Clarivate Plc (CLVT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

November 15, 2022

New York Stock Exchange US Industrials Professional Services conference_presentation 31 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#1

Good day, everyone. Hi, I'm Ashish Sabadra, and I cover business and info services companies here at RBC Capital Markets. Thanks again for joining. And thank you, Jonathan -- Jonathan and Jonathan, for attending the conference, for giving us an opportunity to host you.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#2

Maybe I'll kick off with a question here for you, Jonathan, here. You've been in this new role for a few months now, maybe if you can share what have been the key positive or negative surprises since you've been here.

Jonathan Gear

executive
#3

Okay, great. Well, thanks for having us here. It's a great conference. We're just delighted to be here. So thanks for the opportunity. So I've been in my CEO seat now for 70, 75 days or so. And I guess, on the surprise side, on the positive, as I've got to know the business, got to know the people better, got to know part of our customers and the products, the strength of our products in the 3 core end segments that we talked about in the earnings call last week is just remarkable. And have I've lived my life in previous lives, as you well know, in the world of information services, and I've lived the strong assets, but I never have assets that are so critical in end markets, which are just so strong and predictable. And I think it's just a remarkable combination, whether it's selling IP services into IP end markets, which is extremely resilient, into Life Sciences and Healthcare, with our solutions there and very strong tailwinds there. And finally, in our Academia and Government end markets, we were just the gold standard around Web of Science, our Alma software solutions is in an incredibly strong position to be in. So I think that just the strength, the positions in each of our end markets is a great thing to see. I think in the surprise on the negative side, and this should not have been a surprise to me so I'll caveat that for a second, but just the pace of change that Clarivate has gone through in the last 30 months, from $1 billion company coming out of the destacking of the legacy Thomson Scientific products to a series of very, very large acquisitions over a short amount of time, it's just been amazing to see that pace has changed. And internally, you feel it. As I walk around our offices, meet with our colleagues globally, you just see the change that they've gone through. So coming out of that, my lesson here is we're very focused now on minimize the change, focusing on the integration and the operations and the execution right now. But it is, I say, a phenomenal business with great assets.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#4

That's great. That's very helpful color. And maybe I was going to jump on and talk about your prior experience. You've had a great track record. Particularly the one that stands out to us is the accelerated growth that we saw in Transportation business. So I was just going to -- I was wondering if -- what were the key successes or what were the key lessons learned from your past experiences and how are those applicable here at Clarivate?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#5

Okay. Great. Yes. At IHS Markit, we had 4 big segments. The one you're referring to is our Transportation segment. For those of you who don't know it, Transportation was -- predominantly, it was automotive. Automotive information had CARFAX. So get your CARFAX. We also have the R.L. Polk vehicle and operation database. And both of these came out of the acquisition of R.L. Polk in -- when was it? 2012 or so, something like that, or before then. But I'll tell you, one big peril that I've noticed, and we spoke about it actually in the most recent earnings call, is when we looked at that acquisition, and it was the biggest one we did at the time, it had again to 2 pieces. It had CARFAX, which we [ envisioned ] from a kind of high single-digit to low double-digit grower. But I think what's more instructive for your question is how is this R.L. Polk database? And this database, we counted cars. Either the vehicles are in operation globally, you just have to do lots and lots of great things. But when we acquired Polk at the time, it was sold as data. So we sold it to OEMs. We sold it to automotive parts suppliers. We just sold that as data. And the day we bought it, it was a declining asset. It has declined about 1% a year or so. And what we did over the next couple of years, we transformed that data sale into a data analytics platform and began selling analysis on top of this. So example would be we would tell OEMs, "Okay, you decide a target of reducing your car emissions by x percent in Brazil by the year 2030. Are you going to hit that target or not?" That's an example of an analytic. And we took that product, which was flat to decline, and by the time we closed or sold to S&P Global, it was growing high single digit, just that 1 product. And when I look at the Real World Data we have here in our Life Science and Healthcare segment, to me, it's the exact same model. And so when our -- some of our experts came to Jonathan and I back in early September and said we have this great idea. We have this Real World Data, which is leading. It's fantastic. But today, we sell it as data, and it gets some quarters that we love it, some quarters that it hurts us. They wanted to -- they described to me a similar process of creating a platform by which we could then create more sticky, more recurring add-on products. And that migration -- the cost of migration and the role of information services from enriched data to analytics to workplace solutions wrapped with services, the model we saw at IHS Markit, and it's the exact same model that I see us taking to here at Clarivate.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#6

Yes, that's great. I was going to ask about the Real World Data later, but maybe I'll just jump into that one and just talk about. So as you mentioned, there were some challenges in that business last quarter, but you've talked about productizing it as well as bringing more value-add on top of it. So how should we think about, in terms of the strategic initiatives for RWD and, more importantly, ability to cross-sell with Cortellis? And how much synergies there are with the rest of the business?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#7

Yes. It's a great portion of our Life Science and Healthcare product. And maybe just to add some more context to it. As Jon and I were very explicit in our Q3 call, it's been a -- it's a relatively small product line within the overall envelope of Clarivate. There's a product line that some quarters has been fantastic and some quarters has killed us. In Q4 of last year, it killed us. We had a significant miss from expectations because of this 1 product. Q1, Q2 of this year, it was fantastic. In Q3, it killed us. And the takeaway I have as a relatively new CEO, and Jonathan will speak to you kind of your view also a couple of quarters in, very, very hard. Even though it's a great product, over the course of the year, you can say you're going to get x amount from it. But being able to predict on a quarter-by-quarter precision of when it's going to hit has proven to be very difficult because they -- a portion of the sales are large in size. We lost by -- we missed by $9 million 6 deals, to give you an idea, over a small number of clients. And so the -- but it does line up very well against our other data sets we have in Life Sciences and Healthcare and be able to bring together these different capsules and taken to book the big pharmaceutical companies, the medium-sized small. It's really kind of makes us kind of unique and kind of our niche in the marketplace. But it comes down to -- but the continued productization of analytics is the critical theme you'll see from me and see from Jonathan over the ensuing years. But it is an underlying great product. It's just awfully hard to predict on a quarter-to-quarter basis when these bigger deals are going to land.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#8

That's very helpful color. Maybe just switching back and talking about just overall strategy. Like what are your key strategic priorities for the next 3 to 5 years?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#9

So it's a couple of elements, and I'll ask Jonathan. Jonathan Collins helped drive the strategy that we've been focused on here with him and his team. But a couple of key pillars, as we're calling it, will be critical to that strategy. I mean, first, overall, I'd say, when we reported last week, we came on our 3 core segments. So IP, Academia and Government, Life Sciences and Healthcare. And I encourage you and our investors to focus on the lens of the business through that lens. It's a very good way to look at the business, simply how I look at the business, and we'll be managing the business. And certainly, we want to optimize our performance in each 1 of those 3 segments. Now when we look across the strategy from where Jonathan and I and the team will take Clarivate is around a few key pillars. There's one is around continued go-to-market excellence. And that's something that's been driven really in the last year, 1.5 years or so, with our go-to-market team. And the evidence we see here is in a couple of areas. We see our retention rate go up. Q3, we had a 92% retention rate amongst our subs customers. That was up 2 points from earlier in the year. So you see that, that continued touch goes up. You see it through price -- value captured through price increases. We continue to see that. We've moved it from a de minimis amount of price increase to kind of 3% to 4% this year, and that's partly based upon our go-to-market, partly based upon improvements for making it in our products, with the whole go-to-market channel being a critical piece. The second piece is around continuing to move our content together and find areas where the content does. But -- so Web of Science content, for example, coming out of the legacy Thomson products, sitting today in our Academia and Government sector. That content lines up very well against several of our other content pieces, both within our Academia and Government products, but also within other products. So IP, for example, they do IP searches, go to the line that search against the relevant bibliometric informations is critical for us, continue to drive around technology and shared platforms and a few other pieces. But Jonathan, do you want to add as to kind of your lens on this?

Jonathan Collins

executive
#10

Yes. And in addition to those, a couple of others we highlighted is building those analytics and insights that Jonathan talked about on the Real World Data platform to a broader range of solutions. So we see the opportunity not just in Life Sciences and Healthcare to offer really compelling data that's easy to use, but in addition to that, more prepackaged or prepared analytics and insights to help drive solutions for our customers. We also highlighted the opportunity to continue to expand our workflow capabilities. So we've got a great broad set of workflow tools in the IP segment. Our IPMS is that help customers manage all the way from an early idea through to the renewal of a patent. We've got the great flagship product in Academia that Jonathan touched on, Alma, which helps libraries to manage their collections most efficiently. So we see greater opportunities, and we'll talk a bit more in early March at our Investor Day about opportunities to invest further behind workflow. And I think the final one we touched on is really value-added services, and this is heavily concentrated in the Life Sciences and Healthcare segment. But we have a great set of internal assets and capabilities around helping customers solve problems where it requires a higher level of touch, and we can leverage some of the data that we have to bring in applied research and solve problems for them in that capacity. So I think, most commonly, One Clarivate was thought about as a new go-to-market. And what we're highlighting is there's a really good opportunity to expand through product innovation and help to close that growth rate gap from where we are right now at about 3% to where we think our markets are growing in aggregate at about 6%.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#11

That's great. We're definitely looking forward to the Investor Day and looking forward to the new midterm guidance as well. So excited about that. Maybe just going back to the point that you made around go-to-market. And one of the questions was, are you appropriately staffed on the sales and consulting front? Can you talk about how productive you're seeing some consulting personnels are? And how should we think about the productivity improving, but also as some of the products and strategy comes together, how that should help drive growth going forward? So maybe are you appropriately staffed and the growth potential going forward?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#12

Sure. And the consulting and the sales are 2 different pieces. I'll speak to them in turn. So our consulting is primarily focused on the Life Sciences and Healthcare segment. They kind of came out of that piece. And we certainly, unfortunately, lost a lot of the consultants last half last year, about 1/3 of our consultants we lost. And [ caliber and own goal ] shouldn't have happened. We made a mistake. We lost some critical players. Throughout the course of this year, we've been rebuilding that capacity. And we're now at the point where it is fully, fully -- we're back to 100%. And I think we lost were the rainmakers. They were the bizdev people, the more senior people in general. As it come back into our business, and it's great, they're experts coming out of Life Sciences and Healthcare. So they're industry experts, but they have to get to know our products, have to know our data sets, as they begin to package together appropriate solutions to take to our customers. So the buildup on the bizdev side has been a bit slower than we would have hoped, but we do have full capacity. And we expect, certainly, as we go into Q4, ex Q4, into next year to be back up to where we should be. But consulting for us has been a drag this year, really as a result of losing that capacity at the end of last year. On the sales side, again, there's been a pretty remarkable transformation of that business from being almost entirely field product-focused to really, what I would call, a more professional go-to-market model, with an account management team to focus on serving the full account, product sales, product field specialists, been very product-focused, and then very importantly, building out digital or inside sales model. And the last piece I'm going to highlight on, it's just -- it's been critical to our success, and it's something I saw at my previous companies. Very common theme you see in companies like ours, where, if you don't have a large inside sales team, the longer tail of customers just don't get touched. They get touched once a year at renewal rate, and they don't get nurtured throughout the entire year process. So Steen, our Head of Sales, has built this capacity out. And this is one of the benefits of -- or I say, one of the causes of the increasing retention rate amongst our clients. They're getting touched more often, getting cared more often. It's really just helping the retention and growth of our accounts.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#13

No, that's great. I just wanted to drill down further on the 2 things that you mentioned. One was increased retention, better pricing realization, and we've seen that translate into better subscription growth this quarter. So how should we think about those trends going forward just given all the changes that you're making in your business? Is that an opportunity for better pricing realization and improved retention going forward? How should we think about a normalized retention level for this business?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#14

Okay. So if I think about the subs line, which is 60% of our -- so just the table stakes, 60% of our revenue is subs; 20% is a recurring revenue model coming from our IP business, that's where we manage the renewals of our IP assets for our clients; and 20% is transactions. So I'm going to talk about the 60% now, which is subs. And the model -- how I think about it is this, it ends the year at 100%, and then you lose x percent from attrition, and you need to build back up to whatever organic growth rate you want as a target. So the elements for us right now is we lose -- well, this, in Q3, we talked about a 92% retention rate for ourselves. So we lost 8% there. That's -- I would say, in our industry, that's good-ish. It's not great, it's not perfect. I've obviously seen a lot worse. And so it's kind of in that good-ish range, and it's a 2-point improvement from where we were in the first half of the year, which is significant. If you can move that needle 2% off this very large base of revenue is significant. Then we look about how much price capture we can get. And historically, this business has been very low in terms of price capture. The executive team has done a great job, along with sales and product, of creating the value for our clients such that this year, we're at about a 3% to 4% price capture, 4% increase, again, for that subs line. And I think that's roughly the right range you want to be in. Some years, more features, more value you can beat [indiscernible] above 4, hopefully not less than 3. But that's what I've seen in my experience is a good range to be where the clients understand that. They'll feel you're [ guiding ] them at this appropriate level to be. So 92%, you have 3% to 4%. Let's say you're generous, probably sub-4%, that gets you to 96%. And let's say you're trying to target -- we pin a 4.3 figure. Let's say we're trying to target a 4% growth figure, so at least 8% to go. The other 2 elements of 8% are cross-sell of existing products, and that's the -- actually, if everything, that's the biggest bucket. Biggest bucket for us, probably the biggest bucket for all of our peer groups. Of cross-selling existing products to be very effective in terms of being close to the client, it goes back to your questions on the go-to-market. The second is on introducing new products for innovation. And this is something that I think we can do a much better job at. Now we had a metric at IHS Markit called Innovations -- sorry, Vitality, Vitality score that measured innovation. We never actually told you the number. We were about to tell you, then S&P bought us. So it screwed our chance. But the goal here, if you want to be improving every year, and this is a way of measuring. And it's -- my last company, we said every product launched the last 3 years counted. So that was kind of a way of counting how much revenue is coming from relatively recently launched products. I think you can choose whatever metric you want as long as you have a consistent metric. And we don't measure it here. We're beginning to measure it here, beginning to look at how we measure it here, but my experience is if you focus on it, if you measure it, if you hold product teams accountable, that's a key success metric for them, we're going to invest and get behind innovation. And the final piece is around new logos, which tends to be the least needle-moving, maybe a little more so in IP, but you're going to have law firm moving in enough more rapidly, but that's the piece. So our goal is, as we think about that algorithm, is how can we -- I think pricing at 3% to 4%, we always try to do a little bit better, but if we're not too far off. Retention at 90% is good-ish. We're going to continue to try to creep that up. Cross-sell, we're very effective of that, getting much better at revenue from innovation and then always be good at capturing new logos and revenue in that channel.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#15

That's great. That was very, very helpful color. Maybe just switching gears. So we talked about transaction. We talked about the subscription. How about we drill down further on the reoccurring piece of the business? I think CPA Global is definitely one of the big pieces there. Can you talk about the opportunity? I think, historically, it's been like a 6% to 8% growth business. Is there an opportunity to accelerate the growth there? What are the key secular tailwinds for those businesses?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#16

Sure. So I will say, within the recurring, it entirely came from the acquisition of CPA Global, and this is where we maintain the patents for our clients. So think about a large innovative and intensive company, think of the large pharma companies, large tech companies, they have this huge portfolio of patents that need to be maintained. Now you maintain that and make sure they're filed in 40 different countries around the world. There's a very complex saying, you don't want to miss it. If you miss a filing, you lose your protection behind it. And so this is -- this kind of -- we call this annuity of reoccurring. It's not technically subs, but it's incredibly predictive because tech companies are not going to give up their lifeblood, their IP. Now it does grow typically in the 4% to 5% range. So that's typically what we see on an annual basis. Now what you'll see almost in a year, and this year is a great example of it, is lumpiness. Because this year, the first half, half of the year, that business grew for us 8%. Now the reason grew 8% is 1 of the services we do for our clients is the patent trade-offs around the world, they raised prices. Okay, so we're going to raise our prices in this sector by 20% starting July 1. And our clients expect us to, that's happening, say, we'll renew it on June 30, so we can avoid all these price increases. And these movements by the PTOs change. They change all the time. It just so happened, this year, there were a lot of price increases. Throughout the first half of the year that had us pull a little forward from second half into first half and normal cycle, if you will, which means the second half, it would be 8% first half, it averages 4% to 5%, it means our second half is going to be in the 2% to 3% range, just to get to that average growth rate. But it is something -- I wouldn't expect that, Ashish, to be a accretive growth thing. It's just a very predictable, stable growth every year.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#17

That's great. That's very helpful. Maybe Jonathan Collins, if I can ask a question on '23. Again, based on what you've mentioned on the last earnings call, you talked about expectation for a flattish revenues and flattish EPS. I was wondering if you could talk about the puts and takes that go into -- again, you provided good color on the call, but just wondering if you could drill down further on the positives and the headwinds as we look into the next year.

Jonathan Collins

executive
#18

Sure. We just wanted to highlight a couple of significant things that developed in the second half of this year that will have an impact on the top line and then, ultimately, the bottom line. The first is we were successful in selling the MarkMonitor business. So this is something we've been thoughtful over the past few quarters, looking for opportunities on assets that weren't the best fit for us. We ran a process and we're able to execute that, and we took that and paid down some debt. But obviously, that's going to put us in a position where we've got a bit of a headwind next year. We'll have 10 months of that revenue this year, and we won't own the business next year. So we wanted to draw attention to that as a headwind. It does not affect our organic growth rate metric. We exclude things like that. The second one is FX. We do business outside the U.S. We provide the details of a general level of foreign-denominated sales that we have. Those have obviously translated back to less in U.S. dollars as the dollar has been strengthening. If that continues or stays this way, we're going to have a pretty significant headwind in the first half of the year and even into the third quarter of next year on a year-over-year basis. So we just want to draw attention to both of those. While we weren't yet ready to give a guide on organic growth for next year, which we'll do when we do our year-end earnings in late February, early March, we wanted to make sure that we shared, we have reasonable line of sight into the fact that we think organic growth is going to improve next year. And we've talked about a couple of those things. We think the consulting business, the utilization rates there will pick up. The headwind we had this year related to ceasing our operations in Russia, that will go away. We won't have that same headwind next year. So we see a path, though we didn't give an exact number, but intimated that organic growth will improve a bit. The reality is, when organic growth is somewhere below 5%, the margin accretion on a natural basis is under pressure. But the advantage we have next year is we have the second portion of the ProQuest cost synergies that will come on. So we expect to get about $100 million. We'll do a little less than half of that this year. Most of the balance will come online next year. That will help to lift our margins a bit. but it's not until we start to get closer to the higher end of that growth rate that we're targeting, somewhere in the 6% range over the course of the next few years. But the organic growth will really start to contribute meaningful margin accretion. So we want to provide a general view of kind of the top and bottom line there. The one bright spot we want to highlight is our cash flow. So we have been using a lot of our cash flow in the past few years to integrate these acquisitions and deliver these cost synergies. It's paid off really well because we've got about $0.25 billion of cost synergies that have come in through the DRG acquisition, the CPA and now the ProQuest acquisition. But those costs to achieve that are going to be behind us, and we should see a really attractive conversion on our EBITDA, approaching about 50% on a free cash flow conversion compared to our adjusted EBITDA. So I want to give a general overview, and those are some of the big drivers.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#19

That's very helpful color because I think free cash flow, moving to a more normalized free cash flow, will be very helpful as well. Maybe just a question for both of you is around margins. And the way -- like obviously, there's a lot of cost synergies, which are flowing through from these acquisition integration. But how do you balance the investment in growth? Because, as you mentioned, like there's so much -- such big addressable markets and so much growth opportunity. How do you really balance investments, particularly given that organic growth has slowed down. Investment in accelerating growth were driving margin expansion. And would you consider near-term accelerating investments and maintaining the margins but driving better revenue growth acceleration? So any thoughts on those investment switches?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#20

Yes, I will. And I mean, you know the model well. It was just worth sharing. The vast majority of our costs are people costs. And so we have a certain amount of increase every year from their salary increases. We obviously -- to optimize, make sure it would be the most efficient use of that. But the nature of our model applies to, I think, almost any business like ours and information services. You need to grow really about 4% to have meaningful margin accretion. 3% to 4%, you get me in a zone. I know 3% is very difficult to have reasonable margin accretion. Now we benefited certainly from this year and next year from the cost savings coming from the ProQuest integration. And so that kind of covers us for this year and next year. But we do see, because I look forward, we need to make sure we're growing consistently north of 4%. You need to go ahead and do that. And I believe, strongly, there's a path on how to get there. Now the -- so as I look forward into next year, again, with the benefits of the ProQuest acquisition, I also look across our business. And there's still a lot of optimization that we can do in our business. There's certainly -- as I feel that I see it as I walk around. And the nature of the investments that we need to do, because we do need to invest more in our products, but they need to be very, very focused acquisitions. And someone was asking, well, how many people you -- and we would never do this. How would you take $100 million extra out of people, to put the $100 million more in expenses and focus on investments, we couldn't spend that. We could not -- the nature of our business, we cannot spend that type of money that quickly. I'm a huge believer of the benefit of having the discipline of expecting some level of margin accretion. And Jonathan and I will come back on March to 9 at Investor Day and share exactly what that 3-year plan looks like, what the expectation should be investors in terms of what level of margin creation should happen at the Web pace, but I do believe we have the ability to do that.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#21

No, that's great. That's very helpful. Again, if there are any questions in the audience, feel free to raise your hands or ask those questions. Maybe I'll just go ahead and ask a question on the strategic review. So Jonathan, you mentioned the MarkMonitor divestiture. I was wondering where you are in the process of strategic review and should be. Are you planning to provide an update again at the Investor Day?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#22

Sure. Well, why don't you take this one?

Jonathan Collins

executive
#23

Yes. what we've highlighted is that we started with the one that was strategically most obvious. So this is a business that was largely a -- more like a business process arrangement, where we were providing services for customers that wasn't as tight of a fit. So we started for the one that was most obvious, and we thought we could generate some reasonable proceeds. We will always continue to look for opportunities to put in the portfolio and make sure that we're the best owner of all of our assets. But our intuition is ones that we would find here going forward are likely to be a bit smaller in size, but you can expect that we would always continue to look at those things.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#24

No, that's good. That's helpful. And then maybe a question on capital allocation. Again, you've talked about using the proceeds from the MarkMonitor divestiture for paying down debt and using some -- a lot of the free cash flow as well. So how should we think about the leverage over the next few years and then balancing it with share repurchase given how much the stock has put back.

Jonathan Collins

executive
#25

You got it. So what we're looking at, as we think by the end of this year, we'll probably be around 4.5 turns of leverage. MarkMonitor is going to help us accelerate that a bit as we were able to make about a $300 million payment on our term loan just a few weeks ago when that acquisition closed. In the rest of the fourth quarter, we expect to use the cash we generate to pay our revolver balance down to 0. So that will take us to almost $0.5 billion of deleveraging within 2022. As we look to next year, what we wanted to highlight is we're likely to use the majority of next year's free cash flow to delever further. We think we can get pretty close to about 4 turns, maybe just under by the end of next year based on the trajectory of paying most of that down. And I think it's at a point when we have our leverage levels somewhere in the 3s, with the 3 that could be as high as 3.7, 3.8, 3.9. We'd be in a position to start to be a bit more balanced. It's tough for us. Certainly, when we look at the stock price where it is today, we'd like to be able to buy more of that back. But we think having the discipline of bringing that leverage down to a level that more people, more investors would be comfortable with, we'll be rewarded with that discipline in time. So that's how we're thinking about it in the near term.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#26

That's great. Maybe I'll ask a quick question on Academia and Government as well. How should we think about the cross-sell opportunity there? Both selling and now Jonathan, obviously Collins, you've had a lot of experience being the CFO of ProQuest before. But how should we think about the opportunity of selling ProQuest into the devops science customer base than the other way around?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#27

Well, that...

Jonathan Collins

executive
#28

Yes, there's great overlap. So between bibliometric data, which is effectively the Web of Science product, content aggregation such as ProQuest 1, eBook Central and our software solutions like Alma, Summon and Primo, these are all being purchased by librarians. They're providing services to the pay trends. And there's a great opportunity there to further drive penetration in products that have exposure based on some of the footholds we have with some of these products. A real important part of this, though, is enhancing our customers' experience. So we've made some investments early on to make these products work better together and enhance the value proposition. One of the ones that we've pointed to earlier this year is the availability of our customers who have a web-scale discovery app location, which effectively serves as the front door where the single search box for the library. That's products like Summon or Primo. We're able to index all of the content from Web of Science now into that repository and surface those results for patron, which is driving higher usage to that platform, which is really important for our customers and measuring the value of these products. So you'll see more of those, and I think we'll talk about some of those in early March that will help to further provide a better experience for our customers and will drive returns in the longer run.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#29

That's great. maybe Jonathan Gear, last question for you, just any closing remarks. Or as you think about your next -- or your legacy over the next 3, 5 years, how do we think about -- what are you most excited about when it comes to planning?

Jonathan Gear

executive
#30

I'm excited about making this the most boring company in the world. So there's been far too much excitement with Clarivate the last, last couple of quarters the last few years. And it should be a -- and I mean, that's the kind -- that's the most wonderfully boring, predictable revenue growth, EBITDA conversion, cash conversion, earnings compound story out there. We have 3 incredibly strong segments with this leadership positions in each and every single one of those. And I just -- I couldn't be more excited to be here because I see the path. I've seen it before. I've seen how this thing plays out when focused on execution and making it done. But really, that's my goal. I want it to be boring. I want 3 years now, no one will show up because you already know the answers. You know how we're going to do. And I look forward to partnering with Jonathan and team. We're going to get there. I just can't wait to get it going.

Ashish Sabadra

analyst
#31

That's great. Thank you. Thanks again, both Jonathan.

Jonathan Collins

executive
#32

Thanks for having us.

Jonathan Gear

executive
#33

Great. Thanks so much.

This call discussed

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Clarivate Plc earnings transcripts and 32,000+ 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.