Cool. All right, well, welcome everyone. Good morning. Once again, I'm Scott Wurtzel. I cover info services here at Wolfe Research. Excited to be joined by Jonathan Collins, JC, the CFO of Clarivate for a fireside chat. So yeah, JC, thank you so much for joining us. You know, I think there's some in the room who may be unfamiliar with the Clarivate story, so wondering if you could maybe start off by giving a quick overview of the business and, you know, the different segments that you operate in. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Scott, and good morning, everyone. Yeah, just a quick overview of Clarivate. We are an indispensable partner for intelligence solutions, workflow solutions, and tech-enabled services for institutions and companies that participate in innovation. From a services offering, our intelligence offerings, we enrich data, we provide analytics and insights on that data, and in many cases, industry-wide recognition around credentialing of the quality of the research in any given area. That's our intelligence solutions that we provide. Those are over half of what we do from a services standpoint. The second thing we do is provide workflow solutions. This is in the form of software-as-a-service, where we're deeply embedded and entrenched in the workflows of our customers that are participating in the global innovation ecosystem. The final component is tech-enabled services. This is primarily within our Intellectual Property segment, and this is where we provide services to provide renewals of Intellectual Property around the world, leveraging our global agent network, and by "agent" there, I mean, people that are on the ground all around the world. Those are really the three types of services that we provide. We provide those to three distinct end markets. Our largest end market, which makes up about 1/2 of our business, is Academia and Government. This is where virtually all or 99% of the world's top 400 institutions use our intelligence and workflow to manage the research process and the learning process within that end market. The second market is Intellectual Property. It's our second largest market, which makes up about 1/3 of our business. The Intellectual Property segment is servicing both in-house legal departments as well as law firms that specialize in Intellectual Property, providing those solutions to them. The third is the Life Sciences and Healthcare. This is where we are providing all of the top 20 pharma companies around the world and all of the top 10 med tech companies around the world, solutions that help to provide enabling the research and development process all the way through to the commercialization and protection of that innovation that's occurring within that segment. Those are the solutions we provide, intelligence, workflow solutions, tech-enabled services, and we provide that across those three end markets, Academia and Government, Life Sciences, and the Intellectual Property ecosystem. Yeah, no, it's a helpful overview. You know, if we go back to 4-Q earnings a couple of weeks back, I mean, you know, the company reported pretty solid results. You had better-than-expected results, I think, in the A&G segment and a guide that implies some organic revenue acceleration. Just wondering if you can discuss some highlights of the quarter and also talk about your assumptions underpinning guidance for the year. You got it. When we look back at 2025, we really see this as an inflection point in the business. All of our KPIs started moving in the right direction. I'll start with the one that we've really focused on as of late, which is our ACV, or our annual contract value. This is the leading indicator of our subscription organic revenue growth that we would expect to see moving forward. That inflected from being at a just below 1% growth in 2024 to approaching 2% growth in 2025. We saw a nice inflection there. We saw an improvement in our renewal rates, which is a key measure of the stickiness of the solutions as we continued to invest in embedding AI tools, both assistants and agents, within our products, to help enhance the value proposition for our customers. Nice inflection in ACV last year. Just to touch on how we think that's gonna play out this year, we're guiding to about 2%-3% growth on that metric, as we move into 2026. We expect, you know, a nice improvement, about three-quarters of a percentage point over the prior year at the midpoint of our range. Maybe if we touch on the organic recurring revenue growth, we delivered about 0.5% of growth last year. We expect that to accelerate to between 1% and 2% as we look forward to this year. As we see that ACV continue to improve, we expect modest improvement in our recurring revenue type. That's that agency business that we have within the IP segment, where we're renewing IP around the world. We saw that part of our business improve from a decline in 2024 to being about flat in 2025, and we expect modest improvement on that as we move into this year. The other thing that we are pleased with is the profit trajectory of the business. We delivered over $1 billion of adjusted EBITDA last year. We expect about 200 basis points of profit margin expansion as we move into 2026, really driven by two things. Number one, we have a few businesses that we disposed of that we started last year and we'll finish disposing of this year. Those are gonna add over 100 basis points of margin expansion as we exit those lower profitable, less predictable parts of our portfolio. Then the second part is a strong profit conversion on that organic growth. We're anticipating about a total organic growth of about 1% this year. We anticipate that that's gonna flow through to our bottom line. We have really good cost efficiency measures in place as we move into this year to offset inflation and other things and let that profit growth drop right to the bottom line. The last thing I'd touch on is our cash flow. We generated $365 million of free cash flow last year, which was up slightly over the prior year. This year, we anticipate free cash flow will grow to about $400 million at the midpoint of our range. That's gonna be based on lower one-time cost, lower interest expense, and you know, lower capital spending, helping to move us towards that $400 million. We think 2025 was a really good inflection point, and we're expecting a slight improvement in all of our metrics as we move into this year. Got it. You know, on earnings as well, you also announced that the company was, you know, kind of beginning the process of, or looking to sell the LS&H business. And, you know, obviously not asking for specific numbers or anything like that, but can you maybe just discuss the strategic rationale of looking to sell that specific business versus, others that you have? Sure, of course. About a year ago, we announced that we were embarking on a strategic review, and for us, what that meant was evaluating each of the three parts of the business that we operate in from a solutions standpoint, as well as our end markets, to identify if there was a business unit or a segment that would make sense to seek a divestiture of in order to accelerate value creation for shareholders. In the first part of last year, we worked on a project, didn't talk about the specifics, but acknowledged that we moved on to another alternative in the second half of the year. Just at earnings a few weeks ago, we announced that we've done a lot of prep work with our Life Sciences business, and we are pursuing the sale of that segment. We outline the rationale for that on a couple of dimensions. It's important to note in all of our disclosures that the majority of our profit contribution, and as well as we've indicated, a significant majority of our cash flow contribution comes from our A&G and our IP segments. We believe the potential sale of the Life Sciences business could help us to focus on both of those segments. We've acknowledged that we think the markets are growing a bit faster than where we are, so there's room for us to accelerate our organic growth. We think that the sale of the Life Sciences business could help us to focus on both of those. The second thing that it could do for us, or a secondary benefit, would be the ability for us to take those proceeds, repay some debt, and accelerate our de-leveraging. That's a great opportunity for us, we believe, in the near term to help catalyze you know, improving the quality and the strength of the balance sheet as we move through the balance of this year. That's a little bit of the history on how we got to where we are. As you indicated, you know, I don't have any detail update to provide on that other than what we said a couple of weeks ago. But as we get closer on that, we'll provide more color. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, this and I guess some of the other capital actions that you've taken over the last year, as you said, has been a part of the strategic review the company's done, as well as, you know, the value creation plan that you've set out to, you know, kind of look at and, you know, execute on in the last year. Can you maybe give a recap of some of the important milestones of like, you know, the strategic review or the VCP and how you believe Clarivate is, you know, emerging from this process in a better place than, you know, it was entering in? Yeah, it's a really fair point. The strategic review is one of the four pillars of our value creation plan that we outlined over a year ago. Just to run through those again, the first element is what we referred to as business model optimization. This is where we committed to focus more investments on our recurring businesses, and that's our subscription business and our recurring business, with a de-emphasizing of our transactional business. The metric here that we are focused on is taking our business from about 80% recurring closer to 90%. We made great progress on that last year with initiating the disposal of our transactional book business in A&G, our transactional digital collections business within A&G, and then also where we were reselling real-world data within our Life Sciences business. We identified each of those that we were gonna wind down starting last year and then ultimately completing those at the end of last year and as we move through 2026. Business model optimization, we're making great progress on. Our organic recurring revenue mix moved from about 80% - 88% towards the end of last year, and we expect that to tick up another point or two as we move through 2026. The second element was enhancing our sales execution. This is partially enabled by that first pillar. We are really focusing our field sales teams on the subscription business and the recurring revenues within the portfolio, de-emphasizing that transactional business. What we have left in transactional is our consulting business, implementation services, things that will enable the growth of our recurring revenue stream. Made really good progress there, and we measured that by accelerating our annual contract value, which I mentioned before, which went from just under 1% to just under 2% organic growth, from 2024 to 2025. The third element is continuing to accelerate our innovation within our product, and this is really enabled by the cutting-edge AI technologies that are enabled. Just a few weeks ago, we put out a webinar before earnings that identified the ways that we're taking this technology and putting it into our products. There are really three principal ways. The first is we are embedding research assistance in all of our intelligence solutions. You can think of this often as conversational discovery, but our customers are looking for authoritative answers to research questions, and we have the ability now rather than having the old structured search taxonomy, where you put something into a search bar and get a list of results. We're now engaging with all of our researchers on a conversational discovery basis. That's an example of embedding the research assistance in the product. The second area is what we refer to as workflow agents, and this is where, think of these as more complicated use of LLMs, where it's multi-steps and the ability to really provide efficiencies in our workflows. We continue to invest in that. An example of this would be in our academic products where we have our literature review agent that has the ability to take a process that used to be done by a human. It can now leverage the citation database and the proprietary content that we have to provide a very high-quality literature review, and we have customers that are now using that in our products. Then the third is in ecosystem access. This is where we expose our content in whatever AI environment our customers are working at. We actually announced this morning a pretty exciting new development here where we have made in our Life Sciences business our Cortellis regulatory intelligence products. For subscribers of that product, they can now use that in Anthropic's Claude LLM tool that's available. For customers that are subscribing to both of those, they have the ability to take our proprietary data, embed it into that workflow combined with other data to accelerate efficiencies in regulatory. We have regulatory affairs groups. We have pharmacovigilance groups within our customers that are now able to use this tool inside of that ecosystem. We're meeting them where they're doing that research and where they're doing that work. That's really that third pillar around accelerating product development, and we've made really good progress there. The final pillar was the strategic review, which we touched on, which has culminated in the pursuit of the Life Sciences and Healthcare segment sale. Got it. You kind of led really well into sort of the next topic because, you know, it wouldn't be a information services company fireside chat without an AI discussion. Wondering if you can maybe just talk a little bit more about, you know, the opportunities associated with artificial intelligence, how you see it impacting the business over, you know, the near, medium, long term, whether, you know, we're looking at revenue growth or margins, just any color would be great on that topic. Yeah. We continue to believe that the vast majority of the solutions that we provide are proprietary in nature and are essential or mission-critical for our customers in each of our segments. In Academia, just to talk a little bit about that business, our flagship product there is the Web of Science, which is the premier credentialing tool for the quality of peer-reviewed academic research. We're not a publisher, we're independent, and we have a very time-tested and true editorial review process to identify the quality of research. Our Journal Impact Factor is the authoritative standard around the world for the quality of that content. That data is unique and proprietary to us. We have the ability to take the underlying citation content combined with the analytics that we provide and deliver that to our customers. This is an area where we're investing in AI. Our first AI-native platform that we're launching within the company sits in this area. It's the Web of Science Research Intelligence. What Research Intelligence is is a multi-agent platform to aid our customers, you know, universities, in understanding the availability of funding and the investments that are made in research and the outputs that are demonstrated there, not only from an academic perspective, but also societal impact is being measured as well too. This is an example where we're taking new AI technology from the ground up, building an AI-native platform to provide an analytics layer, using agentic AI capabilities that is really unparalleled with the content that we have. That's an example within our academic business. Maybe another example within Academia, we provide the world's leading solution for academic research libraries to manage their digital and physical collections that they deliver for their patrons. That product is referred to as Alma. A significant majority of the premier institutions in the world use that solution to manage their library collection. We are rolling out assistant and agentic capabilities on that platform, and we're seeing really exciting advances in efficiency for our customers in that area. This is embedding agentic capabilities within those workflow tools. There was an independent study done within the last couple of months that identified meaningful efficiency improvements based on the implementation of these assistants and agents that we've put in those platforms. Within A&G, we have content, we're an aggregator of high-quality content across journals, periodicals, newspapers for customers. This is information that you can only access behind the paywall, and we're embedding these agents in these tools to be able to enhance that experience. We've seen very encouraging signs simply since we've implemented these research assistants where we're getting higher recurrence. The traffic that we see each month, we have more and more users coming back, more and more users engaging with the content because the assistants, the AI assistants help to uncover more information that was harder to find before as they embark on their research process. Really good implementation in our A&G products. We talked about the AI assistants that we're putting in the Life Sciences segment. Our Cortellis R&D suite of products now have research assistants in those. I just mentioned the fact that we're now exposing that in multiple ecosystems for our customers. In the IP side of the business, we are using AI in our intelligence there within our products, Derwent Patent Search and Derwent Patent Monitor. We have the most authoritative content around patent data in the world within the Derwent World Patents Index, and we're using new AI search capabilities and infringement monitoring capabilities to serve up to our customers for both patents and trademarks on the CompuMark side of the house as well too. These are areas where it demonstrates that by investing in this new technology in the application layer, we're surfacing really valuable content for our customers in each of these areas. Yeah. That makes sense. Then, you know, I think on earnings a couple of weeks ago, you disclosed that, you know, you guys believe that 97% of your revenue is derived from proprietary data sources and workflows, and just wondering if you can provide maybe some more detail on the different kind of pieces of that 97%. Sure. We do acknowledge there's a few percent that is easier to replicate, but the vast majority we believe is very difficult to replicate and is proprietary based on information that we have that others do not. The biggest piece of that are our intelligence solutions. I touched a little bit on the Web of Science as the flagship product within A&G. The key intelligence solutions within Life Sciences are the Cortellis platform, where we offer regulatory intelligence, drug discovery intelligence, competitive intelligence around which molecules are available in the marketplace as companies look to develop therapies. Very robust set of solutions there in intelligence. On the Intellectual Property side, we have. I think I mentioned both Derwent and CompuMark are the flagship products for patents and trademarks respectively, where we have a rich set of enriched information so that when a customer needs to do a proper prior art search or needs to understand the freedom to operate as they innovate, they can be sure that they uncover all of the Intellectual Property that's been registered in each of those areas. That's the intelligence part, which makes up over 50% of the solutions that we have. The next is tech-enabled services. We have the largest agent network in the world for Intellectual Property. The world's most largest companies in the world and largest IP law firms trust us to ensure that the IP that's registered around the world is renewed in a timely fashion. We use a combination of technology with humans in the loop to help make that as efficient as possible. We can do it much more efficiently for our customers than they can do it for themselves. That's all based on decades of proprietary workflows that enable that process and ensure that they can trust us to make sure that that's done correctly and on time everywhere. The final piece is workflow solutions. This is the software as a service that makes up the last piece of this 97%. I shared the example of Alma within our Academia business. I think within IP, a good example here is our IPfolio product. This is managing workflows for our customers as they all the way from an idea through to drafting and docketing and filing, and then ultimately the renewal of that Intellectual Property to protect it in the marketplace. Another workflow tool, and these are things that we've developed understanding our customers' workflows at an intimate level, being able to apply the technology and now enabling that with agentic capabilities to further enhance the value that that provides for them. That's a sense of what it is that we have in that 97%. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. If we kinda move along here, I mean, you touched on this a little bit earlier, but talking about the shift from, you know, transaction-based revenue to more recurring revenue up to, you know, 88% now, and just wondering if you can discuss, you know, how this impacts the business model, the predictability of revenue growth going forward, and, you know, how high can recurring, you know, get as a percent of total revenue over time here. Yeah, it's a really important point from a predictability perspective. We identify that there are parts of our business that were exposed to funding within budgets that was a bit up and down year to year, and also some of the economics of these transactional businesses, the unit economics, were less attractive. What we really did is pare down to focus on the core part of our business, increasing to almost 90% what is recurring in nature. Really, it's very important for our sales teams as well too, to be able to focus them on that part of the business where we believe we deliver the most value for customers and ultimately for shareholders in focusing on that part of the business. It really enhances our predictability. It's gonna help improve our margins. We were able to exit these businesses with a negligible impact to cash flow because both of them were a bit more capital-intense. This is an area where we think it makes us more predictable. It's gonna help us grow faster, and it's gonna put us in a position where we can generate a higher cash flow conversion on our profit and ultimately a better margins as well. Yeah. Makes sense. Then I guess we move over to the A&G segment now. Specifically, you know, on your recent earnings call, you talked about how you were seeing an improvement in some of the end markets that A&G serves. Can you maybe just talk about some of the headwinds that we saw over the last year, and then what, you know, could be improving about the market in 2026? For sure. About a year ago, there was quite a bit of concern around the potential of funding pullback, particularly here in the U.S., and we navigated through the end of the first half of last year, which was also the second half of the academic calendar year, and then when we turned the corner into the late summer and early fall here in the U.S., we began to work with our customers and our belief proved out to be true, which is that our solutions that we provide are mission-critical in nature. The research and analytics that we provide on the quality and value being derived from academic research, the software to help enable and manage the library's collection and the content it serves up to the patrons, as well as the software that we're embedding to help discover the content that we're delivering on that part of the business. We had an improvement in our renewal rates in A&G last year, and we saw a slight uptick in our annual contract value as we moved through the year. We were able to navigate some of that uncertainty here in the U.S. We continue to see strong funding for academic research around the world, and we feel good about what that looks like as we move into 2026. 2025 turned out to be a solid year and demonstrated the mission-critical nature of our products. Yeah. Makes sense. You know, one of the big questions we get from investors within the A&G segment is around the differentiation and, you know, the competition within the space. You know, I think one of the potential competitors people cite is, like, Google Scholar, right? Just wondering if you can talk about, you know, within your sort of solution set of A&G, like, how do you guys differentiate versus others in the market? Yeah. For a very long period of time, there have been a series of highly curated and paid-for solutions and then also some freely available solutions like you've referenced. Our differentiation within the Web of Science also rests heavily on the credentialing that we provide. The Journal Impact Factor is undoubtedly the gold standard in the market for the quality of academic research within publications. We're independent, which is also a benefit for us against some other competitors that offer credentials for research. We continue to see broad acceptance by the market that you look to our content not only for citation relevance but also for the credentialing around the quality of the research. We also recognize that continuing to innovate here is a really important part of enhancing that value proposition, so we invested heavily in the Web of Science. That was one of our first products to have a research assistant, which we rolled out over a year ago. We followed that with agentic capabilities. I think I mentioned the literature review service that we have that customers are now paying for to embed for their patrons or the researchers within the community. We're also building our first AI-native platform for multi-agent capabilities on top of the Web of Science data, and that's the Web of Science Research Intelligence. Continuing to innovate with the newest technology combined with best-in-class data and that high credentialing gives us a very good position here. This is a product that we acknowledged a few years ago. Its growth had stalled, but it's been reinvigorated, and it's leading within the A&G segment from a growth perspective. Got it. You know, if we move over to the IP segment, just wondering if you can talk about sort of the main growth drivers within that business, you know, between new customer adds, volume increases. You know, one of the things that, you know, we have been wondering is, like, could this, you know, AI innovation cycle, is that something that if it is sustained over a long period of time, could that potentially be, you know, a benefit to, you know, the IP business and the growth there? We think so, Scott. We certainly look to the overall patents in force market as a leading indicator of where volumes will be largely for our renewals business, but it's also a help to the other components of our business. As a reminder, we provide intelligence here. That's Derwent, Innography, IncoPat, and CompuMark. We also provide the platform for managing the workflows like IPfolio, and then we have our tech-enabled services business for renewing Intellectual Property around the world. It's on that last one where we do really think we're gonna have some wind in our sails as we move through this year into next year. If you look at the global patents in force data that's added each year over the last five years, excluding the domestic market for China, which has a different value proposition, we saw coming out of COVID, patents in force were essentially flat for a couple years. In the last couple of years following that, we've seen it return to a healthy growth between 3%-4%. We've had a couple years of solid growth there. That tends to be a good indicator of where renewals will be a couple years later. We think that's really gonna put some wind in our sails in that business as we move over the course of the next couple years. I think our guide for this year has been a little bit cautious in that regard, but we expect some benefit there. We certainly have acknowledged last year that the continued investment in innovation and AI across all industries, we believe is gonna lift patent filings around the world. We're starting to see that, and we think that's a trend that's gonna continue for years to come. Got it. I think another thing you've talked about is sort of, you know, seeing maybe some steady improvement driven by improved commercial execution. Just wondering if you can elaborate on some of the changes, you know, you are making or have made to the go-to-market approach within IP, and how, you know, that's potentially driving, you know, incremental sales within the business. Yeah. Matti, our CEO, has talked about this pretty extensively, and I would focus in on a few key areas. We made some leadership changes in the last year in the sales group, brought in some high-quality talent and promoted some high-quality talent to help lead those groups. Second, we've been tweaking our incentives to really focus our teams on annual contract value and that recurring revenue. A combination of both of those coupled with that significant investment in product technology to really have leading-edge technology capabilities within our stack as we take to our customers is a really important part to enable that as well too. A combination of those, we think is what helped to accelerate our annual contract value and our recurring organic growth last year, and we expect that continue into 2026. Got it. You know, if we move on to capital allocation, you know, you talked about this a little bit at the beginning. You're guiding to, you know, free cash flow. I think we're around $400 million this year, around 10%, you know, year-over-year increase at the midpoint. Could you just talk about sort of your top, you know, allocation priorities here, you know, where you're looking to deploy that free cash flow, and you know, talk about, you know, I think you mentioned a little bit on how, you know, potential LS&H sale could impact your capital allocation priorities going forward. Sure. We indicated when we put our guide out at earnings that we're really gonna skew more towards deleveraging in the near term. We repaid, or prepaid $100 million of debt in Q1. We indicated that we're gonna generate, as you said, about $400 million of cash. You should expect us to use most of that, if not all, to continue to strengthen the quality of the balance sheet and pay down debt. We also acknowledged, and I mentioned one of the catalyst or rationale for pursuing the sale of the Life Sciences business is not only the execution focus that it provides, but the ability to take potential cash proceeds there and put those towards deleveraging. I think in the near term, that's really where you'll see our focus be. Yeah. Makes sense. I guess one more before we end here. You know, if we were to be back sitting up here 12 months from now and discussing what a successful year it was for Clarivate, you know, what would you point to, maybe the top three things you would have achieved over the course of 2026 that would have made this year successful? Yeah. I certainly think it starts with the products and how it's enhancing value for our customers, so continuing to see improved engagement with our solutions as we roll out AI into those platforms is a key measure. We look at that on a usage basis, and we are seeing significant improvements in recurring usage in parts of our business that are adopting this technology as well as efficiency improvements from the workflow agents that we provide. I think the second aspect is the execution of our financial objectives for this year, so continuing to accelerate our organic ACV growth, our recurring revenue growth, the margin expansion, and the delivery of the cash flow improvement. I think a combination of both of those would put us in a really good position a year from now. Awesome. Well, JC, really appreciate the time, and thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Scott. Cool. Appreciate it. Great. Appreciate Appreciate it. All right. I think we got,