPA and DRG. Hiring across inside sales, customer service and other function is on track. In fact, in many cases, we are aided by the recent environment in attracting excellent talent across all of these locations. We have built new onboarding and training programs and already seeing improvements in ramp times. Inside sales teams are already working accounts, in some cases, saving renewals and building pipeline. So as we move into 2021, we're looking to build on our foundation. Our plan is to strengthen the core that we've built already in inside sales and customer service. We will continue to improve our onboarding, our training programs. We'll accelerate ramp times. And as I mentioned, we're actively looking to integrate CPA and DRG sales teams into this model. We're also looking across all areas of Clarivate to identify opportunities to reduce costs but increase value and improve our customer delight by moving certain teams and functions into the Global Business Centers. We are developing an improved technology stack to boost sales productivity, and we continue to look for ways to simplify and improve our processes. The GBCs will become the incubator for our various sales and service technologies across Clarivate. Finally, as Jerre highlighted earlier, the key to our success is ensuring we deeply embed our values into everything we do. This is key for us to develop a high-performance culture. So the GBCs allow us to migrate smaller accounts into the inside model. This will free up our field sales team to focus on our largest accounts. These larger accounts present us with an enormous opportunity to be cross-sold. So a quick review of the top 180 accounts shows us that while they represent $370 million worth of current revenue, the potential to cross-sell is over $146 million. We are targeting this cross-sell opportunity through 2 key strategies: providing strong incentives to the sales teams to cross-sell their accounts and to provide referrals, and designing smart packaging and pricing solutions for our customers to make it easier for sales to sell and customers to acquire. Earlier this year, we launched a team selling program to promote coordination and collaboration to accelerate our cross-sell efforts. We created an incremental bonus for the salespeople to identify opportunities outside of their core product line within their accounts. We also dedicated resources to identify specific white space opportunities across their territories, so sales could proactively target these customer buying centers. This program was launched in February and leveraged existing products as well as some of our new acquisitions. For example, shortly after we finalized the CPA transaction, the sales teams were trained and incented to promote CPA and Clarivate products into their respective accounts. We had a similar program at DRG. Since launch, we have generated over $20 million of incremental new pipeline and closed 3x this amount cross-sales that we did in 2019. We also need to make it easier to cross-sell through smart pricing and packaging. Working closely with the product teams, we're designing launching options for salespeople to bundle products to different customer segments based on their specific needs. For example, a life sciences package into an academic market or a Web of Science package into a corporate segment. These cross-sell programs, combined with the work that we're doing in the Global Business Centers, are designed to accelerate our organic growth. The Global Business Centers will allow us to improve retention for our long tail of customers. By reducing the number of accounts in the field, the field sales team will be able to drive better retention in our largest accounts, but also allow them to spend more time with our largest customers to grow those relationships. We are also investing in prospecting and hunting resource to accelerate the acquisition of new logos in both the inside and field customer segments. Through targeted white space analysis, we are mobilizing the sales team to capitalize on the significant cross-sell opportunity. Sales incentives, along with smart pricing and packaging, will provide the right environment for the sales teams to be successful. I hope this provided you with some insight on how we plan to accelerate our growth, and I look forward to answering any questions. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Stef Maestri, who will share with you our plans and progress on the technology front.

Stefano Maestri

executive
#7

Thank you, Mike. I'm really pleased to be here today to update you on the great progress we've made in the last 12 months. I feel really lucky to be leading this group of amazing people, and we have some exciting opportunities ahead of us. When I started talking to Jerre about joining the company, the global pandemic had taken hold. And therefore, all our interactions needed to be virtual. This remains true to this day, including Investor Day. Nonetheless, it's worked out incredibly well for me personally, and it gives me great confidence that the work Mel is doing to define our company's future working environment is going to put us in a strong position on a go-forward basis. Once I joined Clarivate, I was really impressed by the depth and richness of our data, which when combined with modern technologies, really allows us to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. It's been a privilege to be passed the baton on by Randy Harvey, whom I consider a friend. We've worked together for a number of years and share a common philosophy on how to lead and transform technology organizations, which means I'm very supportive of all the current in-flight projects. But even better for me personally is I still get to partner with him as he continues to consult for the firm. He and I both tend to focus on engineering culture. But why do I believe the culture of a technology organization is so important? Well, people are our greatest assets after all. And when you have the right culture, you can innovate faster. And when you can innovate faster, that can help drive customers' growth, which in turn, can help us grow. But in order to create a culture of passion for a company, it's really important that colleagues feel vested in the company's success. As you recall from last year, we had an over reliance on contract staff. There are some obvious issues there around costs and product knowledge. But the biggest issue by far is they can be a barrier to building a culturally aligned organization. Well, I'm very pleased to say that on a like-for-like basis, by the end of Q1 2021, we would have reduced that reliance to less than 10%, which is actually 6 months ahead of schedule. But even better, we've accelerated our buildout of our strategic development centers in India and Eastern Europe, which, by the middle of 2021, we’ll have 50% of our engineering staff. All of this will drive a culture of collaboration as well as permit talent mobility and co-location of engineering talent with product management talent. These are the perfect ingredients for creating an agile culture, which will drive product innovation faster than ever before. But being agile is more than just a culture. It does rely on process change also. The way I like to think about agile is a way of working that ensures we are primarily focused on outcomes for our customers. This is achieved by incrementally delivering value with every single release of software, big or small. That can be a small data insight or a brand-new user interface. We have now implemented agile in over 80% of our group and seen some significant benefits. What I particularly like to think about is 12 months ago, nobody could have imagined what our customers might have needed to help them innovate during a global pandemic. Well, while leveraging our agility and our data, we've developed the COVID data lake to assist them during this terrible period. Another way we have driven teams to be more customer-focused has been spearheaded by our UX teams. We integrated a product insight application into about 50% of our portfolio, which tracks usage patterns and gathers feedback directly from end users. This guides us to make our products more usable and feeds into our customer delight survey. We have made great progress with our cultural evolution. Alongside this, we have been optimizing our organization for growth. A key area for us in terms of optimization has been our IT function. We have continued to rationalize our back-office systems that support HR, finance and sales. We have progressed at a really fast pace. In the last 12 months alone, we have integrated Compumark and MarkMonitor and are well advanced with our DRG integration. We have thoroughly exercised and fine-tuned our playbook, which positions us exceptionally well for CPA. But in addition to this, we have matured and optimized our operational processes, such as our SOX controls and incident and problem change management. All these efforts put us in a very strong position to support the company's growth, be that organic or through acquisition. The second key area preparing us for growth is our singularity program. Hopefully, you all managed to see Armughan's demonstration yesterday. Singularity, as a recap, is a program that's focused on consolidation, and optimization of how we ingest, curate and master data. All that is to say how we bring data into the firm, clean that data and prepare it for use for our product set. We needed to evolve from a people-intensive process to a scalable, automated exception-based model. It is a technology-enabled program that extensively uses data science techniques. A good example that can be found is in our life sciences group. We use natural language processing, or NLP, to automatically identify and label documents, which editors then review for quality. This needs to be a totally manual process. We used to consume over 5,000 hours of manual effort per year. While data science is enabling optimization, it's much more important to look at how it's creating customer value for us at Clarivate. We have made a tangible investment in data science. You heard from Mukhtar and from Jeff, it's at the heart of our product strategies. Personally, the thing that struck me the most is the hands-on nature of our data science team. In my experience, these teams can often be too focused on exploratory or R&D activities, which don't necessarily benefit customers directly. At Clarivate the opposite is true. They are hyper-focused on solving customer problems every single day. They drive delivery into every production deployment possible. When you combine this with our rich data and expertise, you create huge value. A great example is in our Derwent product within the IP Group. We implemented a predictive model that helps our customers determine strengths of their patents based on predictive future citations. Essentially, it provides a probability score for a patent being granted or lapsing prematurely. This is a powerful feature and delivers a brand-new insight to our customers, which helps them factor their plans. This is a powerful feature and delivers brand-new insights to our customers so they can factor these insights into their plans on a go-forward basis. We are in a great position. 80% of our compute is already in the cloud. This was achieved when we separated Thomson Reuters and lifted and shifted our technologies out of data centers into cloud. This is hugely beneficial from a hardware refresh perspective and dealing with capacity spikes. But the next investment we're making is to leverage the cloud in a more progressive way by reengineering our applications to be cloud native, adopting serverless architectures and implementing cloud services ahead of commercial software. But how does becoming cloud-native deliver customer value? Here's an example. Today, we have duplicate functionality across the enterprise, which is not easily shared, for example, streaming data to a web page or connecting to a database. If we break down our applications to smaller services, we can then reuse them freely across the enterprise. This frees up capacity to deliver more features faster than ever before, which in turn creates customer value. But the final most critical point I want to make, this also accelerates segregation of our data from our applications, which is pivotal for us to expand into new data services, such as our 5G data cloud that Jeff would have described in [ IB ] update. To summarize, we have achieved a lot this year, but we are well placed to help the company to continue to grow going forward. I'd like to thank you for your time and pass my baton on to our CFO, Richard Hanks, for the financial overview.

Richard Hanks

executive
#8

Thank you, Stef, for that terrific update on our technology priorities for 2021, which are so important for us to drive long-term growth and value creation for our investors. I'm delighted to be here today to give you an update on our financial priorities for 2021. I'll give you an overview of our integration activities, our operational priorities. And then, of course, we'll cover guidance for 2021, which Jerre covered in his opening remarks. 2020 has been an absolutely transformational year for us. We have doubled the size of the company over a 12-month period driven primarily through the acquisitions of 2 strategic transactions, which I'll cover in a bit more detail in my presentation. We have an enviable business model. It's focused on bringing to market end-to-end capabilities across the innovation life cycle in both our science and our IP Product Groups. The completion of these end-to-end offerings was, of course, rounded out through the DRG transaction in February this year and the CPA Global transaction this year. We have deep client relationships, which provide needed stability to our organization, and we have a very high weighting in terms of recurring and reoccurring revenues, which provide near-term revenue predictability. I think the beauty of the model as well is it operates equally well in times of market expansion, but also in times of market disruption, which we've experienced this year. I have to say that the way in which Clarivate has responded to these changing circumstances is absolutely magnificent. We have been focusing on 3 specific priorities, which really are our waymarks to drive growth and to drive long-term value creation for our investors. Firstly, strategic acquisitions, which includes a combination of tuck-in M&A as well as more transformational transactions. Secondly, this focus on continuous operational improvement, really streamlining the business, quickly integrating acquisitions both from a human capital systems and product perspective and driving margin flow-through. And then finally, a focus on top line growth, which is reflected by our pro forma financial highlights. I'll talk about each of these in turn. Starting firstly with strategic acquisitions. Our focus prior to 2020 was executing tuck-in M&A. We define a tuck-in transaction as a revenue stream -- a business with a revenue stream of less than $25 million per annum but, most importantly, significant potential for growth. Oftentimes, these businesses have a particular geographical focus. And what we're able to do by bringing them into the Clarivate portfolio is bring -- is give those assets access to our wide market interface both in the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. And Darts-ip is a really good example of that, which is a Western European-based business with terrific proprietary assets, which we brought into the portfolio, into the IP Product Group, of course. And we gave that business access to our Americas broad EMEA footprint and then, of course, our Asia Pac footprint. We've completed 7 tuck-in acquisitions over the last 4 years: 2 in 2017, being Kopernio and Publons, in the Science Product Group; and then more recently, these 5 tuck-in acquisitions, which are primarily in the IP Product Group. In 2020, we really then pivoted and we focused on some more transformational acquisitions in both the science and the IP space. Firstly, DRG. DRG, we completed the transaction at the end of February this year. The purpose of the DRG transaction again was to complete that end-to-end value chaining in the life sciences space. Prior to DRG, we were particularly strong in discovery, preclinical, clinical and regulatory and compliance, but we had limited assets within the commercial market when branded drugs actually come to market, both branded drugs and medical devices. And DRG -- the DRG transaction completed out that value chaining with respect to the commercialization of our offerings. So we're absolutely delighted with that transaction. Obviously, the life sciences vertical in terms of growth potential, real and potential is very significant, growing at double-digit rates. And then more recently, we completed the CPA Global transaction in the IP space. Again, the key here was the core CPA Global business is centered on the patent and trademark renewals business, which is at the end of the IP value chain. Again, significant growth potential, there is natural tailwinds in that business as patent growth is approximately 5% to 6% per annum, so there's a natural growth opportunity there for the business. And it also has very high margins. So we're delighted to have completed that transaction. Turning to operational improvement. And this is an area in which we really excel as a management team. We have delivered sequential quarterly improvement in margins during 2020, 32% margins in Q1 this year, 36% margins in Q2, 38% margins in Q3. Q4 will be our best margin quarter driven, of course, by the fact that that's our highest revenue quarter in both the Clarivate core business and also, importantly, in the DRG business. And given our platform capabilities and the high margin flow-through from revenue growth to margins, we'll see significant margin accretion in the fourth quarter. Of course, those margins benefit from the 4 cost savings programs that we've been running. Those are listed here. I'll talk about them in turn. Firstly, the $70 million to $75 million commitment that Jerre and I made to the market in May last year when we took Clarivate onto the public markets through the reverse merger with Churchill Capital. We stated that we would save $75 million over a 2-year period, wrapping up at the end of Q1 2021 going into Q2 2021. Pleased to see -- pleased to report that we're slight -- we are ahead of plan, and that program will essentially be wrapped up at the end of this year with the completion of the technology transformation where we have been in-sourcing significant application development activities from third parties into our technology center in Bangalore. We then have 2 programs that are running in parallel associated with the acquisitions that we've completed this year, DRG and CPA Global. The DRG commitment that we gave was $30 million of savings over an 18-month period. We're delight -- I'm delighted to report that, that program is progressing ahead of plan, and we are very confident that we will at least generate $30 million of savings on a run rate basis given that time scale. And then the second program associated with acquisitions was, of course -- is, of course, the CPA Global commitment. We committed to $75 million of savings on a run rate basis over an 18-month period. Pleased to report that that's progressing really well. We're only 1 month into the transaction, but we did significant preplanning work, which enabled us to get a jump-start on the integration program, got things up and running, and we're really pleased with the progress we're making. Very, very confident that we'll be delivering $75 million of run rate savings, essentially exiting 2021. The fourth program that we're running is, of course, the response to COVID. We observed in February of this year some disruption in the Chinese marketplace, which we're all aware of. We reviewed our cost base at the very beginning of March in anticipation of potential headwinds in our transactional revenue stream. That was the area of the business which we felt could be impacted by the COVID pandemic. We responded by examining our cost base, in particular, discretionary costs, and we made budget adjustments as a consequence. That was so important to ensure that we continue to deliver to our investors the commitments we gave in respect of adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EPS and adjusted free cash flow for this year. We did shave and feather our revenue guidance when we announced our Q1 earnings in May by $30 million at the midpoint, but we did not change and we have not changed this year our EBITDA, EPS or cash flow guidance. That is driven by the response that we took to COVID-19 and the continued fine governance of the business this year. In terms of growth and driving top line growth, here, you can see our pro forma financial highlights on a trailing 12-month basis as at June 2020. Now as a reminder, this includes a full year of contribution for CPA Global and a full year of contribution for DRG. So we have a business with a revenue stream of $1.7 billion, EBITDA margins of 45%, potential for high single-digit growth and a very attractive adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow conversion through the removal of CapEx or through the adjustment of CapEx on an unlevered basis, 81% flow through, again, on an unlevered basis. I will now turn to our revenue profile and also look at recent trading results for revenue and EBITDA. But starting with revenue first, what we show here is the mix of revenue by product group, by type and by geography. You can see that the IP Product Group has a slightly higher weighting than the Science Product Group, 56% versus 44%. The IP Product Group is a $1 billion business now pro forma for a full year of results from CPA Global. And our Science Product Group, which has significant revenue growth potential, just under $800 million in revenue. In terms of revenue by type, and this is an area of the business which we are so focused on, and this is the -- this is where the real stability and resiliency of the organization is anchored. And that is this focus on recurring and reoccurring revenues. You see here, 56% of our $1.7 billion pro forma revenue stream is true -- is subscription revenue; 27% is that recurring, reoccurring revenue stream in particular, associated with the patent and trademark renewal business at CPA Global; and 17% of our revenue streams, as is often the case with business information services companies, is in the transactional space. Jerre and I have said that we consider a profile of 85% recurring, reoccurring; 15% transactional to be our -- to be the right way -- to be a very, very good weighting for us, and we're very, very close to delivering that objective. And then in terms of revenue by geography, nice balance, 50% of the revenues in the Americas, 29% in EMEA and 21% in Asia Pacific, which is our fastest-growing region. And just bear in mind that pro forma for CPA, we have an Asia Pacific business with a revenue stream of just under $400 million. So we have real scale in that market now, which is important for us to take advantage of future growth. Turning on to revenues. This is on a reported basis. You can see here a significant step-up in revenue from 2019 into 2020. Our guidance for this year is $1.28 billion to $1.295 billion on a full year basis. That includes 10 months of DRG and one quarter of contribution from CPA given that we completed that transaction on October 1. What's important to bear in mind is that the 2020 results do include a full year of contribution from Techstreet. We have recently announced the divestiture of that business. And so we will be removing approximately $10 million of revenue from this guidance, being November and December revenue streams of Techstreet, and approximately $2 million of EBITDA. Turning to EBITDA and margins. You can see on this slide that in 2018 and 2019 our margins were approximately 30% in both years. Now what's important to bear in mind here is that we were dual running costs in both of those years. We were running transition service agreement obligations that we had with the former parent, which wound down during 2019. But also, we were standing up our own stand-alone infrastructure to enable us to actually decouple from Thomson Reuters, and we completed that program in 2018. That was ahead of schedule, and that actually turned out to be quite prescient because it enabled us to, of course, complete the reverse merger with Churchill in May of last year and actually take Clarivate onto the public markets. So getting the separation completed quickly, efficiently and thoroughly was very, very important in hindsight. And then, of course, during 2020, you have seen the delivery of our cost savings programs in conjunction with the transformational transactions that we've completed, which have contributed to top line growth and, of course, margin expansion. So our EBITDA for this year, $480 million to $495 million. We've covered that in our Q3 earnings call at the end of October. And as I said, that does include approximately $2 million of contribution from Techstreet for November and December that we'll be removing from these figures. Margins of 38%, and we have a clear line of sight on delivering margins in the mid-40% in 2021. So what I'll do now is I'll pivot and focus on the growth drivers and margin expansion drivers for 2021. I'll also look at our capital structure, our balance sheet and then I'll wrap up with guidance, which Jerre covered earlier in the day. So turning to our growth drivers for 2021 and beyond, top left to bottom right. A number of these drivers have already been covered in the previous presentations, but there are 3 areas in particular that I'd like to focus on. The first one is in the bottom left, which is this concept of making our data ubiquitous. Hitherto, clients have accessed our data through our product platforms. Our objective now is to democratize our data through the delivery of data lakes to our clients so that our clients can choose the data they would like to use and the environment that they would like to consume that information. We have unique data assets, and it's encumbered upon us to facilitate the free access of that information to the clients in the environments in which they want to use it. The most recent example of our data lake initiative is the launch of the Infectious Disease Data Lake, which Mukhtar brought to market in the third quarter of this year. Given the focus on infectious diseases, of course, driven by the COVID pandemic, we see this as being a significant growth vector for us in the quarters ahead. Secondly, we continue to invest in our products. It's important for us to continue to refine and polish our UI and our UX through the product platforms which our clients use in order to access our content, our data and analytical tools. This is important for 2 reasons. Firstly, to drive up the retention rates of our products to the 95% level, which we have discussed on a frequent basis. And then secondly, associated with the high retention rates is our ability to generate additional yield. We've locked in price increases for our products at 4%, just over 4% in 2021, reflecting the significant renovation of our product portfolio over the last 2 to 2.5 years. And we consider price equilibrium to be between 4% and 5% per annum 2022 onwards. And then pivoting to the front office, which Mike spoke about earlier, and this is the concept of 3 Global Business Centers and the investment we're making in inside sales. With respect to the investment in inside sales, I see this as being a really important change for us in terms of our go-to-market model. We have a significant cohort of clients in that long tail of our client base. Pareto applies. 80% of our revenue is represented by 20% of our clients. So consequently, 80% of our clients represent 20% of our revenue. And that's that cohort of long-tail customers that we want to and shall be moving into the inside sales organization, serving the Americas, serving EMEA and serving Asia Pacific. I see this as a really important move in terms of my experience with inside sales. We'll have more frequent interactions with our clients. We'll be able to deliver higher retention rates as a consequence of a broader interface with those smaller clients, and we'll be able to also increase the velocity of new business. That, personally, has been my experience with inside sales organizations over the last 20 years working in information services company. So we are really excited about the potential for our inside sales capability to drive growth and to drive retention rates up. Turning to the streamlining initiatives that we've been executing over the last 18 months, 2 years. This has been the area where we have been able to really drive margin improvement in conjunction, of course, with the transformational acquisitions that we've completed this year. It's been these initiatives in conjunction with revenue growth that has delivered that quarterly sequential margin improvement during 2020. Starting with head count optimization. We are a business now with 8,500 colleagues around the world, 3,000, of course, being added from the CPA Global transaction. As I mentioned earlier, we're progressing well with the CPA integration. We've got a jump-start in terms of our planning. And the integration of these large-scale organizations is now really being woven into the fabric in the way in which we run the company. We've got an integration management team. We meet on a frequent basis. We're monitoring the milestones, and we are executing very, very well across the broad panacea of the business. In terms of facilities rationalization, this is an area that Mel covered in one of the earlier presentations. In combination with CPA Global, we now have approximately 80 physical sites within the portfolio. Our view is we can reduce it by at least 50% to 40 or less. We have been observing the company's response, our colleagues' response to the global pandemic, and it has been absolutely incredible to see the high levels of innovation, the way in which we continue to support our clients and drive growth. There has been no disruption to our supply chain from a content perspective, and we are absolutely convinced that with this DigitalFirst initiative, we can maintain that momentum, maintain our market-leading edge and, at the same time, remove some significant fixed costs from the business on a permanent basis. And then finally, in terms of in-sourcing application development, that is the last piece of the 2019 cost savings program. And as I mentioned earlier, that will be wrapped up at the end of the fourth quarter ahead of schedule. Here's a summary of the cost savings programs that we've been running. These are the 4 programs we've been running in parallel. The first program, the 2019 program that we wrapped up by the end of this year, delivering $75 million of savings on a run rate basis. Then we have the 2 acquisition programs that we're running in parallel, DRG, $30 million of commitment over 18 months. We're running ahead of plan. Absolutely confident that we'll deliver to our investors that level of saving. And then, of course, the recently announced CPA acquisition, $75 million of run rate savings over 18 months. It's progressing well. And the way I look at that is essentially, exiting 2021, we'll deliver run rate savings of $75 million. Exiting 2020, the run rate savings from these programs will be $100 million. Exiting 2021, the run rate savings from these programs will be $185 million. Turning now to capital allocation, debt capital structure and our balance sheet, and then I'll wrap up with guidance. So we are generating significant levels of free cash flow. We're deploying that cash to improve our products, to drive retention and to drive growth and to drive pricing. We're deploying capital to round out our platform capabilities both in terms of, again, our product but also our go-to-market strategy, investing in those 3 Global Business Centers, investing in customer service, investing in inside sales, very, very important platforms, which we will be able to leverage with further M&A. We have cash that will be allocated to M&A. That will be either continued tuck-ins, which you've seen us execute over the last few years, but also the opportunity for, again, larger, more transformational transactions within the Science and the IP Product Groups. We see a lot of opportunity there, again, for really substantive, accretive M&A, continuing to build on our platforms. And then finally, using cash to reduce leverage. That will be -- our leverage rates will come down through a combination of earnings growth and also the application of generation of free cash flow. Our leverage at the end of Q3 on a net basis, 2.9x stand-alone adjusted EBITDA. We did burst up for the CPA transaction to just over 4x net leverage. We have explained to the market that for the right transaction, for the transformational transactions that we've been focused on, we are quite happy going into the 4x rate in terms of net leverage. And then, of course, we'll use free cash flow to bring down net debt and bring our leverage ratios back into the low 3s, which is where we're comfortable with. The private equity ownership associated with Onex and Baring has reduced from 71% at the time of the go public transaction in May last year to 26% now, and the public float of 283 million shares at the end of the third quarter represented 74% of shares outstanding. Now that we've completed CPA transaction, the CPA investors have all rolled their stock into stock of Clarivate. And so private equity ownership now on a pro forma basis is approximately 50%. And of course, with the execution of secondaries in the years ahead, that will start to come down. In terms of debt structure, we have an average cost of debt of 4%. That's a combination of our term loans and our secured notes. And we have a weighted average year to maturity of just over 6 years. So our debt is maturing principally in 2026. And on a pro forma basis for the acquisition of CPA Global, our annual interest expense is $149 million. Turning to the balance sheet. We have very healthy balance sheet, solid credit ratings and a very flexible capital structure. As is common amongst business information services companies, when we look at the asset base of the company, it's really concentrated in intangibles and goodwill. And you can see in terms of our asset base of $5 billion, $4 billion of that is centered on intangible assets and goodwill. We had, at the end of the third quarter, $600 million of cash on the balance sheet. Now we used just over $500 million of cash on balance sheet at the end of Q3 to fund the transaction expenses with CPA Global but also, very importantly, is we used $400 million of that cash to retire part of the CPA debt. In terms of liabilities of $2.8 billion, $1.9 billion of that, at the end of the third quarter, is long-term debt, $1.2 billion in term loans and then $700 million in secured notes with a coupon of 4.5%. Pro forma for the CPA Global transaction, our total debt is $3.5 billion with a leverage ratio, as I referenced earlier, of just over 4x. Our outlook in terms of credit ratings with Moody's and S&P, B2 stable for Moody's and B positive outlook with S&P. So what we show here for 2020 is our pro forma guidance for the year, including one quarter of contribution from CPA Global being, of course, Q4. And these numbers, of course, include 10 months of DRG. And then for 2021, we have a full year, of course, for DRG and CPA Global. As a reminder, our 2020 numbers, as presented here, do include a full year of contribution from Techstreet. So what we shall be doing is we shall be removing approximately $10 million of revenue from this guidance for November and December and approximately $2 million of EBITDA, November and December, for Techstreet. In terms of revenue outlook for 2021, the guidance is $1.78 billion to $1.84 billion. That's 40% growth at the midpoint year-on-year, a fantastic accomplishment. In terms of EBITDA, our outlook is $785 million to $825 million of EBITDA in 2021. That's an increase of 65% year-on-year. Margins comfortably in the mid-40% compared to 38% for 2020. Adjusted free cash flow, $450 million to $500 million, double that in terms of guidance for 2020. This is a superlative set of results that we are committed to delivering to the market in 2021. In conclusion, we have an enviable business model, very durable, resilient, significant opportunity for growth and continued margin expansion. We provide end-to-end, must-have offerings to both our Science and our IP customers, and we have a noble and profitable purpose. We believe human ingenuity can transform the world and improve our future. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. And I'll now pass back to Jerre for some closing remarks. Thank you so much.

Jerre Stead

executive
#9

Okay. We're ready to go now. I want to start out by reminding you of what I said I'd do at the beginning, I'm going to give you my personal goals for 2023 exit, just as I did last year. A reminder, we're coming from $919 million to what I'm going to give you in just a minute on revenue from $292 million to what I'll give you on EBITDA, et cetera. One thing I want to make sure, just so you understand, the guidance that we gave you for 2021 assumes and is crafted as if we've already taken out Techstreet at $70 million of revenue and $14 million of EBITDA. So what you're seeing as the numbers that we presented at this point, if you take the midpoint of adjusted revenue, it's 18 -- $1.810 billion, that's after we've taken out Techstreet, and the same thing is true for rest of it. So let's be clear, it feels like, as I've listened and read other things, there might be some confusion. It was coincidental that we closed on that particular transaction yesterday. So -- and I'll be happy to talk in a few moments because some of the questions are, why did we sell that, and I'll be happy to tell everybody about that. As you may -- some of you may remember, when I took -- with my great team at IHS public, 52% of our revenue was what Techstreet was for us. So I know that business really well. So with that, here's my personal goals for 2023. I'm actually giving you a range of those this time only because of the bit of uncertainty we all live with COVID, et cetera. So my range for revenue as we exit 2023 is $2.8 billion to $3 billion. My range of EBITDA is $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion and my range of cash flow before interest is $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion. I'll repeat that. My range for revenue is $2.8 billion to $3 billion. My range for EBITDA is $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion of EBITDA and my range of free cash flow before interest is $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion. I have the greatest confidence of any organization I've been blessed with. And I've never been more excited as I started this today, not because the other companies I've led, like IHS, IHS Markit and all the others, weren't great companies, but because of our opportunities that you heard about in the last 2 hours. So with that, Mark, let's get started with questions.

Mark Donohue

executive
#10

Great. Thank you, Jerre, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today. We have a lot of questions that came in, and we'll try to get to as many as we possibly can. If we don't get to your question, we will personally follow up with you to answer your question. So let's start. We have a question from Manav Patnaik at Barclays. In the opening video showing life cycle of how the brands work together, where does CPA Global fit in?

Jerre Stead

executive
#11

Two things. Great question, Manav. That video was done before we acquired CPA. We will be adding them in -- with the next video. But Jeff, give them a quick view of where CPA fits in, as you talked about today.

Jeff Roy

executive
#12

So there's 2 real things that we bought with CPA. One, we're able to fill the gap in our product mix, particularly around the renewals business. And the second thing we bought was really the software business, the IP Management software business, that helps us string together that innovation life cycle. So if we're making that movie today, I think we would talk a little bit more about automated workflow and we’d talk about our ability to really serve end-to-end. We did have a nice package of solutions. But with CPA, we definitely closed the gap, and we definitely have an ability to string it all together right now.

Jerre Stead

executive
#13

Thanks, Jeff. And by the way, a quick comment, your tie was unanimously picked as the best tie of the team for the day. Okay, next question, Mark.

Mark Donohue

executive
#14

Great. We have another one from Manav. So how does customer delight differ from Net Promoter Scores? Do you conduct those and have those to compare to your other peers that occasionally report that number?

Jerre Stead

executive
#15

No, it's a good question. No, we don't use Net. The -- ours, and I've used this, by the way, for 15, 16 years, ours is much more focused. We get exact tie-in to the revenue and the customer with ours, and our feedback is so important with what we get back from it. So it's a great question. But no, we feel very good about it. That 82, by the way, that is our target that we will hit -- doing 79 this year is world-class. And it put us in the upper 1% of all the companies that do measure the same way we do. So great question, but happy to answer more of that with detail. Great question. Next?

Mark Donohue

executive
#16

George Tong from Goldman Sachs. So Jerre, you mentioned that organic revenue growth should exit next year at the upper end of 6% to 8% due in part to CPA and DRG. How quickly do you expect DRG and CPA to grow next year? And discuss how cross-selling is progressing within and between life sciences and IP.

Jerre Stead

executive
#17

Yes. No, I'm happy to start. You should think this year that the 2 grew north of 10% with DRG and 6-plus percent with CPA, so great start. But let's get both Mukhtar and Jeff to comment on the second part of the question, it's a critical one. Jeff?

Jeff Roy

executive
#18

Yes. Thanks, Jerre. So I mean, obviously, we have a tremendous cross-sell opportunity. And what -- we started really this summer before the deal closed with CPA, thinking about how we can package the solutions together to help our customers solve problems more easily. And one of the things I want to emphasize here on why we have such a high degree of confidence is that the product mix is really more focused on data going forward into 2021 than it was in past years. And that's really going to enable us to put solutions together using and sharing the data from the Web of Science Group, along with our patent intelligence and some of our other data sets to build complete solutions for our customers. So the bench chemist solution I mentioned earlier does, in fact, include all of our data, not just the IP data sets but includes the Web of Science data as well.

Mukhtar Ahmed

executive
#19

Yes. And just to add to what Jeff has said, I mean, I think there's still tremendous opportunity within the life sciences and the medical device and diagnostic verticals. We've started to certainly cross-sell both our Web of Science and Cortellis data with the DRG portfolio to go deeper into those segments. But I think moving forward with the assets that Jeff and the IP team have now brought into the fray, we can put those together and really go deeper into life sciences in particular.

Jerre Stead

executive
#20

Thanks a lot, guys. Next question, Mark?

Mark Donohue

executive
#21

Okay. A question comes in from Peter Christiansen at Citi. As you have replatformed the overall business, effectively broadening Clarivate's moat, how do you view the competitive landscape evolving in both science offerings and IP? Where do you see the greatest opportunity for market share gain?

Jerre Stead

executive
#22

Yes. I'll start, then Mukhtar and then Jeff. By far, we have more -- as you heard them both say today, and we'll deliver more in the future. Our white space is the largest I've ever been part of, despite being the world's industry leaders where we're at today. Mukhtar, you start. Jeff, you pick up.

Mukhtar Ahmed

executive
#23

Yes. I think the key thing here is this is not about selling one-off products. What we're selling are integrated solutions into our core markets. And I think that's where there's tremendous opportunity. As I've just said earlier, life sciences presents a fantastic opportunity for us. I think there's so much more that we can do in the diagnostic space. I think real-world research, which clearly -- which brings us into broader health care, I think there's tremendous opportunity there with all of the assets that we have.

Jeff Roy

executive
#24

Yes. So I mean there's 2 things competitively. I mean we really are the only company that has the full life cycle covered with our products between science and IP. So competitively, we feel that we're very well positioned to help our customers in the most creative way possible. The second thing I would say is that we're really able to drive our content, particularly some of the IP content, some of that Web of Science content into nontraditional users of the data. So we see a tremendous opportunity to grow in ways that some of our direct competitors today within our spaces just can't grow.

Jerre Stead

executive
#25

Thanks. Next question, Mark?

Mark Donohue

executive
#26

A question coming in from Zach Cummins at B. Riley. Can you provide more rationale behind the Techstreet divestiture? How does this impact the mix of subscriptions, reoccurring and transactional revenue?

Jerre Stead

executive
#27

I'll start, and then we'll have Jeff and Richard pick up real quick. As I said, when I took IHS public, 52% of my revenue came from the same business model. We love the people at Techstreet. What we've been able to do is sell their business into a really creative situation, which is one of the larger providers of standards in the world. That's their first for-profit organization. It will be very interesting to see how that plays out. Two reminders, though. About 50% of every dollar that Techstreet earned in revenue, actually a bit more than that, is royalties that are paid to the other standards companies, point one. Point two, we had little or no cross-selling opportunity. So pretty clear why we wanted to do that. Jeff, any other comments? We love the people there, and we put them in a good home.

Jeff Roy

executive
#28

Yes. Thanks, Jerre. I mean it's a great business, as you say. And when we look at grooming the portfolio, we always look at a couple of things. One of them is are we the best owner? Can we satisfy our customers in the greatest way possible as the owner of the business? And the second thing we tend to look at is how complementary is the offering to our other products. And in the case of Techstreet, it's a great product, great people, but when we look to the future and how we wanted to grow with driving more advanced analytics into the market and the combination of services that we wanted to offer to the market, it just didn't fit as well. So we took the opportunity to groom the portfolio.

Richard Hanks

executive
#29

Yes. And final comment would be on margin. So from the biggest I gave you, the 2020 margins for Techstreet are 19%, which is less than half of the rest of the portfolio, so it's margin -- the divestiture is margin accretive at about 1 point to our margins in 2021. So that's another driver for us.

Jerre Stead

executive
#30

And what's the -- any significant change at all, Richard, on the split for us in total of subscription versus transaction with that being gone?

Richard Hanks

executive
#31

Yes. I mean the Techstreet business did have a reasonable level of recurring revenue, but it's not going to change our overall profile of 83% recurring, reoccurring and 17% transactional, which is the expectation for next year.

Jerre Stead

executive
#32

Thanks. Next question, Mark?

Mark Donohue

executive
#33

So from Jay Warner at Artisan Partners asked I'd like to better understand the key product areas that make up Clarivate's transactional businesses and what the major end market customers are of those transactional products and why there's been a softening of the usage of those transactional products in 2020 alongside COVID. What's the risk that the customers who rely on these transactional services realize that they can drive their businesses without uses of these transactional products?

Jerre Stead

executive
#34

So I'll start. That's 5 questions, Mark, not one. But I'll start, and then we'll go to Mukhtar and then Jeff, but actually good question. Think about our model going forward of about 85% recurring and annual subscription-based 15% transaction. Think about that 15% being built out of 2 pieces. We are investing, and we have this year and will continue to, in professional services. It pulls through our other products. We did not historically have professional services. This is not one-off bids. This is taking our data to our customers and helping them make decisions. You should think in the future of that 15% of transaction business, I said, would be a great model, at least half of that being professional services. The other pieces are ones that Jeff -- sorry, Mukhtar, you start, and then Jeff, pick them up, because it's a great question. Mukhtar?

Mukhtar Ahmed

executive
#35

Yes. Thanks, Jerre. I think just to begin, we should separate usage from new business, particularly transactional new business. These are 2 separate things. If I was to look at usage, certainly of our transactional customers, then the usage is still pretty impressive. Of course, we have to take into account that we have been in a pandemic, and we still are. So decision-making is certainly a little slower when it comes to onetime purchasing, particularly of some of our assets that historically were offered in that manner. But as Jerre has said, moving forward, certainly, professional services, consulting is very important for us. It's something that we haven't really done in the past. And if I look at the last 6 months, we've had very impressive growth in our consulting services, certainly within our academic space and within life sciences, in particular. And that's something we want to continue doing because it brings us a rich vein of reoccurring revenue. It allows us to bundle our data assets and our software assets with those services and take those to customers. So I think that's -- it's certainly going to be a core focus for us moving forward.

Jeff Roy

executive
#36

Yes. And so there's 2 points I'll make. I mean to directly answer the question which part of our business was most macro sensitive, it's going to be trademark clearance searching is the most macro sensitive part of our business. But it's important to note that what we really pay attention to here is are we losing customers or not. So there are certain segments that we serve that did see some slowdown in brand activity. But by and large, we don't see it as a permanent fix. There's no -- we've already seen the recovery, I think, as Jerre began at the beginning or mentioned at the beginning. And then as Mukhtar pointed out, what we didn't really have this year, which what we have going into 2021 is a much, much better product mix that's focused on advisory services and a higher percentage of data subscription sales than we did in 2020.

Jerre Stead

executive
#37

Thanks. Great question, more to come. Next one, Mark?

Mark Donohue

executive
#38

Seth Weber at RBC Capital asks Jeff mentioned CPA software assets will feature prominently in the future. Can you expand on that, give some examples of what, how?

Jerre Stead

executive
#39

Yes, one of the critical questions we looked at strategically when we were making the decision to end up acquiring CPA. Jeff?

Jeff Roy

executive
#40

Yes. I think I mentioned that there are really 2 things we were buying with CPA. One of them is plugging some gaps, which was primarily referring to the renewals business and really the ability to stitch everything together. And that's really the IP Management software specifically. So we have a pretty aggressive plan on how we want to bring that software together and how we want to integrate all of those solutions. And that's really what I was referring to in the presentation. I would also point out that on the patent intelligence side, the Innography product and the Derwent products really went into different market segments, and we're now -- one being more commercial focused, one being more information professional focused. And now we're making a pretty substantial pivot not away from those but also into the research desk as well. So there's a really complementary set of products that we expect to push on next year.

Jerre Stead

executive
#41

Mark, next question?

Mark Donohue

executive
#42

Right. Shlomo Rosenbaum at Stifel. What is the organic growth expectation that is embedded in the 2021 guidance to the range and to the guidance bracket your expectations for organic growth next year?

Jerre Stead

executive
#43

Let's work backwards. Richard, you pick up on this. It is in the 6% to 8% that we committed to doing. Over a year ago, we said we'd exit 2021, 6% to 8%. The assumptions that are built in there cover that. By the way, they also include improvement year-over-year in all of our acquisitions too. So I think that helps you think through, yes, and we have a great deal of confidence. The other thing I would say is we're not assuming with the plan we laid out from the 15% that is transactional, we're -- what we've built into the plan is that it will get back close to our actuals in 2019. So not being overly optimistic, and it could be an upside for us. Richard, please.

Richard Hanks

executive
#44

Yes. So as we said in the guidance, it excludes Techstreet. So in terms of year-on-year impact, divestiture is about a 5% impact -- minus 5%. And then IPG and Science Product Group will be growing mid-single digits, and the balance is the contribution from M&A.

Jerre Stead

executive
#45

Thank you. Next question.

Mark Donohue

executive
#46

So Toni Kaplan at Morgan Stanley asks, Mel, you talked about working remotely will be the norm going forward. I can see the benefits of that. Companies that have been trying to bring employees back to their offices have often attributed that strategy to culture. Do you worry about jeopardizing the culture? Or do you believe that you can achieve the culture you want in a virtual setting?

Jerre Stead

executive
#47

Great question. Mel, you start, and I'll finish. It's a critical question for us.

Melanie Fitzpatrick;Digital First Transformation

executive
#48

Thanks for the question, Toni. It is indeed an important question. And we feel absolutely that we can continue to build a strong culture alongside a better workplace for colleagues in a remote, virtual model. And what we're doing is looking at shaping where people can still come together for purposeful collaboration. So we are very confident we can achieve this productive, high-performing culture in a new model that actually fully leverages the virtual setting. So we're working on new ways of working to support our people to ensure we do just this. One thing I do believe is, around culture, it needs to be engineered. So unless we get clear on what culture we're designing and what our people need, our colleagues need around the globe, we will not get to a great place. But we're doing it: people centric, engagement led. I've talked about we're using data. We're designing things with our colleagues across the globe to better enable the way it works. So our culture will evolve, and that will enable us to continue our success and create opportunities for our people across the globe. It's a really important piece, but no, we're super confident.

Jerre Stead

executive
#49

Thanks, Mel. And let me just finish that. It's a great question. As I covered this morning, we had 90-plus percent participation with our colleagues and our colleague engagement, well above the midpoint. And some of the highest was with communication. One of the things we asked them, too, was how are you feeling about the way we are managing the work from home. 90-plus percent were positive, couldn't have been happier. So -- and one of the reasons we're so pleased and excited that Mel was leading this effort is it is a massive change in where we go to market inside out with all of our colleagues. And I'm really pleased that we're on point, and we'll keep you up to speed because we do -- one of the few companies do, we do report publicly twice a year how our colleagues feel about our company. Single most important thing: if we don't have engaged, excited colleagues, all the rest doesn't play. That's why I always start that virtual circle and why we said that we would get to the 80-plus percent, which will put us past world-class. Great question. Thank you. Next one, Mark?

Mark Donohue

executive
#50

Great. So Shlomo Rosenbaum at Stifel asks how long will it take for Clarivate to make the journey so the applications are closer to primarily being cloud native.

Jerre Stead

executive
#51

Stef, you answer that one because maybe we weren't clear on where we are with the cloud, okay?

Stefano Maestri

executive
#52

Sure. Thank you, Jerre. So the way I'd answer that is, first and foremost, we're making great progress with the transition. As you'd expect, we're operating in an agile way, so we are really tackling the highest-value, highest-priority items first. So really, the way to think about it is an evolutionary process. I don't really -- we describe it as having a hard end date.

Jerre Stead

executive
#53

And let's just -- let me come back to Stef again, so from a cloud-enabled standpoint, where we are, so we're also clear.

Stefano Maestri

executive
#54

Yes. So as we said in the presentation, 80% of our estate is already in the cloud, so we are in a good position in that perspective. As we reengineer to maximize the value from the cloud, we're doing that in an iterative fashion over the next period of time to be able to maximize and align to the commercial value.

Jerre Stead

executive
#55

Thank you. Great question, Shlomo. Next question, please.

Mark Donohue

executive
#56

Seth Weber at RBC Capital. It sounds like M&A remains core part of the story. Should we assume it will remain concentrated within Science/IP categories? Or is there a potential for something more transformational, another lake?

Jerre Stead

executive
#57

No, that's a great question. The way we set today, and it's a critical strategic question is we've got between the 2 groups, the best total end-to-end solutions ever set out to manage for our customers, everything from creation of an idea to invention to success of an idea. That does give us the opportunity, and we'll be talking about that in the future, creating indices for many of the markets that we have not been in with what we now have in both the life science, certainly with Web of Science, as you heard Mukhtar talk about being that becoming the researcher's business for every organization, profit and nonprofit, worldwide. And what it does give us, and we'll talk more about that in the near future with Jeff's group is that IP will allow us to start providing data that nobody else in the world has except us into the finance community in a very positive way. So great question. We don't need a third leg of the stool. If -- just to put it in perspective, when Mike talked about where our top 180 were, et cetera, customer-wise, we've got so much white space. We're less than 10% to 15% all in penetrated today. And I can tell you everything on point will get us much closer to 30% in the next 3 to 4 years. Great question. Thank you. Next one?

Mark Donohue

executive
#58

Great. Well, staying on the M&A theme, Sami Bayke at DSAM Partners asked will future M&A deals need to be year 1 accretive for Clarivate to pursue them. If so, will that significantly narrow suitable targets given the growth and margin levels Clarivate is currently generating?

Jerre Stead

executive
#59

Yes. No, great question. If you look at what I told you my goal was, you'll see that's a 46% to 47% EBITDA margins. So that's a high bar. Remember, however, this model allows us, when we get north of 6% organic to drop 150-plus basis points every year to the bottom line. So the bar is higher now. It does not mean that we won't continue to do acquisitions. If we use shares, it does have to be accretive on adjusted EPS after 12 to 15 months or we won't do them. We never have. And again, remember, we will not participate in auctions. Two, if we use cash, then it's very straightforward. At the end of the first year, the first full 4 quarters, is where are we -- including the synergies that we gained, where are we compared to what we expected to pay. Example only, if we paid 18, 20x multiple of EBITDA trailing as we did with DRG, we said we'd save $30 million, that would bring us down to 12x trailing, and we're ahead of that target. So those are the -- it's a great question. In fact, every one of the pipeline of businesses we're looking at today from possible acquisitions, both larger ones and the tuck-ins that we're so glad to have that makes such a difference, we look at that with those new fresh binoculars. Great question. Thank you.

Mark Donohue

executive
#60

Great. Our next question, Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. So how much of the medium-term growth outlook for high single-digit organic growth are you anticipating to come from revenue synergies from DRG and CPA?

Jerre Stead

executive
#61

Great question. Let's -- Richard, you start with that, and then we'll have Mukhtar and Jeff give color.

Richard Hanks

executive
#62

Yes. I mean so we obviously didn't include in our valuation, the opportunity for cross-sell from DRG and CPA. We do include in our valuation metrics that drive the accretion figures that Jerre was just describing, of course, cost synergies. But we haven't disclosed the actual contribution from cost synergies, but we do expect -- from revenue synergies, we do expect them to be meaningful.

Jeff Roy

executive
#63

Yes. I would just add that we do expect to see progress made in 2021. We've spent a considerable amount of effort already, creating packages from the customer backwards on things that are going to help our customers be successful. And the whole premise behind the acquisition of CPA anyway was that the product mix was improved and helped our customers connect more of the workflow. So we expect to see progress made. We've already seen some progress made in -- as we started the fourth quarter, but certainly into 2021, and then to accelerate through 2021.

Mukhtar Ahmed

executive
#64

Yes. With our DRG portfolio, we've been very successful in terms of incorporating the products into our various offerings, various bundles. We've started to certainly see some traction in the marketplace. We expect that, of course, to continue in 2021. So that's certainly a source of product growth opportunity for us. I think the other one is geographical. If I look at the DRG portfolio, Asia Pacific is an area that, historically, DRG has not sold into. And of course, with the infrastructure and capabilities that we have in that region, that's certainly one where we can certainly take the offerings and assets into those geographical markets.

Jerre Stead

executive
#65

Great. And let me just wrap up on that question because it's such a critical one. We -- this is the first year that Clarivate, historically, has included cross-selling ever for commissions. In fact, historically, they were penalized. We track it every week, Mike Morhardt's team. Michael does a great job. It's continued to increase as the year goes on. And I'm very excited about 2021, 2022 with what we've now added, and we expect to see that and the commissions cross-sell and upsell increasing in 2021. Great question. Thank you. Next?

Mark Donohue

executive
#66

Great. So Manav Patnaik at Barclays asked a few modeling questions, so he's wondering if we can address those, asking about the share count 2021 and how much revenues have you assumed for M&A broken out by, say, DRG, CPA and IncoPat.

Jerre Stead

executive
#67

So I'll start with that. We don't assume any acquisition. Everything is on share count. The full share count today, if you take exactly as it is, the 625 million shares, not the reported, but the all in. From that, we will never add more than 1% of outstanding shares for granting restricted shares and at-risk shares, which, by the way, all of the customer delight shares are at risk. We have to meet or exceed the goals that we set. And in my case, all of my shares are risk entirely. They're performance-based shares on 3 years and a large part of our top executives are, too, that are based on 3-year goals that the Board sets. So think about 1%, all of that included in and think about us giving you -- and Mark, you can refer them to the latest update -- but where we've calculated, I think, at 30, 33 and 36, what will be the all-in at 625 million.

Mark Donohue

executive
#68

Great. And then also asked about any FX, foreign exchange, assumptions and any organic growth. Thank you.

Jerre Stead

executive
#69

Richard, please. Thank you.

Richard Hanks

executive
#70

Yes, sure. So as Jerre said, just back to the share count, 625 million basic shares in issue, 631 million fully diluted for 2021. And then on FX, we use 6-month forward rates in our plan. So for example, the 6-month forward rate USD-GBP would be 1.34. But just recall that a significant percentage of our revenue stream is dollar-denominated, so we have a significant natural hedge between revenue, expenses when you break down the transaction currency profile.

Jerre Stead

executive
#71

With that, I'm going to close. As Mark said, the questions we didn't answer, we will personally get to each of you quickly. We thank you so much. I'll just tell you, and I said it at the beginning, I've never been prouder of a team with more potential that I'm privileged to be part of today. Thank you very much. We're going to go, go, go, and we'll see if my personal goals don't get met or exceeded. Thank you all so much. Bye-bye.

Read the full transcript via the API

You're viewing the first half of this call. Get the complete Clarivate Plc transcript — plus 251,000+ transcripts from 12,000+ companies, speaker segments, AI summaries and full-text search — through the EarningsCalls.dev API.

Get the API View API docs →

This call discussed

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Clarivate Plc earnings transcripts and 251,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.