All right, our next section is with Clarivate. So first of all, thank you everyone for joining this section. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Owen Lau. I cover information services, exchanges, and digital assets at Oppenheimer. Clarivate, it's a global information and workflow solution company serving customers in university, life science, and legal area. Today, we are very excited to have CFO Jonathan Collins joining us. Thank you for spending time with us today, Jonathan.
Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.
For the people who are listening to the webcast online, please feel free to submit your questions. We will do our best to address your question. So, as a starting point, Jonathan, you reported results last week, and you largely maintained the guidance but lowered expectation for your full-year organic growth and full-year free cash flow generation, kind of like expectation a little bit. Could you please highlight, you know, which drivers are more macro-related, and which factors are more related to competitive reason, and what actions are you taking to enhance your products?
Absolutely. So just as a reminder, we began this year with organic growth expectations between flat and about 2%, so about a 1% midpoint. As you noted last week, we reaffirmed all of our guidance ranges but indicated that organic growth would likely come in in the lower half of the range. Early in the year, I shared where I thought we would be on a full-year basis from a revenue type. We thought subscriptions would grow over 2%, and we expected our recurring revenues to be about 1% growth, and then we expected low double-digit declines in our transactional business, and that's what got us to about the midpoint of the range.
So really, two changes from that, and the first is I expect our subscription growth for this year is gonna have a one handle instead of a two handle, so something less than 2%. First half of the year was about 1.5%. What's really changed our expectation there, I think, is more macro-driven, in particular in our life sciences business. Life Sciences ACV was lower in the first half of the year than I would have originally expected. We do get feedback on budget pressures at our customers, and keep in mind, we are particularly focused on larger pharma. That's where a lot of our revenues come from.
So we have acknowledged, and Henry, the head of our life sciences business, put out a webinar earlier this year that pointed out some of the product innovation that we are doing. We think as we continue to enhance the products, we'll become more insular from some of these budget changes. But I do believe that's the pressure we're seeing in subscriptions in our life sciences business. And then, on the other hand, our IP business saw a bit of softness in, subscription sales performance or ACV in the first half of the year. I'll point to our patent intelligence area. This is, an area in which we're investing, and on our earnings call, in Jonathan's section, we outlined the four new applications or modules that are coming to market.
Derwent Search and Watch are really core applications that are coming into general release soon, have been in alpha and beta, so customers have been reacting to those. And while we saw some positive signs on Derwent's renewal rate, it did improve by about 2.5% over the same period in the prior year, we saw further deterioration in the latter solutions to be refreshed, and that's Innography and IncoPat. I think for the most part, this is the impetus for us to invest in the product, particularly with Innography. I think IncoPat is a product that, as Chinese content for the Chinese market, there could be a little bit of a macro impact there.
But life sciences and IP are what putting a little bit of pressure on the subscription performance for this year, probably have us just under 2%, and that's most of the change in that. I also did note that our recurring revenues, which for those that may not follow us as closely, this is mostly our patent and trademark renewals. So this is where we renew those patents globally for our customers, both large corporates and customers of law firms. I do expect that business is gonna be flat, where I originally anticipated it would be a bit better. And we cited a couple of factors, but the most notable is we had an award that gets tracked to this revenue type at the USPTO that was appealed, and that appeal was upheld.
That process is gonna be pushed to next year, so there was some incremental revenue I would've expected in the second half of the year that we'll have to work to secure for next year. So those are the primary drivers on the organic growth. Maybe I'll just touch on the other Owen, which was the free cash flow. So our revenue, because we think the dollar is likely to be a bit weaker in the second half of the year, we'll offset some of that and stay pretty close to the midpoint on revenue. We're managing costs, so I believe our profit and our profit margins are gonna be nearly on top or pretty close to the midpoint of the guidance range.
But on free cash flow, I think we'll likely be at the lower end. That's really driven by two things. Number one, Jonathan and I, in the first half of the year, saw some opportunities to slightly increase our capital spending. So we originally thought we would step up this year by about $20 million. We're gonna step up year-over-year by about $30 million, so an incremental $10 million there to continue to invest in enhancing the products and bringing the right content into the products. And then the other item is, I think we're gonna likely be a slight use of cash and working capital this year, just the way our sales phasing is shaping up for the second half of the year.
We're gonna have some growth in our non-subscription revenues that's concentrated towards the fourth quarter, and I think some of that growth will likely end up being collected next year. So those are the two primary drivers as to why I think we'll be closer to the low end of the free cash flow range, but still gonna be a strong cash flow generation for us by historical standards. You know, almost a 40% conversion on Adjusted EBITDA on a full-year basis, and we'll have plenty of capital to put to work, and I'm sure we'll have a chat on the capital allocation here in a bit.
Got it. So in the second half of this year, you do expect organic growth to, like, could return to positive territory? Maybe we can dive into each section individually.
Yeah.
So for subscription revenue, you expect organic growth to remain consistent compared to the first half. Could you please talk about the dynamics there, you know, for each of your segments, like A&G, patent, and also life science?
You got it. So to your point, returning to growth in the second half of the year really is gonna happen in the non-subscription type. So yes, I do expect that the subscription business is gonna grow at a comparable level, just under 2%, in the second half of the year. And maybe I'll just touch on each of the segments. We continue to expect to see really solid subscription growth from our A&G segment. So as a reminder, in the first half of the year, A&G subscriptions grew at greater than 3%, and that has improved over the last couple of years, principally based on the investments that we have made in the Web of Science. So this is a product that is largely a subscription business.
There's a small amount of transactional sales, but most of what we sell in research and analytics is Web of Science, and most of that is subscription. And this is a product for years had been hovering around flat. With the investments that we've made in the last few years, it's returned to growth. That's lifted A&G's growth to this level of greater than 3% in the first half, and that's really been enabled by really strong renewal rates. So we disclosed that the renewal rates that we saw in A&G in the first half were 96%. So those are really industry-leading, great renewal rates for the subscription business and bodes well for the recovery in A&G as Bar and his team continue to execute their plan.
In our other two segments, that implies the subscription businesses for both of those, the decline just slightly, and that is due to the product challenges and some macro pressures that we highlighted. I talked about some of those that brought our organic growth view for the year down, you know, in the lower half of our range. But I will note that this is the area where we're investing, and we took a little bit of extra time in the earnings call to walk through the product plan for the patent intelligence business. So this is those products I mentioned before, Derwent, Innography and IncoPat, and the two new applications that we're gonna be bringing, the Watch service as well as the R&D tool.
So making that investment, and continuing to make that investment, we expect to see good signs on usage of those platforms in the second half of the year, which will be a good leading indicator of the performance of those businesses heading into next year. And then on the life sciences side, we've talked about the fact for a while now that our pivot in our strategy as it relates to real-world data, taking those, that content to market directly to life sciences companies, has put pressure on that business, for over a year now. That continues, to be at a headwind, both in transactional and in subscription, and that's a product that we are strongly investing in.
We highlighted on earnings that real-world data platform should have 10-20 therapy areas or indications on it by the end of this year, that our teams can be out selling with a handful of prepackaged analytics. And then we also shared that next year, we'll be bringing to market a franchise, and that's going to give us the ability to add additional content to our real-world data repository that makes it more unique, more valuable for customers, and then we'll pick a specific area that we drill deeper on analytics with. So those are areas we're investing that'll help on the subscription side. Maybe then I'll pivot to what the real change first half or second half is gonna be on, and that's the performance of the non-subscriptions business.
So, the recurring order type, again, which is largely patent and trademark renewals, was down in the first half of the year a few percent. I expect it'll grow a few percent in the second half to be about flat. We're seeing good stability in the book. We see some signs of life in volumes. We lap some softer comps in the second half. And those things, along with a timing issue that we'll have in the fourth quarter, give us confidence that that business is going to grow in the second half of the year and get us to about flat. And then on the transactional side of the business, we declined about 7% in the first half of the year.
I'm expecting low single-digit growth in the second half of the year, so nothing heroic, just a little bit of growth, and that'll trim the decline to low single-digit declines on a full year basis. We lap tougher comps, and we get into easier comps in the second half of the year, really in all three of our segments. A&G, digital collections, and books purchases softened a bit in the fourth quarter of last year. And then also in IP, trademark volumes were soft Q4 of last year, and those trademark search volumes have continued to improve through the year. So we have pretty good line of sight into some improvement there.
So that's what we think will really drive the transactional and get us to a place that on a full year basis will be in the lower end of our range, somewhere between flat and about 1%.
Got it. Maybe on a transactional side, I mean, I think the perception, it's, it's always, like, kind of unpredictable. I mean, I guess, I guess the question is, what makes you comfortable that you can get to low single-digit % growth in the second half? Have you signed any deals yet that, you know, you expect to kind of like, buck the revenue in the second half, or there are some other dynamics here?
No, it's an excellent point, Owen. The transactional business has been our Achilles heel in predicting over the last few years, and even since Clarivate has been a public company. There are really three drivers of that, and their names are Bar, Henry, and Gordon. So having three division presidents that have now been in their businesses for a year, in the new operating model, and as they have come up to speed, has given us much better execution. We indicated in Q1, we expected the business to decline by about 2%. We did a little better than that. We indicated in the second quarter we thought the business would decline by about 1%. We did a little bit better than that.
We've, you know, made progress in being able to predict the performance of those transactional businesses, which is usually the driver quarter to quarter. To the second part of your point, yes, they've also been heavily focused on securing deals that'll have future delivery. I gave a couple of anecdotal examples. We're not gonna give specifics for competitive reasons, but both life sciences and the IP business has some deals that they have won that will deliver in the second half of the year that start to increase some of that confidence. Historically, you know, the fourth quarter is always, on a seasonal basis, the largest transactional business quarter.
But yeah, the performance of having those three gentlemen in their seats for over a year now has really helped to enhance the predictability of our non-subscription revenues, and particularly transactional.
Got it. So without getting into 2025 guidance, how should we think about, like, you're kind of, like, returning back to positive territory organic growth and going into 2025? Do you feel confident about this trend? How do you think about that?
Yeah, I appreciate your point. You know, I don't have any specific numbers or don't have a guide for 2025 to share yet. Investors should expect that from us in normal course, which is typically at our year-end earnings in February. But what we have said are a couple things within the A&G business. The subscription business is performing well. I do believe that we're in a sense resetting to some slightly lower discretionary budgets that are available to purchase digital collections and even individual backfile titles of monographs or research books. So those things, you know, as we move into next year, we should have better comps on those and have a good subscription trajectory as we continue to invest in that.
I'm really excited about, you know, the Research Assistant that A&G has put into market, an AI-powered tool that sits on the Web of Science platform. You know, that'll be in product this year. It's a really good thing for us to demonstrate additional investment and value that we're delivering for the users of the platform as we go into next year. So another example of something that we're doing, investments that we're making in AI, that will help the business. And then as we step through the other segments, I'll go to IP next. You know, the progress that we've made on the software and the services business, Jonathan talked about in the prepared remarks on the call, the fact that our win rate for our IPMSs has continued to improve. That's very encouraging.
These are great products like IPfolio, FoundationIP. Those are so important because, we provide those customers not only with workflow software, but often, with the services that come along with that, the renewing of the patents and trademarks within their portfolio. A really important product. I think that bodes well. Then next year's gonna be a really big year for patent intelligence. Having the new Derwent in market in the second half of this year, having Watch service available, and then launching both the R&D and the new Innography next year, should really, help us to start to see, some level of improvement, in those businesses as we start to, move into next year's renewal cycle.
And then obviously on the life sciences side, the thing that we've drawn the most specific attention to is the real-world data. We talked about that, the investments we're making in the platform, the number of indications that we'll be able to serve with some high-quality analytics on top of our data, should start to come into market. And then the franchise that we talked about for the first time on the earnings call last week is another item, that's available for the life sciences business. So continuing to invest Henry's approach of two releases a year for all major products, that Jonathan talked about on last week's call, is another thing that we think to help modernize those solutions and improve our position in the market.
All these things are items that we would expect to give us some momentum as we move into the coming years. And again, more color on the specifics of what we think 2025 will look like early next year.
Got it. So in your last earnings call, you talk about Clarivate will take a more balanced approach towards capital allocation, and I ask about the size. But I wanna ask about how you rank buyback, M&A, organic investment, and debt repayment. And also, will the new CEO, Matti, like, his appointment impact this approach in the near term, or everybody kind of buys into this new model?
Yeah, I certainly believe there's buy-in on what we indicated at earnings, so that was something that we thought through. So, I know Matti's gonna be heavily focused on getting up to speed, getting into the business, looking at innovation, looking at the commercialization opportunities of the technology. But I think on capital allocation, I can give a pretty good indication. And what we wanted to highlight is, over the last couple of years, Jonathan and I were very focused on deleveraging. We felt that we needed to get the leverage below four turns. That was really important. So as an example, last year, we used most of our available cash flow, about three-quarters of it specifically, to de-lever, and what we're indicating this year is, we're not gonna be going at that pace.
There are a couple things: getting below the four turns of leverage and improving rate environment, the fact that we were able to extend our term loan to 2031, those things all give us continued confidence in operating the business in the near term at these leverage levels. And, certainly at where the stock is priced today, we see that as a very attractive opportunity to reacquire that. So buybacks will become proportionally more important than they have been in the past. And then we also acknowledged that there are places, and we did this in the first half of the year with the MotionHall, Global Q, and Rowan acquisitions. We see opportunities to acquire earlier-stage technology that can accelerate the development of a new offering for us.
So most recently with Rowan, you know, the opportunity in attorney workspace, with Global Q, the opportunity in workflow solutions within, the supply chain for our life sciences customers, and then, MotionHall with great AI capabilities that we can put into the, the Cortellis suite of products within life sciences. So there are some of those that we'll continue to look at to help accelerate growth. But we wanted to make sure that the message was clear at earnings, that the approach of using most of our cash for deleveraging, is less of a priority right now, and we can be opportunistic about, repurchasing a share and, making small acquisitions that'll really serve as vectors, on the growth side to help accelerate, our organic growth.
Got it. So you talked about you have been making some smaller acquisitions. You just mentioned Rowan, MotionHall, Global QMS. So those are the smaller acquisitions you have made this year, and it looks like you will continue to make further acquisitions. I guess the question is, what are the criteria you're looking for, and what are the gaps you really want to fill, you know, for the rest of this year?
There, there's nothing that I would sit here today and say we have to have. I would characterize these as being opportunistic, and these are places where we see an unmet need for a customer, that we have other products and solutions that, combined with a new offering, could serve the customer better and provide growth. The opportunity for an acquisition typically comes if we have the ability to buy something versus build it ourselves, to accelerate speed to market. And practically speaking, the business can be more valuable in our hands because of the commercial channels and access to market that we have with these customers.
So I would say for the most part, these last three acquisitions that I just mentioned fit into those, and it's possible we could do another one or two in the second half of the year. We may not. You know, so we're not signaling that it has to be a certain amount, or it specifically will, but just highlighting that for a couple of years we were, for all intents and purposes, completely out of the M&A game. We did a divestiture. But we're comfortable with the acquisition and integration of the ProQuest business, that we're now in a place where we can handle some of these small tuck-ins, and we think it's a wise thing to be opportunistic about those.
Got it. So the opposite for M&A is divestiture-
Mm-hmm
... which is a hot topic we hear quite a bit. Could you please remind us why you think the three businesses right now, you have are better off under the same roof?
Sure. I mean, we've shared with investors before that the original logic behind the combination of the academic, life sciences and IP business was that these businesses had the ability to share content, technology, and certain commercial channels that helped each of them to achieve a scale that they weren't able to on their own, and ultimately that led to $hundreds of millions of cost synergies as they were brought into the business. So we recognize that's a benefit that exists. We do not believe these businesses have to be together, so there's never been an assertion that they couldn't be independent or thrive individually.
And this is a place where the board's charter to management is to focus on improving the performance of each of these segments, and really to drive better product innovation that leads to better execution and higher organic growth. So that's really the potential. Jonathan had been clear over the last couple of years; he would say often that, you know, none of these businesses are a business that we have to have, and we'll always look for opportunities to create values for shareholders. That's an ongoing analysis. It's not a point in time. But right now, we're laser-focused on, in particular, improving the performance in all the businesses.
But A&G's getting closer, but we've still got some work to do in the life sciences, and IP space to help them to get closer to the market growth rates.
Got it. So let's move on to each segment individually. So let's start with A&G. The subscription business, that part was pretty good, but you also highlighted that there were some headwinds in the transactional sales for the content side because of like the softer one-time budgets in the last academic year. So I'm just wondering, have you heard any change in the budget for the upcoming academic year? Anything there?
No, no, not a lot. I think what we recognize, after the last few quarters, and we've heard it anecdotally from some of our important customers, is there was a bit more funding available, for the last few years coming out of COVID, for digital resources, and some of that was used to build out, these digital collections. We had strong sales in those over the last couple of years. The subscription business in A&G hadn't been doing quite as well. In particular, we talked about the Web of Science, but, we had done okay on the, the digital collections and book side of the business. We've seen that pull back a little bit in the last few quarters, and our general sense is, coming into the next, budget year, that...
We'll see something that's more in line with the rate of spending that we've seen over the last few quarters. So I highlighted that in the fourth quarter of this year, we lapped some more challenging comps from earlier in the year, and we get into a place where I think we're probably closer to those budgets being reset. And again, this is on the margins. This is not a you know, it's not a really big part of the business, but does affect the growth rate for a minority of A&G, which is a transactional business.
Another hot topic is GenAI. Could you please talk about your journey of incorporating GenAI into A&G? Have you launched any products in this area yet, like in Web of Science and also ProQuest? And if yes, what is the feedback so far?
It's been really good, and I touched on this earlier, and I love talking about it. I'll highlight again. So Bar and his team have introduced the Research Assistant, which is an AI-powered analytics tool that sits on the Web of Science, that is available for customers to view and to use for certain use cases. And this is the ability to, in your search process, be prompted on areas to look other opportunities for for resources within that field, that go beyond the traditional search box and clicking of links to really bring the content more to life and to help refine the search. And we've talked about this very openly.
We think the user journey for discovery is gonna continue to be more conversational, where in the past it's been, you know, the single search box and a list of results. There's an opportunity for a dialogue leveraging AI for those capabilities. Really new, interesting visualization tools that enables, that's sit within Research Assistant. So given how close you are to this product, I'm gonna need to make sure we get you a demo of this, given, you know, your other- the other things you do with your time. So, this will be a really interesting one. It's a great example of how we think that that technology can augment what, what, a researcher's experience is when they're in the platform.
I will also highlight that Henry's team, when they did their Clarivate in the Age of AI webinar, I believe it was back in March, highlighted this conversational discovery coming to the Cortellis's platform. I think it was the competitive intelligence tool that we showed a demo of how this will AI-powered search will enhance the experience for the user. It's also important to note that the new Derwent will come with AI-powered search, which is a marked improvement over what those users have experienced in that platform for the last decade. So, great opportunity there. And then, of course, we continue to look and evaluate opportunities to leverage this new technology in the middle and in the back offices, so there are opportunities for us to become more efficient.
There are great tools for, dev teams to use to accelerate, the pace of development and the writing and, testing and implementation of code. That shows promise that could help to drive some efficiency as well, too. So we continue to be really thoughtful and try to prioritize the highest value use cases for the customer, but also what they can do for our business internally.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to see the demo of this product, but I think the question is, how do you price this how do you price this product? Can you price it separately, or it's kind of like part of the contract negotiation, negotiation conversation going forward?
It's a really great point, Owen. We think our hypothesis is it's gonna be a bit of both. So there will be an aspect of this that will help to augment, that'll be, you know, just embedded in the platform. It can help to keep and improve renewal rates. It can help to drive pricing on the margins because we're adding more value. But the other part of our thinking is that there will be certain cases where some of these solutions could be discreetly priced as upsells or add-ons to the existing capabilities. So you will see us, in the coming months and quarters, work with various options of this, working with our customers. The reality is there are incremental costs associated with operating some of these LLMs in production.
So, you know, there's going to be an opportunity to drive some recovery or figure out how much investment that we wanna make on that to enhance and improve what we offer to the customer. So I think it's gonna be a bit of both, and we'll continue to share color on that as it unfolds going forward.
So you talked about all these products. Any additional color on the next step in terms of maybe the timeline of launching this new product, and the progression? How should investors think about, you know, when these products will come to the market and, you know, kind of like how it would impact the financials? I guess that's the question.
Yeah, it's really fair. I think it's going to continue to happen in the coming quarters, and in the next couple of years. So I wouldn't point to a specific point in time when all of them are gonna hit. It's going to be ongoing. The Researcher Assistant is a great example of one that came in this year. The AI-powered search on Cortellis is an example of one coming this year as well, too. Henry's philosophy of having, you know, multiple releases on an annual basis for all the products will continue to get these capabilities embedded to them. And then maybe more specifically on the big ones, we talked about Derwent, just as a reminder, the search product will be in general release this year. Watch is coming shortly after that.
And then in the first half of next year, we'll see both the R&D and Innography with their new user interfaces, and these will have AI-powered capabilities in them when they come into the product. So I think you'll start to see it across all three sectors.
Got it. So let's move on to IP. There are many, many products in the IP when I look at your webpage. I think the two bigger and more famous products are Derwent, you just talked about quite a bit, and also CPA Global. I guess that's kind of the one common question we keep getting. Can you talk about maybe the use cases of these products, and will companies actually use both of them or just one of them? Like, how should we think about the potential overlap or, you know, like, the use cases for these products?
No, it's a great point. I'll go back to the sub-segments that we've talked about publicly and try to put some of the pieces together. So first of all, when we refer to our IP segment, we operate in both patents and trademarks. So workflows are different. Sometimes the parts of the customers we deal with are different, but both types of IP we cover. For both of those, we really span all three of these other areas. So we do IP intelligence, we do IP maintenance, and we do IP management. So intelligence are the products that help to analyze and track the IP in the market, so search for whether it's a prior art or freedom to operate or potential infringements.
On the patent side of the house, we have our Derwent, Innography, and IncoPat, so our patent intelligence products, and we spent some time here, talking about those yet this afternoon, and the investments that we're making there. On the trademark side, CompuMark is the product that provides most of that capability in collaboration with the acquisition we did for Darts -ip. Those are the ones that handle that on the trademark side. For the maintenance side, for many of our customers around the world, large corporations, and law firms that use some of our intelligence products, we also renew their patents for them and provide you know services on maintaining those.
So we do that for both patents and for trademarks, and that's really, for all intents and purposes, the legacy CPA business, plus the very last category, which is the IP management. And you'll hear us call these IPMSs, intellectual property management systems. These are workflow tools that help to manage the process of taking an idea, through to securing a patent, and the ability to, renew that patent on an ongoing basis. IPfolio is one of our big products, FoundationIP, another of the significant products that are out in the market, and these products, manage those workflows for professionals that are interacting in all levels of IP. And these came from, the CPA acquisition as well, too, and they have a very powerful, better together value proposition with...
combined with the, the maintenance service or the renewing of, intellectual property. So those are really the three areas. Again, two major markets, large corporates that handle all of their IP, largely in-house, and then large law firms that are, helping corporations around the world, manage these workflows. And we have solutions that are tailored, to both of those markets, across these areas. But yeah, that's a refresher on the IP segment. Then, in terms of where we're headed with these, we've talked about the investment we're making in intelligence, to return those products to growth. We had some macro headwinds on the maintenance business last year. We expect those to subside.
We've seen some improved performance in our IPMS win rates that we highlighted on our last call, which is important for that combination of software and services together, to improve over the next couple of years. So it's really a combination of those things that we expect to help the IP business migrate toward its mid-single digits growth potential, in the coming years.
So if we want to step back a little bit and think about, like, the headwind, I mean, you talk about, I think Derwent improve renewal rates, and you are going to develop more new products and enhance the products. But I guess one of the key questions we also got was, like, what are the headwinds to these products? Is it, like, AI-related? Will AI disrupt the whole thing? I mean, I just want to get a sense about how you think about this, like, AI potential AI disruption narrative.
No, it's an interesting point. I think a year ago, there were... this was a very hot topic. I think it has subsided as we and others that provide products like we do recognize that the value and the quality of the underlying data is so critical to have the output of the AI be useful and accurate. And we highlighted that in our markets, just, it's just so critical that the information is accurate. You can't afford hallucinations or incorrect output from the AI, so the underlying data is really important. And patent intelligence, that you raise, is a great example. The pressure that we've seen in Derwent hasn't been recent. You know, Derwent has been a product that's been declining for years now, and it also hasn't been because of AI.
It's been because of someone taking a more modern user interface that's easier to interact with and willing to accept, you know, a lesser content quality and make that trade-off. And that's why we're so convicted that, DWPI, the Derwent World Patents Index, is just a great, you know, unparalleled set of content. And with a really high-quality user interface that's tailored towards those four different use cases, search, watch, R&D, and the corporate user, and strategy and business development, really will create a great value proposition, and AI will be a part of that. There will be places that, like you and I have talked about already this afternoon, conversational discovery, relevance of information, you know, enabling high-quality visualization, through the use of LLMs.
These are all great, tools to help make the product more valuable, and that's the reason why we're investing on such a great underlying data source. We have decades and decades and decades of highly editorially enriched, curated content that really improves the accuracy of getting to the information you need, and now we're making that investment in the, application layer, to make it, user-friendly and really attractive for the customers.
... Got it. So we have, like, four minutes left. I do wanna ask one final questions on IP, which is your USPTO contract. I think on the last earnings call, you mentioned there was a delay. Could you please talk about, add more color on this delay? Do you when do you expect, you know, they will start, like, honoring this contract, or you can kinda-
Yeah
... like, start booking revenue?
No, it's a great point. This is all in the public domain, and you have to read through a lot of information. Just a quick summary, this is, we refer to it as the PCT, the Paris Convention, work that we do, related to classification. This is a contract that had been existing, that there were three participants. They ran a process last year, to take it down to two. We were one of those two, which means we would've picked up some incremental revenue. We had that baked into the second half of this year's when we expected to start to see some of that benefit. There was an appeal or multiple appeals, I don't remember exactly, and the most recent one was upheld. They're gonna have to...
Or they've informed us that they're gonna be rerunning that process next year, so we'll be participating in that. That potential upside still exists for us, going forward, we're just not gonna see it in the second half of this year.
Got it. That's clear. And then the final segment, the life science segment, some of the challenges you mentioned are macro-related. Could you please talk about, like, how and when these headwinds could potentially abate, and what actions Clarivate you guys are doing to mitigate its impact?
I'll probably really focus on the latter, because the dollar amount that we're talking about on a full-year basis, you know, isn't that large. But it's really what you saw in that webinar for life sciences and healthcare a few months ago, that concentrated investment in using AI and other technology advancements in the application layer of our platform to help the information be more discoverable, more relevant, and more tightly interwoven with the workflows of our customers, whether it's in competitive intelligence, drug discovery intelligence, you know, the regulatory and safety compliance, or ultimately, the commercialization of drugs. So we see the opportunity to continue to enhance the platforms and the products, and the user interface, and how the customers interact with those.
That's really what we're focused on, Owen, to help this business return to growth, along with a meaningful investment in real-world data, and we expect that that'll pay dividends for us in the coming years.
Got it. Any final word for us? We have 30 seconds left.
Thanks so much for having us. We look forward to getting Matti out after he starts to get up to speed, getting introduced, and you know, given the opportunity to meet with some of the shareholders at some point as well.
Sounds great. All right, thanks a lot, Jonathan. Thank you for your time again, and thank you all for joining-