Clarivate Plc Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Your first question comes from the line of Scott Wurtzel with Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. Just wanted to touch on, you guys cited some timing around renewals that may have impacted ACV growth during the quarter. Is anything around that due to longer sales cycles, and anything we should expect to persist at all in the second half of the year?

Hey, good morning, Scott. Thanks for the question. We believe that our results for Q2 and the first half are in line with our original expectations. If I remind everyone, we pointed the equivalent of page 20 in Q1 indicated we expected to see a pullback in recurring organic growth in Q2. Subscriptions were a part of that. ACV, we continue to make progress over the last six quarters. It's not always going to be linear, but we continue to see strong renewal rates, and good opportunities for the new products to convert to sales. The timing of renewals is something we see in the business from time to time, though we don't think it's an elongation of the renewal cycle.

The organic ACV growth of about a percent and a half in the end of June is generally in line with our first half organic growth for subscription revenues at about 1.2%. We're generally where we expected, and as we indicate also on page 20 in this quarter's tack, we expect the ACV and the organic recurring revenue to inflect in the second half of the year. We have good line of sight to that. At this point in the year, the A&G business as of the end of July has 75% of this year's business in the bag. Very similar to what we saw at this point last year. The fall's an important renewal cycle, but we're already well on our way, and we have good line of sight for the second half of the year. Thanks for the question, Scott.

Your next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Thank you.

Thanks so much. I was hoping you could talk more about the MCP opportunity, where you think which client types are going to more gravitate towards utilizing your data over MCP, which segments, et cetera. Just how you're thinking about how it could contribute to growth, and is it included in the subscription or is there an upcharge for it? Also just, Jonathan, congratulations on your new opportunity. Thanks. I'll take this one.

Thank you, Toni. To maybe take a broader view on the AI innovation we are doing, we are very much focused, and since I joined or since we started the VCP, we are delivering on 19 different initiatives regarding external and new product that we are delivering. We are very pleased with the progress so far, which is the AI enablement of our existing product is a source of revenue for new logos, new products, and improving retention. I think also to allow us to have some AI-specific pricing for new products. New revenue generation or new revenue stream. For example, Web of Science Research Intelligence, definitely a new revenue stream. Harmaspecto, a new revenue stream. IPOne that I've been talking about, and we are very excited about IPOne, definitely a new revenue stream.

Some will come, Nexus Connect, another product from A&G which involve MCP, and we see the customers industry segment including the life science, how they want to consume our data, our proprietary data. Either directly through us with our UX or a new AI-enabled product, or using their own customers. There's a tendency in some the bigger customer, who would like us to embed our capabilities, the MCP capabilities, into their respective corporate AI product. This is why you see more of our product, whether it's embedded into Anthropic, ChatGPT, and other generic LLMs. By and large, the bigger customer would like to be able to embed this through MCP. Smaller customer may want to use it in our environment, but this is just early days.

Overall, we are very pleased with the momentum that we have in introducing AI, either our own native or embedding our proprietary data into MCP environment of the customer designation corporate AI infrastructure.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays.

Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. First, congratulations, Jonathan and Mike, both, for your new roles. I just had a question on the expectation for acceleration of organic growth. I think you said sequentially 100 basis points. Can you flesh that out a bit if it's different between academic and government and then the IP side as well? I think just going into 2027, I guess maybe just is that 100 basis points for the full year as well in 2027, or how we should think about that?

I think we are pretty positive on both segments. We have a line of sight that the momentum is building up in IP as well. We are back to recurring flat in Q2. We believe that we're going to improve recurring in the second half of the year for IP as well, with a great new momentum. Here to re-mention the introduction of, or the rejoining of Simon to Clarivate. He's been in the industry for 20 years. He was kind enough to come back and support us. He will utilize all his IP knowledge and expertise in accelerating the progress on the IP turnaround. We do believe IP will be turned around faster with Simon in place, and with the great assets, annuity, software intelligence that we have, and with the AI innovation I've mentioned.

I've mentioned RiskMark as a product that won three awards. I'm also upbeat about IPOne. IPOne is not just intelligence. IPOne is in fact an agentic environment in which IP professional. Basically, we're taking a different route. We all know about the data winds and the other one, which has been a little bit contracting. Basically, we are going to disrupt the market using both our agentic capabilities and expertise and our proprietary data. That's on the IP side. On the A&G side, momentum is also building with the new Web of Science Research Intelligence, with the new Harmaspecto, and with obviously Nexus Connect, and some of the new innovation coming out from the A&G product hubs. Optimistic on both ends. Your next question.

Next question, please. Your next question comes from the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs.

Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you. Good morning. Thank you. I wanted to dive more into transactional revenue performance. To what extent would you say the transaction revenue declines are due to industry factors versus idiosyncratic execution factors? What gives you confidence that there's a path for transactional revenue performance to improve?

Let me start, and I will hand over to Jonathan. The idea that we are moving is part of my playbook or the playbook we've used in the VCP, is to move away from transactions. Going into this VCP, there were certain businesses that we divested completely, like the one-time books, the one-time files, the real-world data. We divested this business completely. The divestiture of life science, we're also giving away some of the life science was a little bit higher on transactional. There's still a portion of transactional business that will stay with us, and it's supporting the one-time business we had. Still within this transactional business, there are still businesses that we have been ambitious to transform to subscription. Just one example is the back files of Web of Science. This will be gradually improved, our subscription rates going even beyond 92%.

I'll hand it over for Jonathan to provide some more specifics about the quarter.

Yeah, thanks, Matti. Just a little bit of additional color on the quarter, George. The life sciences business is still in our organic results in Q2. We didn't reach the agreement until after the end of the quarter. That business saw some headwinds in the quarter on transactional in particular. As Matti said, we have been looking to migrate some of those things to subscription. That's a piece in it, but also we just saw some headwinds in life sciences. In the other two businesses, the business can be lumpy quarter to quarter. We knew we lapped a couple of things in Q2 in both of those businesses that were going to be a bit of a headwind, but we do expect that to ameliorate in the second half of the year. I think we have better line of sight into that.

Our full-year guide does contemplate that transactional will be down slightly year-over-year, but I think we'll see some improvement on that in the second half. Thanks for the question, George.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one now to raise your hand and join the queue.

Your next question comes from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Adam on for Shlomo. Was there any client losses that might have impacted the life sciences business that drove the revenue decline in addition to the transactional movement?

Yeah. Thanks for the question. No, there's nothing discrete or specific. As I mentioned, Matti talked about the fact that we've had an emphasis over the last year or so of really providing good subscription alternatives to migrate some of the transactional business away from. Certainly, that's an item, but nothing specific that we would highlight on an individual basis other than just some headwinds in that area on the transactional side.

Okay. Does the buyer of the Life Sciences division know the performance in the second quarter when they announced the deal? I just want to verify it wouldn't potentially trigger a MAC clause or anything like that.

No, certainly this is nothing to that level. That process is moving exactly as we would expect. We work through the process to reach an agreement, all of the approvals that are required are customary, we expect those to occur in the coming months, we expect this to close before the end of the year.

Thank you. We have reached the end of the Q&A session.

I would now like to turn the call back to Matti for closing remarks. Please go ahead. As we close, I want to just repeat the key takeaways today are very clear.

We have a building block in place to accelerate organic growth, and we will continue to deliver on our commitment to drive long-term shareholder value. Thank you for joining us.