Gartner, Inc. (IT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Annual Growth Stock Conference. My name is Andrew Nicholas, I'm the business services analyst here at William Blair. Before getting started, I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential products of interest please visit our website at williamblair.com. With that out of the way, please to welcome Craig Safian, CFO of Gartner. I'm going to hand it over to him to give you an overview of the business. But again, I appreciate you all being here.

Thank you. Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for spending the time with us today. For the next 30 minutes, I'm going to take you on a little bit of a walk, which is an introduction to Gartner. We'll talk about the value we provide to our clients. We'll spend some time on our go-to-market. And then we'll close with what I think is a pretty compelling story about revenue reacceleration, earnings growth, free cash flow growth and returning significant amounts of capital to our shareholders to drive incremental shareholder value. I also would now like to read to you every word on our forward-looking statement. We'll go through that. It's here. So again, I know many of you know Gartner well, many of you are hearing about us for the first time. sort of just level set around who we are and what we do. Our whole goal is to make sure that we are delivering actionable objective insights to our clients to help them drive smarter decisions and stronger performance on their individual and organizations mission-critical priorities. And you'll hear me say mission-critical priorities a lot, that is sort of how we center our business and what we're focused on solving and we'll talk about that a little bit later. Today, we serve every major functional role across the C-suite. So Gartner was born as a company focused on serving technology professionals. And for the first 35 years of our existence, that's kind of all we did or 40 years of our existence. That's all we did. Over the last 1.5 decades, we diversified our portfolio through a combination of acquisitions and organic development, where we now serve not only Chief Information Officers and their teams, not only the tech vendor community from the largest hyperscalers in the world down to a pre-revenue technology companies, but we also serve CFOs and their teams and Chief Human Resource Officers and their team, Chief Supply Chain Officers and their teams, general counsels and their teams, chief marketing officers and their teams and so on and so on. So essentially, think of us serving the entire C-suite are -- we sort of built the company based on serving the technology world, and we've now branched out where we serve every major functional area. And look, the simple way to think about the value proposition is we help our clients save time. They get to the right decisions faster. We help them save money, literally helping them negotiate the best deals for themselves on major technology purchases, and we help them manage, mitigate and remediate risk. And in today's world, where we're moving really rapidly. It's pretty chaotic and there's a lot of risk. Our services are really invaluable. From a quant perspective, last year, we did about $6.5 billion in revenue. We are a free cash flow machine. We consistently generate free cash flow well in excess of net income. Our recurring revenue business, which is our insights business, has about $5.3 billion of annualized contract value. And over the last 10 years, we've delivered compound annual growth rate to that CV base of about 12%. And here, you can see some of those stats, contract value on the top and free cash flow on the bottom. I would note the bulk of both of the performance is organic. There have been a few acquisitions you'll note the step-up from 2016 to 2017 on contract value was 1 large transformative acquisition that we did in 2017, where we acquired a company called CEB. Otherwise, the bulk of what you're looking at is purely organic growth. So we offer what we consider to be a significantly differentiated value to our clients. And here, these are sort of the hallmarks of what we deliver in broad terms, and we'll get into a little bit more detail around how we do it for each of the different constituencies that we serve. I think the #1 most important thing that we offer that is very, very hard to replicate is our whole brand is based on being independent and being objective. And that means that we don't say you should do X, Y or Z. We say -- based on being paid or who's a big client or what have you, we base it on what is the best answer for your specific situation. You may know us for our Magic Quadrants, which is probably 1 of our best known, most popular content types. Magic Quadrants are a key tool in just about every technology purchase decision that gets made out in the world today. And clients rely on that because of that independence and objectivity. Second big thing is really the breadth and depth of the insights that we create for people. If you think about the world of technology as an example, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a topic in technology that we don't cover, that we don't have dozens of experts on that we don't go really, really deep on. And so people's priorities change. The market changes, dynamics change. And because of our breadth and depth, we're actually able to take that journey with our clients and actually help them navigate that journey and sometimes even define that journey for them as well. Obviously, we've been doing this for a long time. And so our brand reputation is incredibly strong. Boards know us, C-suite CEOs know us. We're in sort of every technology, S1, you could imagine or every pitch book, et cetera. And that's because of the reputation that we have around providing independent and objective advice to help our clients achieve their mission-critical priorities. A lot of what we have in the sort of the foundation for everything we do is a huge amount, terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of proprietary data and information that does not exist outside of Gartner's firewall. And this moat, if you will, is really valuable to us and even more valuable to our clients as we help them execute on their mission-critical priority journeys. On top of that, because we have such a huge client base, think 80,000, 90,000 operating executives around the world who are registered license users of Gartner, we get the network effect of talking to them on a daily basis, gauging what their interactions are on gartner.com or a mobile application, looking at what questions they're asking our language model behind the firewall on gartner.com, what conferences they're going to, what sessions they're attending, what their analyst inquiries are on what topics with questions, et cetera. And we're able to actually repackage all of that, turn it into proprietary data and information and continue to provide great value to our clients. And then lastly, one of the things we pride ourselves on is execution. And we've been on this journey for a long time. Our CEO, joined the company in 2004 and basically led a very significant turnaround of the company. And it didn't happen by accident. It happened because we studied everything, we analyze everything. We figure out what works and what doesn't, and then we execute the heck out of the things that work and evolve as the world changes. I'll spend a minute here on the value prop side because I think this is really, really important. And so if you start in the upper left quadrant on the client profile. As I mentioned earlier, we are serving senior operating executives across the entire C-suite, across basically every major enterprise function. And I think what's really interesting about our market opportunity and sort of our pathway for growth going forward is we are size agnostic. We sell to the largest companies in the world down to, as I mentioned, pre-revenue technology companies. We are industry-agnostic. We sell to energy and utilities companies, financial services companies, public sector companies, not-for-profit organizations, et cetera, et cetera. and we're geography agnostic. We do business in about 90 countries around the world. The reason why we have that breadth of market opportunity is because regardless of where you are or what size you are, you're using technology to run your business. You have a CFO, you have an HR leader, et cetera, et cetera. And so a lot of companies in our space or around our space tend to be very vertical oriented or vertical specific. We don't have that challenge. We're actually able to sell in across the world, all size companies across every industry. When you think about the C-level executives that we serve, every 1 of them has a handful of strategic priorities that are make or break for them, their organization or their overall enterprise. And we help them on those major priorities. And the interesting thing is those priorities can change on a dime given the situation. And when you subscribe to a Gartner license, you don't have to buy anything different if your priorities change. You just change your priorities and we go along with you. And that's really where the breadth of our offerings really comes into value. And the other thing I mentioned is we target the top of the org chart in each organization that we serve. So we are first going after the C level, top of the box in each function. So the Chief Information Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Supply Chain Officer. And usually, their direct reports. So in finance, that would be the Head of Financial Planning and Analysis, the Controller, the Head of Investor Relations, et cetera. And in larger organizations, maybe 1 or 2 levels below that. But generally speaking, we are laser-focused on the top of the org chart, C-level and C-level direct reports. If you move over to the right, top right, we talked a bit about this. But our objective on biased in sites really set us apart from what people can get for free, what people could get on the Internet 10 years ago, what people can get from large language models today. It's the human intelligence, the 2,400 experts that we have on our payroll or former practitioners who go really deep on every domain you could imagine. All the proprietary data that comes as a result of our 90,000 licensed users in every interaction that they have in addition to significant amounts of proprietary market research, primary market research that we do, We do about 0.5 million expert inquiries per year, which are all recorded, transcribed, become part of that proprietary database. We do more than 20,000 vendor briefings per year, which are all recorded, transcribed, become a part of that proprietary database, and you can't get that anywhere else. It's all behind the Gartner firewall. Moving down around the circle to the bottom right. In terms of the client value, and I think this is, to me, is super important. What we're able to do because we know what role you're in, we know the corporate graphics of the enterprise that you work for, how big you are in industry, et cetera. And because you tell us what your most important priorities are, we are able to proactively push insights to you before you even think you need them. And so oftentimes, we'll get questions around, well, is Gartner a question-and-answer engine, absolutely not, right? Do we have that functionality within gartner.com? We do. But the primary way that clients interact with us is not by going to gartner.com and typing a question, it is by the proactive pushing we're doing that triggers them to say, I need to click on that and learn. They come in and then they go through and interact with all of our other assets, really, really, really important. Most of our services come with what we call analyst inquiry. That is the ability to talk to an expert on an unlimited basis in a 30-minute or 45-minute increments, so you can go deeper, get context around your situation, et cetera. We also have significant online and in-person peer networking opportunities. We have a wonderful conferences business where basically, the magic of Gartner comes to life for our clients. They are user-focused, content-driven, insight-driven conferences, and we deliver about 70 of them around the world. Obviously, we have our own Gen AI tool that sits on the corpus of information. That sits behind the firewall. We have workflow tools, benchmarking tools, et cetera, et cetera. And then on the bottom left, you can see some of the examples around the ways that we can help people or traditional mission-critical priorities. Again, important to understand that our clients are interacting with us in a variety of different ways. It's not just 1 way. And so yes, they read insights. And we are, as I mentioned, proactively pushing them to them or they are discovering them on gartner.com or a mobile application, but equally as important and all part of the Gartner value are connecting with peers, using our tools, going to our conferences. And we actually have a service team or teams that support you along your mission-critical priority, journeys as well. And then the other thing, and again, I think it is a bit underappreciated and it's on us that it's underappreciated, not on you all. But we help our clients on these journeys in a variety of different ways. And so one is as an operating executive, you don't know what you don't know. And because we have experts across the spectrum and because we're interacting with our clients on a daily basis, we can help identify those unknown unknowns or blind spots before it comes back to hurt you. Second element is we help you see around corners. You don't know what things may be looking or not corners, if you decide to go with 1 different technology or choose 1 approach on cyber security because we see so many things, we're actually able to help people see around those quarters and corners and really mitigate and minimize risk. Third thing is there is so much information available in the public domain, but a lot of it isn't really helpful for you or there are critical gaps. We fill in those critical gaps for our clients to make sure that they are making the best informed decisions around those journeys and accomplishing their mission-critical priorities. And then the last piece is like we are charting the future. we're looking out several years, and we're helping our clients make sure that the planning they're doing today fits within the realm or the -- within the guidance or guardrails of what the future is going to look like. And again, as I mentioned earlier, and I can't underscore this enough, that's why there's an exclamation point. At the end of it, we're doing it proactively. We're not waiting for clients to come to us and ask us questions. We are actually proactively pushing our most important insights, most relevant insights at the right time to our clients so that they can actually, again, know the unknowns avoid around corners rather filling gaps and understand how it all fits into the future of what they're trying to do for their enterprise. And again, here are some examples. This one is for CIOs. Specifically, and again, we are doing this proactively, understanding what's happening across the AI landscape and how do you scale your AI capabilities internally. How do you protect yourself in a world of large language models and AI? How do you leverage data so that you can build scalable, integrated fundamentals for your organization to make better decisions and drive the right outcomes for your business. We help them manage spending in risk. This is actually an underappreciated asset, I think we have. We actually help our clients with a service we call proposal reviews. It's an AI-driven service where we have an AI tool that ingests proposals and we can help our clients ensure they are getting best pricing, best terms and they're actually buying the right stuff. And again, none of that information exists outside of our firewall -- and then obviously, talent is a big thing. It always is a big thing. It's probably even more relevant today, especially in a new AI world, helping our clients figure out how do you develop, how do you attract, how do you retain the right talent so that you can be successful into the future. We have 3 businesses. We are an insights company. That is the fundamental foundational element of our business. it represents 81% of our revenues, probably 90% of our gross contribution margin. And if you did a sum of the parts analysis, probably 95% or more of our overall value. Our Insights business is a recurring revenue business with high renewal rates, selling multiyear contracts predominantly. And again, this is where we help our clients across every major enterprise function around the world, across every industry. Our other 2 businesses are great businesses, but they are there to catalyze, augment and complement the Insights business. We're not in the conferences business because it's a great business. We're in the conferences business because it drives incremental value for our Insights business. and the same with our consulting businesses. So our Conferences business, which in 2025, represented about 10% of total revenue. We have 2 conference offerings, our destination conferences, which are multi-day conferences, where people travel in to experience our insights, our experts, network with peers, and we actually have a show floor element as well where the technology vendors come and showcase their wares. Some of you may have come to our flagship conference, which is IT Symposium in Orlando, where we have 8,000-ish IT executives come together for 4 days of immersive learning exploration, pure networking and meeting with vendors. It is so valuable. We know that when licensed users attend our conferences, they renew at higher rates. And we know that when we have new business opportunities at our conferences, we closed those at higher rates. And so again, conferences is a great business, but it exists to catalyze and complement our insights business. And then we have a consulting business. Again, a wonderful business because our Insights clients, our largest Insights clients want our help on consulting type projects. And so we only do consulting for our largest clients. We only do it in North America, Western Europe and Japan. But we're in this business because a lot of times, our largest clients want arms and legs on the ground to help them with some of their thorniest IT problems. We generally focus on large program management, IT strategy, cost optimization and things of that nature. We don't do implementations. We don't do integrations because that would potentially tarnish our independence and objectivity. But again, we're in these 2 businesses, not because they're great stand-alone businesses, we're in them because they complement and catalyze our insights business. The last few quarters, we've talked a bit on each earnings call about the transformation we're undergoing for our Insights business. And so as I mentioned, we are an insights company. That is what we do. That is the foundation of everything we do. And we are transforming the business along for major initiatives. So one, which we call impact is making sure our insights are on the topics that matter most. And the way we were able to do that, and we talked about this on some past earnings calls, we've actually developed an AI-driven neural network that by leveraging all the proprietary data sources, we're actually able to sense and forecast where demand is going to be and actually make sure we're creating insights on that. Historically, it was a little bit of art and science around what we wrote to and what topics we focused on. Now it is scientific and it's working wonderfully because we're absolutely staying ahead of the curve on what's most important to our clients. Second element is volume. All of the elements of our value proposition are important, but the place where our clients interact with us most is through our insights. And so we want to make sure that we are creating the right amount of insights on the right topics at the right time for our clients to consume. And we've been on a mission to increase the volume of insights that we are creating. And again, we're doing it on the high-impact stuff as well by leveraging that normal network I just mentioned. Third element is timeliness. The world is moving at a rapid rate. You all know it, we all know it, et cetera. And so we need to make sure that we're not relying on old processes that take longer and have more bureaucracy, we're actually eliminating a lot of bureaucracy and getting things out much more quickly. So if 1 of the frontier model companies comes out with a new offering. We have a note on it and insights on it and a position on it within 24 hours. And we're going to keep doing that because that's the way the world is moving, and we need to make sure our clients have a Gartner perspective within 24 hours of major news and major announcements. And then the last element of it is the user experience, which is primarily our digital experience, which is through the gartner.com platform or through the Gartner mobile application. And so we're making sure that we continually improve the experience so that our clients can easily and efficiently and effectively connect with the insights at the right times. So as I mentioned earlier, you spent a little bit on sort of how we go to market. So when we target an enterprise, we are actually targeting individuals within the enterprise. As I mentioned earlier, we start at the top of the org chart. So we are going after the C level. And again, it could be the Chief Information Officer, it could be the Chief Financial Officer. It's all of those things for us. And so we target them and when they are a happy client, we're then able to expand down below to their teams. And so if you think about the strategy there, it's really have top of the org chart advocacy so that we can sell deeper into the organization. Most of our deals on initial deals actually are typically a C-level client and 1 or 2 of his or her direct reports. But then we have the opportunity to continue to expand that going forward. Again, we're selling on an individual license user basis. Our average install is 5 or 6 licenses for enterprise. So we don't -- we're not trying to go broad. We are trying to target the top of the org chart and the top of the org charts' direct reports and in larger organizations, maybe 1 or 2 levels down from that. And we're going to market through distinct channels. We talk about GTS and GBS, but it's actually broader than that. And so here, you've got some stats on GTS versus GBS. So GTS is our traditional Gartner business, historically, heritage Gartner business, which is about $4 billion in contract value today. about 3/4 of our total CV. And you can see we've got about 3,600 direct frontline sellers in that space doing business with about 11,000 enterprises. GBS, which was created after the acquisition of CEB, we report it as 1 thing. But in reality, it's several different channels underneath it because what we have found is HR leaders are different and make decisions separately and uniquely from finance leaders, from supply chain leaders. And so within GBS, we actually have a supply chain-focused channel that only calls on supply chain leaders and their teams. -- a marketing channel, an HR channel and so on and so on. They are on average. Again, we've got 7 or 8 major functions within GBS and about $1.3 billion worth of contract value. So roughly $200 million per function. And there's no reason from a market opportunity perspective, that each of those functions can't be a $1 billion business. or a $3 billion business or even the same size of our IT business. Of the functions within GBS, supply chain, HR and finance are our 3 largest within the GBS business. And then as we think about managing the business from a top line growth perspective and a bottom line growth perspective, we've committed to growing the business, growing the top line and modestly expanding margins each and every year going forward. And you can see over the last 10 years, what that looks like, with 12% top line growth and 15% EBITDA growth. And obviously, implied in there is a pretty significant margin expansion from where we were back in 2015. And then on the right, you can kind of see, roughly speaking, how our cost base kind of splits up, right? And so as we think about how we're going to generate margin expansion going forward, One, as insights becomes bigger and bigger, we get gross margin leverage because it is our highest margin business. with the highest incremental margins. So as Insights continues to grow faster than conferences or consulting, there's just inherent gross margin leverage even if we don't get any specific gross margin leverage within the Insights business. And then within SG&A, as you can see, the bulk of it is sales. And remember, we're selling an intangible. And so we need to make sure we've got the appropriate number of sellers out there preaching the value proposition of Gartner and bringing new clients into the enterprise and also retaining our a $5.3 billion book of business that is RCV. And so as we think about it, the way our sort of guardrails work around investment is G&A should grow slower than revenue, and so there's gross margin leverage there. And sales should grow about in line with revenue. So think of sales cost as a percent of revenue as being roughly flat. And so the combination of gross margin leverage, G&A leverage, sales being roughly flat should give us a modest margin expansion going forward from where we are today. And then lastly, our business model structurally is engineered to generate strong -- very strong free cash flow. And you can see the elements of it, obviously, recurring revenue business with high renewal rates and high contribution margins, particularly on our Insights business we invoice upfront. So we sell an annual contract we book it, we send an invoice out right away. We collected 30 to 45 days later, and we're recognizing the revenue over a 12-month period. And so we've got this negative working capital dynamic that allows us to generate free cash flow well in excess of net income. We're obviously not building factories. And so we don't have to spend a ton of money on CapEx think roughly 2% or less of revenue. And within our sort of operating structure of modest margin expansion, we can actually reinvest in the areas we need to. And when you think about what do we do with all that free cash flow then we do tuck-in M&A or we do share repurchases. And over the last several years, the bias has clearly been towards share repurchases. And so you can see on the chart on the right, just the amount of money that we've put to work on behalf of our shareholders, largely by leveraging our free cash flow, a little bit of incremental debt there, not much, really just leveraging our free cash flow generation capabilities. to significantly reduce our share count. You can see the stats there. In the first quarter, just as an example, we bought back about a little more than $500 million, reduced our share count net by 4% in the quarter. And we entered the year with about $2 billion worth of "dry powder" through a combination of excess balance sheet cash and our free cash flow generation forecast for this year. And so -- this is a great model. And again, we think that we can -- will accelerate our growth rate from a top line perspective, EBITDA will grow a little bit faster than that, continue to generate strong amounts of free cash flow so that earnings per share, free cash flow per share, however you want to management, however you want to measure it, grows at an even faster rate than revenue. and we'll meet for our breakout in a moment.

Thank you. And yes, Maher is the breakout. Invite all of you to join us there. Appreciate you being here.

Thank you, everyone.