Luke Sergott: Hi, guys. Can you talk about the — we keep talking about the TAS recovery, but — and the big pipeline that you guys have, but can you kind of double-click into what that looks like versus discretionary versus the sticky side? I think there’s a lot of confusion about where the weakness has been in TAS and where the strength has been? And if there’s actually any change or improvement on the side of like regulatory and medical writing, things like that to give more confidence in that back half recovery that you’re talking about?
Ari Bousbib: Yes. Well, look, we ourselves are, as I mentioned before, I’m putting a fair amount of caution and conservatism, if you want to call it that way in our own forecast because of some of the factors you mentioned, that we’ve experienced last year. The business continues to grow. Look, the general environment so far is consistent with what we were experiencing at the end of last year. And you’ve seen our large cap companies that operate in the same business actually forecast even declining sales for their own businesses for 2024. Now, we’re not there because as you correctly point out, some of these services that we sell are not exactly discretionary, so look, the data business, for example, continues to hold up well.
It’s never been a fast growth business, but it’s holding up. We saw headwinds in the more discretionary part of the TAS segment, which is the analytics and consulting business. But I have to say that the business started to pick up a bit with sequential improvements in growth in Q4 compared to Q3. So even this more discretionary side, we saw an uptick, not — again, not a steep curve, but we saw a positive movement even on the discretionary side. Now, the impact on the discretionary project part of the real-world business, that is a little bit of a longer cycle within TAS, is a little bit longer cycle. We started seeing that in Q3 and continued in Q4, and it did impact the performance of our real-world business in Q4. So, if I might summarize the data business holding up maybe a little bit even better, doing a little bit better.
The totally discretionary piece of analytics and consulting, little movement and some uptick that we are perceiving. The real-world piece, you’ve got the stuff that they need to do. That hasn’t changed. And then there is a step that’s more discretionary because it’s more — it’s a longer cycle, the deceleration impacted our numbers more in Q3 and further in Q4. So, the issues we saw in Analytics and Consulting in the early part of the year, we started seeing in real world in Q3 and Q4, and we expect that to continue in Q1. But if you — I hope that gives you enough color here to get a sense for what we’re seeing.
Luke Sergott: It does, it does. Thank you. And then I guess a follow-up on the — there’s a lot of concern here. Some of your peers talked about biotech RFP slowing in 4Q. But just as you look at the actual step-up needed to maintain the book-to-bills and the bookings levels that you guys have had. Do you see that, that level of RFP volume across all your segments is enough to sustain it over the next six months? Or could we see some softening here maybe in the 1Q? And obviously, this is just more of a quarterly dynamic as the full year kind of paces out as what you’re talking about. But just when you’re thinking about the actual bookings getting — you’re closing that sales cycle, could some stuff get pushed out to more of the back half of the year.
Ari Bousbib: I mean, look, you’ve got a lot of hypothetical here. You’re referring to a competitor commentary. I didn’t hear any of that. And we’re not seeing that again. This is interesting. People want to see badness and had their hat on something. I would point to you that going back a couple of years at least, people who are competitors “whining about EVP funding.” and all see our stock suffered as a result of this whining, we kept telling the world that we weren’t seeing it. We ended up being correct. There was no dramatic drop-off in funding. It didn’t happen. If anything, now, as I mentioned, it’s even going further at record levels. So EVP is good. That actually was very, very strong in terms of bookings. We see that trend continuing.
When things get funded in a quarter, typically the bookings come in over the course of the following year. So, I don’t see that happening on the EBP segment. Large pharma, yes, there is a little bit of reprioritization of projects. You’ve heard that from us, from others, looking at different programs, but it’s not like people are saying, all of a sudden, we’re not doing research anymore. There’s a little bit of — at the moment, as we discussed earlier Ron mentioned a bit of a pendulum moving more towards FSP. But again, we play in that segment, too. We play in every segment. But other than these dynamics, I don’t see anything that would lead me to believe that all of a sudden, we have to be worried, quite the opposite. As I said, our RFP flow was up 13% in Q4, and that’s across the board, strong double-digits in EBP and in large pharma as well.
For the — that was in Q4. Full year same thing, very strong and EBP even stronger for the full year. Awards, which is sort of, if you will, a leading indicator of bookings because as you know, we and maybe a small number of others actually report bookings and book to risk based on contracted work. Some still report only awards, which is kind of before contracted and awards are also at a record high level. If you look at our pipeline, the total pipeline is up high single-digits, in very high single-digits, again, at a record level. Qualified pipeline, which is we look at — we have our own methodology to screen all the opportunities and come down to those that we think are the ones we want to pursue and that are the most viable and the most likely to come to fruition.
