All right. We have Thomson Reuters continuing the session with us, and this is not Mike Eastwood.
Much more handsome version, right?
Gary.
Yeah. So let me start, Maher. Thanks for having us. I'm Gary Bisbee. I run investor relations at Thomson Reuters. Mike Eastwood, our CFO, was expecting to be here and unfortunately not able to attend at the last minute. So you've got the B team. I apologize for that. But I will do my best. And for anyone who'd like to follow up with Mike, we'll certainly be happy to help work that out. It's our board meeting today and tomorrow. And there was a last-minute scheduling change. He had to attend a board committee meeting today that overlapped with this session. So apologies again.
That's fair. You know.
Things happen. Companies need to be run. Those are facts of life. We understand that.
Good, but I have to say, having you here, I'm really not afraid about the level of the conversation. Because throughout our discussions the last two years, I've always felt that I got a lot talking with you.
Good. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
And I think everybody here will notice that today. So maybe I'll start with the business model. The Thomson Reuters business model is so resilient that I always wonder what makes your product so captive of the customers that they reach and why the high recurring business model is so dependable to come in quarter in, quarter out. Maybe talk about the portfolio. What constitutes that portfolio and why is it so resilient?
Yeah. So it's a great question and something we're proud of, the recurring and repeatable nature of the business. So let me just, on a top-down level, a couple of thoughts, and then I can talk about a few products. First of all, 81% of our revenue in 2024 was recurring. A good portion of that in multi-year contracts. Our end markets that we serve, legal, tax, and accounting, and a number of end markets within corporations, including some risk products and others, tend to be many of them. A lot of the portfolio is non-discretionary type products. They tend to be products you need to do your job.
And we obviously, on the overall resilience of the business, have a very strong balance sheet, under one times leverage, strong cash flow, and that long-term customer relationship, high-quality content-enabled technology that they need to do their jobs, along with a growing level of innovation, strong relationships, and a number of other factors, I think, play into that resilience of the business overall. From a product perspective, obviously, Westlaw, in our litigation research tool, market-leading tool, is the biggest product we offer. And lawyers who litigate cannot do their job without a litigation research tool. They learn to do legal research in law school. And it is a key part of the job. And we believe that we invest more and have invested more and continue to than our largest competitor in that space. There is a strong number two. But that product is key.
And there's a number of others, from Practical Law to a bunch of more emerging generative AI-driven tools that we have in legal that we really think have those attributes. In tax and accounting, we're one of the two leading players to help CPAs do tax returns in the U.S. and Brazil and some other countries as well. But those are the two key ones. And also have a significant amount of software and content-enabled software to help with audits. Tax and audits are the two big things that CPAs do, right? And so we have a meaningful market share. The products tend to be very sticky. Because again, to do your job, you need a tax calculation engine like UltraTax or GoSystem Tax, which are two of our offerings there.
And so I think the markets we serve, and like we like to say, whether it's a recession, expansion, no matter what's going on, you've got to file your tax return, right? So CPA, that industry is a growing, resilient industry. It's also one where there's a real shortage of new people entering the industry. And so what CPA firms are trying to do is be more efficient. And we have invested heavily, both organically, but also the SurePrep acquisition two years ago, the SafeSend acquisition we did in January, to add more automation and allow us to offer a more end-to-end workflow for CPAs handling tax returns. And so it's great markets. It's strong businesses. It is the recurring mix. But it's also, to your question, portfolio, both.
Portfolio management.
Where we're at and our strategy to drive that. That's right.
You get rid of underperforming software and services and you add on growing all the time. You cycle.
We don't foresee any other big divestitures in the near term. But as Mike Eastwood would say, we constantly review the portfolio. And we'll consider divestitures. And you're right. Our M&A strategy has been very focused on how do we add adjacent complementary capabilities that will allow us to provide more value for our customers. And we remain focused on that. M&A remains a priority for the business. And the focus there is on the businesses we're in today. So how do we bolster our legal professionals' business, tax and accounting professionals at corporates?
So while your business is very low concentrated in the U.S., for example, or Canada or the U.K., it is concentrated geographically in those countries. And so I always wondered why, over time, you have not been able to expand those product portfolios or acquire similar products in other jurisdictions to expand your geographic diversification.
It's a real focus of us. Our outside of North America revenue is about 20%, and our high-teens % of the mix. We aspire to take that up towards 30%. We think that there are real opportunities to do so. As we talked about at our March Investor Day a year ago, that international portfolio that we have is growing in the low- to mid-teens. And we believe that there's real opportunities, and we have some terrific assets there. Domínio, which is our tax business in Brazil, is an outstanding business. We acquired it a decade ago. It's grown north of 20% CAGR in the last decade and is still gaining share and innovating within their market. Brazil, like the U.S., is a good market for tax because tax regulations are complex and constantly changing, in fact, much more so than the U.S.
And so that's a market that really makes sense. But there are other markets that we're focused on. We have a big opportunity internationally to take the legal generative AI capabilities that we've been rolling out the last few years and take those and develop leading market share positions in other big common law legal markets we serve, like Canada, the U.K., Australia, to name a few. And we're actively focused on driving that. Some of those product introductions into the overseas markets are coming a few quarters later than those introductions in the U.S. And so a lot of that growth is in its infancy in the U.S., to be clear. But that will be a driver in the next few years. And we definitely are considering M&A and would like to use M&A. You don't go from 18%-30% of the mix likely just on organic growth.
So certainly, we have aspirations to acquire overseas. But we have a high bar. There needs to be a strong financial, strategic, and cultural fit. And I probably should have said financial last, strategic, cultural, and financial fit to do M&A. We are not going to apologize for being patient and waiting for the right opportunities that bring the strongest returns for our shareholders. But certainly, we aspire to do more overseas. And the Pagero acquisition last year probably is a good illustration of what that can look like. This is a technology business with a large regulatory-driven demand wave that's coming that happens to have a significant overseas revenue contribution and where it fits incredibly well with the ONESOURCE family of products, particularly our indirect tax solution. And yet, 80% of their revenue that we acquired with that acquisition was outside the U.S.
And so certainly, we will look to do more. Latin America, Asia, and especially Southeast Asia and emerging markets are our focus areas. But we would be disappointed in a few years if we've not increased that mix of international. And by the way, not because North America slows, because we're growing that faster and hopefully find incremental M&A opportunities there.
OK. Last year, it was interesting that you articulated why you're investing more in AI and how that is going to affect your margins in 2024, and we actually saw margin deterioration in 2024 in multiple product lines, and yet, the market continued to provide you with a high multiple. I think you explained why you made those investments, and we saw in 2025, your guidance is for margins to start to pick up. How should we think about margins in 2025, 2026, 2027 in the context where you are continuing to make investments in AI and looking to do additional M&A?
So a couple of thoughts. The modest year-to-year decline that we had guided for, and we did slightly better than the guidance, but the margins declined last year. It was in large part because of initial dilution and follow-on investment from M&A. And that was both Casetext, the legal GenAI system that we acquired in August of 2023, and then Pagero, which we acquired January of last year. And so part of it was just bringing in some lower margin business and then investing behind those. Because both of those are terrific long-term growth opportunities. We also chose organically to reinvest our operating leverage last year to accelerate investment, not solely generative AI, but certainly, you're right. That was the bulk of the sort of incremental opportunity that we saw and invested behind. And we're very comfortable with those decisions. And you're seeing it in the improving top line, right?
We guided last month, accelerated or raised, I should say, the revenue guidance for this year and next year from the prior framework we'd provided. And I think those investments are one factor contributing to that improvement. Our business, growing revenue at the rate we're growing, has strong operating leverage. And that operating leverage is in excess of the 75 basis points we're guiding to this year. I think we're 100 basis points or potentially a bit better. And that's based on 60%-65% relatively fixed costs, fixed cost base, growing at, let's say, 4%, round numbers. And that gives us real operating leverage as we grow at these levels.
Because you're growing the top line at 7%-8%.
That's right. And so I think implicit in the 75 basis points this year is some incremental reinvestment on some of that operating leverage. And what I think a chunk of that is we've done a series of very small but very strategic acquisitions in the last few months: Safe Sign last summer, Materia last fall, and then SafeSend at the beginning of this year. SafeSend's a bit bigger. But the other two are real small. And so we've absorbed that but still are delivering that margin commitment we made a year ago to have 75 basis points. Looking forward, our margins have the potential to rise quite nicely. But we will always consider reinvesting a portion of that operating leverage to the extent that we see a really strong opportunity set to invest. But I think last year in our minds was somewhat unique in that we made an investment.
We were very clear about it, given the explosion of opportunity we saw around generative AI and those acquisitions. And we believe that to be a highly valued company, driving strong top line growth is important. But the best valued companies do both top line and margin expansion on a consistent basis. And certainly, that's what we're shooting for. But we'll invest when we see real opportunities to drive the top line.
I had this question, a follow-up to this question later in the queue. But I'll ask it now. As you think about the long-term business model for Thomson, what would be your target revenue growth and target operating margin inside that business model that you're talking about?
I'm smiling because the former sell-side analyst in me remembers asking questions like this. And I think my corporate response, now that I've gone to the dark side for the last three and a half years, is nice try, Mayor. We've given guidance through 2026. I'm not going to talk a lot about beyond that. But let me give you two comments that I think are worthwhile. We are investing to deliver long-term growth, right? This is not a, hey, a couple of year bump from generative AI, and then it goes away. So the acceleration we've delivered from what was 2% - 3% for a long time prior to the last five years, where we've accelerated to 7%+ percent now, we hope to maintain that. And we're investing at a level that we think will allow us to.
So certainly, we will try to drive improving growth over the long term. And with the operating leverage we have and with the balance sheet capacity we have, I think that we can both deliver good revenue growth and stronger profit growth and hopefully invest in a way that will allow us to continue to be a very strong investment opportunity.
OK. In terms of GenAI and those investments, can you give us some view on what product launches we should maybe think about when that can boost your revenue growth?
Yeah. So a couple of thoughts on 2025. We don't talk a lot about specific launches prior to announcing them. But let me give you a few thoughts. For any of you who want more on the product evolution and roadmap, we still have available on our IR website the Investor Day we had in March of last year. David Wong, our Chief Product Officer, gave what I think is still a very relevant presentation at the time about our product vision. And we made a lot of real progress, real success in 2024 delivering against that roadmap. A couple of the keys for 2025. A big part of what we're doing this year is driving more integration between our products. So for example, CoCounsel, the generative AI assistant, is a great standalone offering. But we have recently introduced some more meaningful integration with Westlaw.
And that we think is really enhancing both to the user experience of our customers if they use both, but also to the capability of those offerings working together. And we've got a lot of that throughout the portfolio. So I think that integration to improve user experience and improve capability is, in many ways, the most important part of the 2025 roadmap. Now, we've got a bunch of other things throughout the portfolio. We will bring more skills to CoCounsel. CoCounsel's our legal GenAI assistant. So more things lawyers do that our technology can't automate for them. We have some new capability coming to Westlaw. We will, I think, meaningfully enhance the capability in drafting to add litigation drafting. Right now, the legal drafting tool is more in the transactional areas of the law. And we've laid that roadmap out for clients. And that's coming.
In tax and accounting, the Materia and SafeSend acquisitions will help us do a lot of things. But there's a lot of work to put those together with the portfolio and create real value. Materia is an agentic AI assistant that was purpose-built for tax and accounting professionals. And we see substantial potential layering that on top of the SurePrep at the front end, our tax engines in the middle, and the recent SafeSend to create real opportunity, including allowing CPAs to go from processing tax returns to offering more advisory services to their customers. And if executed well, allow them to bring new revenue streams to their practices. And so there's a lot of really exciting stuff in the portfolio. I think that relative to a year ago, I think I'd argue there are more opportunities in front of us. And internally, we're calling 2025 the year of execution.
Because I think we acknowledge there's a lot we need to execute this year. And that's not just a product and engineering comment. That's go-to-market. That's on a customer service and support, helping customers really engage with and get the most value out of these generative AI offerings. But we're excited about what the team is working on and what the roadmap suggests they'll deliver this year.
Agentic AI has been, I mean, the new big thing in AI. And everybody is talking about that. The rate of innovation in agentic AI is important. Because at what level are we in terms of the investment and the return on that curve? Are we still in the beginning where you can get outsized return for the investment you're making, or?
It's early days, I think. We've been at generative AI for, I guess, two years now, just about, right, and so it is, or coming up on two years, and so I think it's early days. There are a lot of things we can point to that show we're delivering terrific returns. But I think that the level at which we're investing and the breadth of our investment is significant. The Materia acquisition that we talked about in our third quarter conference call, while very small and essentially a pre-revenue startup, that team had done some really unique things from our perspective as it relates to creating agentic generative AI capabilities, and so we are really excited with all of the opportunities, and that team, we've grown the team. They are doing a terrific job helping drive and supplement innovation in our tax and accounting business.
And I think we see some things that they've created in their technology that we will leverage in our legal business and other places. And so that's one. But your point about things changing quickly, a lot of the stuff's evolving fast. We're focused on. We're not making one bet. We're sort of betting across a bunch of areas and investing and trying to react as quickly to the change in the stuff as we can. As a user of models, improving the accuracy, speed, and price of models coming from the foundational model providers, we think, will benefit. And so we're excited about that. But we also, for example, the Safe Sign acquisition last year brought an incredibly talented team that is creating small language models, our own, in the legal space.
We have a hypothesis that there will be certain tasks in legal that our own small language models that this team is creating will deliver better performance than the large language models. There's certainly a lot of exciting stuff going on. We think that's one of the reasons we are investing in excess of $200 million in 2024 and will again in 2025 in AI. There's so much going on and so much potential, we believe, to leverage these advancements that are happening into our market-serving professionals.
OK. I guess two points here in terms of if we see an impact on the economy from tariffs, which part of your portfolio has the potential to see some pressure?
Yeah.
Also when it comes to spending by the federal government in the U.S. on subscriptions and things like that, is there a downside in any particular area?
I can frame our exposure for you. Yeah. And maybe let me get that one out of the way first. So our government business, we said at the Investor Day last year was 19% of our legal segment. So call it 8% rough numbers of TR revenue. Roughly 60% of that is serving state and local government customers, and 40% is federal customers. Another way to slice it is the majority of it, or more than half of that revenue, is legal. So in other words, serving court systems and attorneys in the court systems. And the other 40% is our risk and fraud business. We feel uncertainty like others do. But we also believe that our products provide real value. And so ultimately, all I can commit to at this point is we'll be transparent.
As we see any changes, we've not seen any material change that I'd call out to date.
OK.
I'm sorry, what was the first part?
The first one is more economic.
That's right. Yeah, yeah. So the macro. So we're blessed with an 80% + recurring revenue mix and a lot of that multi-year contracts. And so we have historically, when you look at recessions or sort of the COVID-impacted market of a few years ago, been a quite defensive company when times get difficult. Where do we see the most exposure in a recessionary environment? I'd call out three places. So our Global Print business certainly is one where we would likely, in a bad macro environment, see some deterioration in the business. Within Reuters News, there is a portion of their business. It's pretty small to them and real small to TR, but that is in events and in digital advertising revenue. Those are both, I think, to some extent, discretionary purchases or areas where you could see some weakness.
And then in our corporate business, to the extent that you saw corporations pull back on their spending, I think you could see some impact on large multi-year software sales or content-enabled technology sales. And certainly, that would be an area where you might see some impact. We think it's a very resilient business as it's proven to be in the past, but maybe a little more impact there than we've seen in legal and tax.
As I was thinking the other day, as companies bring their employees back to the office, could that seat that was paid for, because everybody was working from home, you had to have access to a certain software at home, you can't share because you're all separated, if everybody goes back to work, can we see some of those seats be canceled because you can share now?
We do not price much, if anything, on a seat basis. In the legal business, we don't do seat-based pricing. It's enterprise pricing, and that's by design, particularly with generative AI. If one had a hypothesis that the industry could become much more efficient and reduce headcount to deliver the same value to customers, we wouldn't want to be in a position where our revenue would go down if we're providing the tools to produce that efficiency, right, and so we have enterprise contracts, and that's always been our model, and so we're not impacted a lot by the concept of seats in any of the business. In tax and accounting, much more of it is priced on a per tax return or per audit that they some of it's recurring. It's not all transactional, but it's more of a usage model.
Actions.
That's right, as opposed to user model. So I think we're pretty well protected from what you described.
One area of strength, I would say, very, a lot of investors agree on is your balance sheet strength and the way you dispose or use capital.
Yeah.
You have not made any stock buybacks recently. As interest rates now are coming down again, does that change your view on stock buyback?
Yeah. So first of all, we believe a balanced capital allocation approach is the best. And when I say balanced, I include three things: dividend growth annually. We've, the last four years, grown the dividend 10%. I think it's probably a fair bet that we would look to continue that trend in the future. Strategic M&A, which remains a priority for us, and capital returns as well, meaning share purchases or NCIB programs. We completed our last NCIB in the second quarter of last year. And we've not initiated a new one. I'd say a couple of thoughts. The returns we earn on buybacks today aren't as strong as they were a couple of years ago. And to some extent, the success of our share price and the valuation rising is part of it. But you hit on it.
When you run the numbers, and we use the same IRR and NPV type framework to assess M&A and large capital projects as we do to think about buybacks, what you'll see is the returns are OK. They're not great. And so our preference for M&A is in part because we believe we can earn higher returns. But over time, I think buybacks are part of the calculus. Now, I'd say one other thing. At our Investor Day one year ago, we provided a new capital strategy metric, which is we committed to returning to investors 75% or more of our annual free cash flow. And when I say that, I'm including dividends and buybacks, essentially, right? And so the dividend is a little bit more than 50% of the free cash flow today.
To commit or to deliver to that 75% target of ours, we would need to do $500 million of share repurchases per year. And I think that there's a good likelihood we'll do that. Now, to be clear, we need to ask the board for approval. And then we need to initiate a program, to your point. We've not done that to date. But I would be comfortable if you wanted to assume that we would do $500 million a year. Because I think that's likely. If we get to a point where the returns on share repurchases improve and look better to us, and we don't have better return opportunities in M&A, or we have the kind of strength we have in the balance sheet today, we would clearly consider doing more than that. And I think we would.
But we're also not going to apologize for being patient and waiting for opportunities that bring the kind of returns that we're looking to generate and provide to our shareholders, particularly when we're earning 4.5% or whatever it is on our cash today. So we want to maximize returns. And we are willing to be patient for a period of time as we look for the best return opportunities.
Great. Gary, we're out of time. Thank you very much.
All right. My pleasure.
Very good. Thank you, everyone. So we have up next Consensus.