Thomson Reuters Corporation (NYSE:TRI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Stephanie Yee: This is actually Stephanie Yee stepping in for Andrew. I’ll just ask a question about client retention. I was wondering if you can just comment on what you’ve seen in 2022 in terms of your client retention rate versus 2021 and whether you’ve seen any improvement on that front? Maybe from some of the changes that you’ve made through your Change Program.

Michael Eastwood: Sure, Stephanie. In regards to retention for 2022, we saw nearly a 50 basis point improvement overall. As we’ve discussed before, Stephanie, that varies by segment and subsegment. And for the benefit of the full group, our highest retention is with Neil Sternthal’s customers within our global large law firm at 95% plus, if not higher. Also parts of our Government business has very, very high retention. Where we have the greatest opportunity, Stephanie, is with our smaller firms. And I mentioned during the prepared remarks and in the prior question about continued investments in our customer success, we’re quite optimistic as we continue those investments into end-to-end customer experience. We’re going to see a direct correlation in the continued improvement.

So at roughly 91% overall, we definitely see opportunities to continue to improve retention in ’23, ’24, ’25. We have also embarked on an NRR initiative within our Corporates segment, led by Brian Peccarelli and Maria and others in which we’ll be expanding our NRR initiative to Legal as we go through ’23, ’24. So we definitely see continued upside, Stephanie, in retention in the coming years.

Operator: Up next is Manav Patnaik from Barclays.

John Kennedy: This is Ronan Kennedy on for Manav. May I ask, do you provide kind of insight on the organic growth components, I guess, specifically through the Big 3 in terms of pricing, the cross and upsell innovation, et cetera, what they were for the fourth quarter, expectations for first quarter in ’23?

Michael Eastwood: Ronan, we don’t go into that level of granularity. And the item that we have consistently shared is in regards to price, whereby price varies by segment and subsegment. What we had shared in the past is that our Tax & Accounting Professional business historically has been about 5% price uplift on an annual basis, with Corporates being about 3% and our Legal business being about 2.5%. Ronan, what we see as we go into 2023, if I link back to Vince Valentini’s question, we do see higher price lift in 2023 versus 2022, to Vince’s question with our multiyear contracts, and just that natural extension. So price increases will be a little bit higher than the reference points I just made in 2023. But we don’t go into any additional granularity, Ronan, in regards to the components thereof or organic growth.

John Kennedy: Understood. And then may I just confirm with regards to ’23 guidance assumptions, how you flesh out on the mix of what subs, nonsubs revenues will be, the assumptions around the Transactional, Print and Events? And then also, can I confirm quantification of margin impacts from benefits of divestitures and if there’s kind of a run rate of the portfolio pruning?