Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Andrew Nicholas: Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. In the press release, you mentioned alongside your guidance reiteration that you expect some, I think, modestly improving market conditions. It doesn’t sound like things are notably different in terms of the macro backdrop today versus when we last spoke to you. But if you could just kind of talk about what you’re expecting and what’s baked into that 1% organic growth midpoint on that front and how we get to that number if things get a little bit worse that would be helpful.

Jonathan Gear: Sure. Maybe I’ll comment on market conditions and Jonathan, I’ll have you kind of connect the dots on the number, if you will. I mean in general, Andrew, you are correct that the market conditions kind of entering the year we thought it as generally neutral. I think that’s largely holding up. A&G is generally holding up some weakness as we — in our transactional business within A&G that we saw in Q4. A little bit weaker than we would have liked in Q1, so we would kind of expect that to continue until we see a turn. Sub is looking — no issue with subs at all there. IP as per the earlier question, it’s generally positive with — actually some more positive than we expected with trademarks. That’s been, I would say, slightly better than we expected.

And life science is kind of a push. Life science is really a market made up of the individual — situation of individual pharma companies and kind of where they are. So I’d say, neither good nor bad compared to our incoming expectations. Jonathan, do you want to connect the dots on the guide?

Jonathan Collins: You got it. And Andrew, in the second half of the year, the items that we think will be a slight benefit or the last ones JG touched on a moment ago, which is we do think the trademark business will continue to do a bit better. As we move through the year, we see good indicators there. And then we also see it on our patent renewal. So the volumes of patent renewals and some of the leading indicators there, give us the sense that that will improve just modestly as we move through the balance of the year. But other than that, we think the market conditions are generally in line ,with what we expected when we started the year and gave our original guide just a couple of months ago. Thanks, Andrew

Andrew Nicholas: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Owen Lau with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Q – Owen Lau: Good morning and thank you for taking my question. So you highlighted some success in the real-world data framework and signed I think two top 10 global pharmaceutical clients. It has been a drag to your transactional revenue, because of your strategic shift. But could you please add more color on the progress there? Do you expect to sign more clients in the coming quarters? Thanks.

Jonathan Gear: Sure. Yes. And I’m glad, you noted that. We’re really pleased, with those two very important milestones, because what that shows to us what we certainly expected with the investments we’ve been making into the data is that we’ve now converted the underlying RWD database into pharma-ready data, and it really wasn’t there a year ago. So the indications from those first two early wins from the — as we mentioned top 10 pharma, it’s a very important proof point very important for both and we’re looking for the team. We were hoping to get two in the quarter. We’ve ended up getting kind of two entry in the quarter. So, it’s a good place to be. We’re certainly not top of there my guess and it’s really two levels is we are — we do expect to make progress, with other pharma companies harder because you need that timing on that.

We are in discussions with others kind of at the data level. And then the other element is Henry and the team are building, analytical solutions on top of data to sell therapeutic solutions as we discussed, which will help in another way to monetize that database going forward. So, again, the way I would view it is a very critical and important market affirmation of our progress with that product. Thank you.

Q – Owen Lau: Thanks.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Your line is now open.

Q – Shlomo Rosenbaum: Hi, Good morning. Thank you for taking the question –Do you hear me?

Jonathan Gear: We hear you, great. Go ahead. Thank you.

Q – Shlomo Rosenbaum: Okay. Great. First, I had a question just Academia & Government growth is only about 1%. And this is one of the areas that we’ve been pointing to in terms of evidence and prior investments gaining traction. Can you talk about the context of the growth this quarter vis-à-vis, what the investments in the 3%-plus growth we had seen before, and then just actually a housekeeping kind of question, I saw deferred revenue down about 14 days year-over-year. And with subscription growing 2% I’m just wondering, are you changing the terms — contracting terms at all, that you’re not paying — you’re paying more frequently in advance as opposed to maybe annually in advance? If you can just talk about those two items, I appreciate it.

Jonathan Collins: Sure. So, Shlomo I’ll cover the first one on A&G’s performance in Q1. We do continue to see traction in our subscription business in A&G. So, we had strong subscription growth improvement in Web of Science continues to come through and we’re getting a nice return on investment. As Jonathan highlighted, we’ve seen our second quarter now where the transactional sales has been a bit softer. It’s on a smaller base. So Q1 is not a big transactional quarter for us in the A&G business. The second quarter as we’ve highlighted before is much larger as we get to the academic spending year-end for many of our customers in North America and in Western Europe. So that’s really what’s happening on the A&G side. Nice subscription growth, a bit of a headwind on the transactional.

But the important quarter for A&G transaction or the larger quarter this year will be the second quarter. As it relates to deferred revenue, there’s a little bit of your point on the contracting terms of multiyear deals but we also see some of the business that was flowing through last year related to real-world data that was running through deferred revenue. And as we enter our new business model for selling real-world data and some of the declines we saw last year we’ve seen a bit of a decline there. So it’s really in those two areas that are driving deferred revenue. But we do believe our subscription growth this year will be stable at 2%. And as Jonathan indicated previously, we do expect improvement in our renewal rate and in our subscription business as we move into next year and we start to monetize some of the investments on the Patent Intelligence area within IP and then the real-world data within life sciences as we start to get traction.

Q – Shlomo Rosenbaum: Thank you.

Jonathan Gear: Thanks for the question.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.