Okay, everyone, we'll get started. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Hodulik from the communications team here in research, and I'm pleased to welcome Almar Latour, the CEO of Dow Jones and Publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Almar, thanks for being here. Oh, great to be here, John. I know we actually go back to a different era- Yeah. - covering telecoms as a reporter, and now we're here together, so great to be here. Exactly. We used to chat 20 years ago covering WorldCom, the CLECs, all the, you know, all the, the exciting times in telecom. Yeah. So, we've got about 35 minutes for questions. I've got the iPad here. If anybody has any questions, you can, you know, register them with the app, and I'll weave them into the conversation. Almar, let's start with maybe if you could provide just to frame things, sort of a brief overview of Dow Jones. Okay, good. Thank you, and great to be here, everyone. So we're in an era of increased complexity. Everything around us is changing, be it in technology or in geopolitics, et cetera. And this is exactly where Dow Jones comes in. We're a business news and information service provider. We help people make decisions in this era of complexity. And how do we do that? You know, we serve people all day long, from the moment they wake up and through their workflow at their businesses, all the way to when they get back home again, with our consumer services, which you know, The Wall Street Journal and Barron's, but also B2B services. We sell subscriptions, so to consumers and to enterprises. We're now, by and large, a subscriptions company, a digital subscriptions company at that. Roughly 80% of our revenue is generated by subscriptions in one form or another. We're a company that is undergoing a lot of change and has undergone a lot of change in the past couple of years. Our profitability over the past four years, our profits have doubled. We are very optimistic about the future because that complexity that we see all around us, we provide answers and help people navigate that very, very difficult period we find ourselves in. So that gives you a sense of what we do. We believe that everyone in business should come across Dow Jones' products and services and information multiple times a day, and so we believe there's a lot of headroom for growth, be it in consumer or B2B. Got it. And to that aim, the company has made a number of acquisitions in the not-too-distant past. Can you go through sort of the key transactions and how they fit inside of Dow Jones? Yeah. So the framework for our acquisitions, and we hadn't done acquisitions for nearly two decades until a couple of years ago. The framework is that we are operated through verticals, so vertical areas of focus, so business news, retail investing and wealth, energy, risk, and research. So those are a few. We deepen our verticals with acquisitions, and that's what we have done with IBD, which was one acquisition, which rounds out our retail investment portfolio. It connects very, very nicely and deepens the toolset that we can offer with Barron's and MarketWatch. That's one. And then we added a vertical, Dow Jones Energy, we call it, but there were two acquisitions involved, and that's OPIS and CMA. Those acquisitions have gone exceptionally well over the past year and a half. They're fully integrated. We've accelerated the growth rate pre-acquisition of those companies to today, significantly by investing in them. And we're also outside the borders of Dow Jones Energy and OPIS and CMA. We're learning a lot from having imported and just an entrepreneurial spirit into Dow Jones, and so it's paying off in many different ways. Got it. News Corp disclosed recently that the majority of Dow Jones profitability is expected to come from B2B products this year. Can you discuss that transformation, you know, away from sort of the retail into the business? Yeah. We're at an inflection point, really, for Dow Jones, where that profitability is generated primarily by premium B2B services. You see that driven by risk, and we'll talk about that if you want- Yeah. ... Dow Jones Energy, but also just by across the board, whether it's within consumer or B2B, an emphasis on more premium services that's driven a margin profile up. This is where we see a lot of room for expansion, down the road, both going deeper in verticals and adding verticals to our portfolio. Yeah, let's... If we can, we can sort of double-click down into that risk business. Obviously, I don't think there's a lot of similar businesses out there that get a lot of attention from the street, and I know it's one of the big growth drivers. So can you sort of give us a lay of the land in terms of, you know, what that business is and what's driving the growth, and maybe talk about sort of how much runway you have? Yeah. So first, maybe start with the macro picture around that. So, regulatory risk has increased around the world, and we expect that to increase even more as the world again becomes more complex. As you see de-globalization, then sanctions regimes are becoming more difficult to understand and are proliferating. You see many types of regulations impacting corporate decision-making, and so the corporates have to, and financial institutions have to manage that risk. You know that from your own institution, and everyone in this room knows that. It's like, on a monthly basis, we get these training modules we have to do mostly about—you know, sanctions, companies and countries, and know your client, all that kind of stuff. And you have to understand, so know the companies, know your customers, that, that you're doing business with, and this is where we come in. We have trusted sets of data, and that trusted part is incredibly important, to check which individuals, which entities you can do business with and not get sanctioned. And so, I'll give you an example. Recently, this is a global business, as you, as you, might imagine. A customer recently reached out to our team in Southeast Asia, and they wanted to do business with an HR company in that region. Our researchers went to work, deployed our technology on our, on our data sets, AI coming in, pretty heavily there. And, lo and behold, they discovered that the company that this customer wanted to do business with was actually a front for a human trafficking operation. And so that might sound exceptional, but we identify day in, day out, the risks with individuals, politically exposed individuals, financial crime, human trafficking, and other sort of sordid risks for companies, and help them navigate that, help them avoid that. And the trusted part is so important because if your data is not to be trusted or if there are sort of false positives in there, that costs a lot of time and money for companies to navigate that, because then you have to dedup, and that's really hard. So that's how we are exceptional. How big is that market? And then I would also say, ask, you know, how, sort of, how, how much penetration do you have, and sort of, is there, is, is it a very competitive business? So within our space, financial crime, we're roughly $250 million. We've been growing double digits for many, many, many quarters, and we expect substantial growth to continue for the foreseeable future. That's both within the area in which we operate, so financial crime. But we're not just serving financial institutions. Increasingly, the needs of financial institutions when it comes to risk are replicated and mirrored by corporates in any industry. Just got back from Dubai, from COP28, where we met with a lot of risk clients and potential clients. Probably about 150 people showed up for an event like this. The risk there, deal navigating with terrorism and funding, navigating regulations, increasingly, ESG and environmental regulations fall into these categories, which is where our risk and our energy businesses actually come together. And so we see a lot of headroom for growth. It's growing very strongly. It's a highly profitable business, and it fits so nicely with everything else that we do. Right. Maybe talk about the energy business and within that, OPIS and Chemical Market Analytics. I mean, can you just discuss how they integrate? You know, both of those transactions and how the integration is going? Yeah. As I indicated earlier, these were acquisitions that we made about 1.5 years ago. Probably started seriously looking at that two years ago, and those integrations have gone incredibly well. The teams are, you know, fully part of Dow Jones. But what we're seeing is, A, our investments into that vertical are paying off. We did that early on. We had a plan going in. We're executing against that, probably better than we even had expected. The megatrends around us, so just everything that we see every day on oil prices, energy overall, the energy transition being the story of our lifetime, the demand is developing accordingly. And so demand for new services, data, analytics, and then also our convening power, bringing people from that industry together, that's all coming to fruition in ways that meet our expectations and exceed our expectations. And so that's going incredibly well. So both of these services, both the Risk and Compliance and what you're doing on the Energy side, those are both... You, I think you start off by saying 80% are sort of of your revenues are subscription businesses. These fit into that category, right? How are the sort of these services, both on the Risk and Compliance and on the Energy side, sort of sold to businesses? Yeah, so it's B2B. Yeah. So our corporate sales team goes out and connects with procurement officers. There's different points of engagement. Sometimes, for risk, it's within the compliance department, as you might imagine, but there are other entry points as well. And so we have a global sales team of about 250-300 folks that is operating on a generalized basis, understanding just the full suite of everything that Dow Jones has to offer, but also highly specialized, and so we bring in experts. And often, John, this is about not selling a product, but a solution. You plug into someone's workflow. We spend time on the ground. We even have both within energy and within risk some consulting functions that just make us really, really close to the client. And once we're embedded, we're there, and we then expand from there. One thing that's happening since you're asking about sales is that, well, we have increasingly an integrated sales approach. So, you know, one of the things that I just heard from risk managers in Dubai is that news is something that they start their day with. They set the agenda. And so we fit other parts of the portfolio, bring that to bear when we meet with clients in the B2B space as well. Right. Before we get into news, I mean, it seems like, you know, you're selling sort of risk control services, energy data and other services. I mean, are there other? It would seem that there would be a number of other potential verticals that would sort of fully leverage sort of, you know, your expertise, your sales force, and the rest of the infrastructure. Yeah, I love that question because it's exactly sort of how we got to this point and how we're navigating into the future, in the sense that we operate in a very disciplined manner. In every super vertical that we have, in every area of concentration, we have news at the foundation, we have some data sets. Then if you combine those two and put analysts on it, analytics, and then we have that convening power, and that's a replicable model. We've done that in a disciplined way with risk, now with energy. And so you can, in fact, add more verticals. We can do that organically. From The Wall Street Journal, we'll talk about consumer shortly. From The Wall Street Journal, we have tremendous data. A wealth of data that shows us where there is potential, what the needs are, what people are asking for in terms of vertical information needs. And so that gives us a leading indicator as to where the next vertical organically might come from or opportunistically through M&A. And how do you balance that? I mean, are you guys... It would seem like in, you know, given the deals you guys have done and sort of the structure and sort of, you know, what you've set up here, that there would be opportunities to, you know, inorganically, through M&A, to sort of fill in some of those silos and to create a sort of a more fulsome product set. Well, it feels very natural to us to cover multiple industries- Right. Now that we have that operating model. We've got great support, of course, from our parent company, News Corp, and I can't make any forward-looking statements on- Right. M&A, but we're looking opportunistically at the market. Got it. So yeah, turning to the B2C side and the news business, can you talk about the sort of recent digital subscription growth that you've seen at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones? I believe the growth rates have improved sort of in recent years, and what the drivers for that are. Yeah. So the macro drivers, where we started out, that we live in an incredibly complex environment, trusted news and data is very, very hard to come by, and that it holds true for all of our consumer properties as well, The Wall Street Journal, or Barron's, or MarketWatch. So that's an underlying demand that's there. We have a new editor who is leaning in very much to the premium business user, and we have a laser focus on that, just to make sure that we're consistent across the entire portfolio, from B2B all the way to B2C. We're emphasizing that user put their user experience above anything else. And we've been investing in select areas within The Wall Street Journal. We are undergoing change on the digital front. Obviously, UX matters a great deal, and so, there's a lot of activity taking place there right now. And has the growth been more domestic or more international? So our outlook is global, and one of our benefits is that we are a global company. It's one of the differentiating factors, certainly within news media. There are very few news media operations that can operate on a global basis like we do. Most of our expansion thus far has come from our domestic market, from the U.S., and we see upside internationally because a business user is a business user, is a, is a business user. And so we, we are emphasizing that and in the time ahead. We have a new Chief Marketing Officer who's really responsible for digital subscriptions, Sherry Weiss, who's emphasizing that. Emma Tucker, our editor, is working very closely to make sure that our content offering, and our pricing and our UX are all aligned for different markets as well. How important is bundling to the growth of the B2C side? Yeah, it's been one significant driver of growth. And so from our point of view, bundling is listening to consumers' needs and giving them choice. So we started out small with combining Barron's and MarketWatch. We saw that got traction. Our kind of user has, when offered a bronze, silver, and gold package, clicks gold. These are people who are hungry for information, for deep information on all the areas that we cover. And so we're accommodating that need. And so you'll see sort of us catering more closely to specific needs from the customer through bundles by having something more financially focused, or maybe something more technology focused, et cetera. So it... Bundling is something that has been very successful, and we expect that to continue. ... This is a question that I asked The New York Times yesterday. I mean, how is the product evolving in a world of sort of social media and TikTok, when sort of younger people are getting their news more and more, like, you know, less from sort of traditional news services and more from these, you know, sort of, you know, sort of new platforms? Yeah, so, well, for one thing, I think as you have a generational shift and then the consumer habits shift with that, that has to be reflected in our personnel base. So a lot of the changes that you'll see will be driven by the generational shift that we're seeing within the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones overall. So it's an always on effort to make sure that we are focused on mobile, on vertical video, on audio, and all the new ways in which or sometimes not so new ways that are accelerating in a younger demographic. So we're investing in that. We're through Apple News, we've gotten this is not really reflected in our subscription numbers, but we have had now access to a younger user base. Also, MarketWatch has just a much younger user base than just across the board for Dow Jones. And then IBD, so you asked earlier about some of our properties that we acquired. Well, that entrepreneurial spirit from them, we launched a youth-focused investor newsletter called Market Diem, and it hits a lot of marks. It's a paid-for product, which yeah signed up the double-digit thousands by now in terms of users for a paid product and for that demographic, it's really good. Really remarkable is what we see, even though that's a very young demographic, and there's all kinds of assumptions that we make about young demographics. They don't want to pay for stuff and such. But we actually see that more than 65% of the total revenue comes from derivative products that we've sold subsequently from that user base. So effectively, they're self-bundling products and we're succeeding at upselling. So we're... In short, we're very optimistic about reaching that base on their terms, but also making sure that the information retains value on that journey. In the most recent quarter, I think 70% of the digital circulation revenues and 87% of subscriptions were digital only. Is there a point when going all digital makes sense for you guys? Well, this is about consumer choice and user choice. We wanna be there for everyone in any way in which they wanna take us in, whether that's on O&O Digital, or through an API, or through social, or through print. And so, for as long as people want that, and there's the people who are religious about, you know, taking in the journal that way or Barron's that way, that's available. Increasingly, that's taking on the behavior of a luxury product because it's something people seek out, and it's an experience for which they are willing to pay more. Like, we, my family, we get The Wall Street Journal electronically. You know, we have a digital subscription, but then we get the weekend version, so it's there. We like, we like the Off Duty section, we like The Exchange section, all that's done. Yeah. Well, thank you, first of all. And that's great. It's a great read. And so, we know the user dynamic, that you're not atypical, but there are still also, you know, plenty of people who want it on a daily basis. But yep, for just how we run the business, we're a digital business, and we have a print outlet. Right. At the Investor Day in 2020, you spoke about doubling the sub base, which I think was just below 4 million at the time. Is that still the goal? And sort of what are your long-term view of this? Yeah. So we're on track with our goals. In fact, we're adjusting our goals because we're optimistic about how we're developing. And so we're sticking with the plan that we had at the time. That's now sort of coming on 3 years ago. And so we're very excited about how our digital subscription base is developing. Big topic of conversation, you know, as you would imagine, at any media conference is the advertising backdrop. Can you give us an update on sort of what you're seeing, and are there any signs that there's some green shoots out there? Yeah. So, when it comes to advertising, so we can sort of talk about the past few quarters, not the quarter we're in or going forward, but our advertising, digital advertising, improved from Q4, our Q4- Q1. And certainly Q1, across the board, was the best quarter we've had since we were taken over by News Corp 15 years ago. So, but advertising, specifically, you know, the sectors that are strong for us, B2B, technology, you know, we see, we saw in the past quarter some strength coming back to that, and you know, those are the sectors that we rely on. Okay. How is the... Another topic that's come up a couple of times, AI. How is Dow Jones sort of thinking about AI? Is it, is it a sort of a good guy or a bad guy, and, and how could it sort of be used at this point? Obviously, it's very early days to, you know, in your business processes. Yeah, it is early days, but it's an important time. There's sort of three areas that we look at. One is IP, making sure that we secure the value of the information that we and news and archives, that we've painstakingly built up over the decades. So for that, as you know, and those of you who follow News Corp, we have been in negotiations and talks with various players in tech, with an eye on making sure that the value of our content, the value of our news, of our proprietary databases is protected. So we wanna have that as a continuous area of focus and secure that value. Two, workflow. So within workflow, we're already seeing whether it's in the newsroom or, for example, the research team that I just talked about in Southeast Asia, focusing on finding financial crime and such, we are deploying generative AI and have been deploying sort of classic AI for a long time. And that will continue, and that will intensify. Whether that's translation or just helping reporters find information that is harder to come by or impossible to process, just on your own. Then third, and this is perhaps the most exciting part, is creating products that really are demand-driven. So we hear from a lot of customers who say, "I like what you're doing in risk or in energy. I wanna have access to that. Do you have the capability to summarize and such?" And so we have detailed plans to come out with generative AI based products, and so we'll announce those when they're coming out. Got it. Dow Jones again posted record profits, profit margins last year. So do you see, you know, given that, do you... How do you expect things to trend going forward? Do you see potential for further margin expansion? So the trend has been for us to focus on premium information, you know, subscription-based, and that's driving our margin profile and has been driving our margin profile, and that we're not done with that. So that will continue. And that's, you as I indicated earlier, that's not just within B2B, but within The Wall Street Journal, there are also quasi-B2B services, like the CEO Council and such. And so there are, for every part of our portfolio, there are opportunities that are more premium-oriented, higher margin products. So that will set the trend in terms of our margin profile, I think. The other thing that's happening is that we are looking more aggressively at efficiency because there is so much change taking place all around us, in the market, in media, in technology, et cetera, as we all know. And we wanna make sure that we're optimizing every dollar, every resource. And so, the part of that will pay off in terms of margin as well, that efficiency drive that we've been on for the past year and will be ongoing for the next couple of years. And so those two engines will make sure that our margin profile will continue in a favorable direction, I think. Great. We already touched on M&A, you know, previously in talking about the sort of information services business. But, you know, just talk about the sort of M&A landscape. Do you think the company has been, you know, an acquisitive company? You talked about the acquisition, the News Corp's acquisition of Wall Street Journal 15 years ago. Mm-hmm. I mean, what do you expect that sort of rate of M&A that we've seen more recently to continue? Is it, are there a lot of sort of attractive targets out there, or do you feel that we may have reached sort of a place where the assets are where you need them to be, and majority of the growth would be more organic going forward? Well, so we are opportunistic when it comes to M&A. We're always scanning the landscape. I think for each vertical, we have a deep understanding as to which parties would fit, which ones would not fit. I think we mainly look at this as categories. Going deeper in verticals is always of interest, whether it's organically or inorganically. Adding verticals, also organic or inorganic, that is, adding verticals is an aspiration. And then, you know, we're always looking at, is there something across the board that could help all of our businesses at once? And so, that's the lens through which we look at our organic growth, but also inorganic growth. And lastly, can you talk about the benefits that you're getting that Dow Jones is getting as being part of News Corp versus sort of being a standalone entity? Yeah, well, we have had some of our best years under the News Corp flag, and we continue to perform incredibly well. We have great support from the News Corp team, great supportive ownership. I think The Wall Street Journal wouldn't be where it is today without the support from News Corp. Those acquisitions and the entrepreneurial forward-looking spirit is very much something that's part of News Corp, and we're deploying that throughout Dow Jones. And so there's a great symbiotic relationship. We learn from our sister companies, hopefully we can help them as well. And so it's a great situation. Well, great. Well, I think we'll leave it there. Okay. Thanks for joining us, Almar. Okay, good. Thank you so much, John. Thank you, everyone.