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

Michael Eastwood: Sure. Let me address each of those, Ronan. In regards to 2023, Print, we are — we had a really strong year in 2022. And based on the factors that I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we would anticipate Print reverting back to more of the historical declines of 4% to 5% in 2023. So 2022 was just an unusually strong year for us there. In regards to the Events business, we think orders overall will be approximately 5% organic growth in 2023. We had a strong year in ’22 from Reuters News for the reasons that I mentioned, including Reuters Events and the News contract with the London Stock Exchange Group there. So Print, roughly minus 5. For modeling purposes, Ronan, Reuters News overall, about 5%. We did get a strong uptick in Reuters Events in ’22, which will be less in 2023. Transactional revenue, I think, will be fairly comparable in ’23 versus ’22 there.

John Kennedy: And then, sorry, with regards to margin impacts on planned divestitures and a potential run rate, any — on how to think about that?

Michael Eastwood: Yes. In 2022, those divestitures that we did in Q4 was $155 million, Ronan, in annual revenue and $40 million of annual EBITDA. So with that, you’ll see a little bit of benefit from margin accretion as a result of those divestitures, which we have incorporated in our full year guidance.

Gary Bisbee: Yes, I think we have time for one more question.

Operator: Our final question today comes from Maher Yaghi from Scotiabank.

Maher Yaghi: I wanted to ask you, now that you’ve delivered on and finished your Change Program, can you discuss if there are specific geographies or new areas? You talked about maybe Risk as a potential new area where you want to focus on. Can you discuss a little bit what you are looking to amplify in terms of investments, new areas for investments? And also, when you look at the $2 billion return program on capital, can you provide some guidepost as to when that program will be initiated and the needed milestones to be achieved in order to begin the process?

Stephen Hasker: Yes. I’ll take the first part, Mike. I think in terms of the investment, certainly, we’d like to take advantage of opportunities to grow our franchises internationally. And we see opportunities to build on our recent successes in Latin America. We also see opportunities in Southeast and North Asia. And so we’ll be looking to sort of develop those plans through this year. On the — in terms of the sort of product lines and lines of business, as I said in my remarks, we don’t think we need to sort of step too far out beyond our Big 3. We think we’ve got lots of growth potential in serving customers within and around the Big 3. But the areas like Risk, Fraud and Compliance, we have a really interesting starting position with CLEAR and Pondera and TRSS that we think sort of enables us to play in a much bigger way in that space, particularly expanding beyond our Government franchise and Corporates.

Other areas like ESG, we think we’ve got a sort of natural right to play. And so we’re looking at expansion opportunities in and around that, but it’s very much serving the Head of Tax and the General Counsel and the head of Risk with — at ways in which we can help them navigate an increasingly complex regulatory and compliance-related environment. That’s what we do well. We’re in a company that sort of can help our end customers and their advisers navigate those environments with content-driven technology. And so those are really the areas that we focus on. Mike?