Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. We are really excited to have Jerre, CEO of Clarivate, and Richard, CFO of Clarivate, join us today morning. Jerre, do you wanna give a quick overview, and then we'll jump into Q&A? Thanks.
No, happy to, and thank you. We're delighted to be with you as always. If you look backwards, we just finished half hour ago our quarterly call with all of our hands worldwide and had the opportunity to talk about the amazing job that they've accomplished in the last two years almost and including the customer delight scores that were excellent. We'll talk more about that. It was such a good feeling to reflect for a minute. We went public on May 14th, 2019. We had seven standalone businesses at that time with great potential. Richard and team was carrying a burden of 6.8x trailing debt. I must say, what was accomplished despite that was amazing.
When we went public in 2019, this set of businesses I had watched since 2012, back in my days at IHS, and was very excited about the potential of what we could do to help change the world. We've done that, and we're just getting warmed up. If you had an opportunity to see the Investor Days, including the Monday demos, you'll see how far we've come. We've actually introduced 60 new products or improvements in 2021, period. I just couldn't be happier with everything we've laid out to do and how well we've executed. We moved from those seven businesses, divested of some pieces, and moved to two groups, the IP Group and the Science Group.
We complemented those with several tuck-ins and then two large, very successful acquisitions, CPA and DRG. Just couldn't be happier with that. We're now moving very rapidly to what we intended to do way back in May of 2019, where we're moving to what we call One Clarivate, which is a single system to open up all the potential we've got in four major global markets with all of our products, rather than historically, as we did selling them one-off. Huge opportunity. Couldn't be happier in all the steps we've completed to get there. I'm very thankful for everybody. We're happy to be here and talk about it today.
That's a great introduction, Jerre. As you highlighted, we see very strong momentum in the business going into the fourth quarter, and the organic growth is expected to accelerate to 6%-8% in 4Q 2021. We've received a number of inbound questions from investors just trying to better understand the growth acceleration from 3% in the third quarter to 6%-8%. I was wondering if you could help, if you or Richard could help us with the revenue bridge.
Yeah.
How should we think about particularly the contribution from the acquisition, all of those things? Thanks.
No, happy to do that. Just as a refresher, in 2019, the business was about 2.8% organic growth. In 2020, it was 1% if you think about everything that was going on. In 2021, and I'll have Richard fill in the blanks 'cause he's done a great job of that. If you think, right now, actually, and I think people forget it a bit, we're actually have grown organically 5% year to date for the three quarters, the first three quarters. There was a lot of peculiarities by quarter because of a lot of renewals, et cetera, being moved in and out with COVID last year. Take them, Richard, from where we're actually at the 5% year to date and what we expect to see happen in Q4.
Sure, yeah. The objective is, as we said, consistently to get to 6%-8% organic growth in the fourth quarter. The pickup in Q4 is principally driven by transactional revenue growth, in particular in the sciences group, so that is custom data sales in Life Sciences. It is in academic and government. It is back file sales, where we sell chronological slices of information, and also in professional services and consulting as we close out delivery of projects, you know, naturally consistent with the end of the year. It's very much driven by those elements of our revenue stream.
As a reminder, the business that we acquired in February 2020 being DRG in the life sciences space, that has a significant back-end loading of revenue into Q4, where 36% of their annual revenue is booked in Q4, driven by those custom data deals and consulting. Those are the drivers of Q4 growth in particular. I'd also add in absolute terms that CPA in the IP Group, the business that we acquired in October last year, Q4 from a seasonality perspective, in absolute terms, is always their strongest quarter, just simply due to the timing of patent renewals as we close out the calendar year. Those are the main levers that we're pulling on to get into that range of outcomes.
Great answer, Richard. I'd just add one thing to it. We said that early this year that we would see 48% revenue growth in first half, 52% in the second half. We're on target. That's where we reaffirm the guidance, et cetera. That actually will be a norm for us because of what Richard described so well. It's really not a hockey stick of our business, it's a hockey stick of the industries we're in. Great job, Richard. Thanks.
Thanks, Jerre. Thanks, Richard. This was very helpful color. Again, Jerre, as you mentioned, the product demo day as well as the analyst day last week was really good, very insightful. One of the key things I wanna focus on is the revenue growth. You called out organic revenue growth of 6.5%-7.5% in the near term. We just wanted to understand, is that the expected organic revenue growth in fiscal year 2022 as well? If you could elaborate on what are your expectations when you gave out the fiscal year 2022 guidance, what were the expectations for revenue and EBITDA contribution from ProQuest in fiscal year 2022?
Yeah, yeah. Just we did give guidance, and I'll just quickly spin through it to remind people that didn't hear it. I do need to preface. This is guidance including ProQuest, and we're consistently hopeful that we'll close ProQuest before the end of this year. Assuming that all plays out, the guidance we gave for 2022 was $2.875 billion-$2.935 billion revenue. By the way, if you look back to 2018, that revenue was $830 million. The progress, I couldn't be prouder of a team that's done what they've done. Adjusted EBITDA $1.2 billion-$1.26 billion. We're growing.
If you go all the way back to 2018, our adjusted EBITDA for the end of 2021 will be 44.5%-45% and be 47% in 2022 as we exit after we take the cost out, for which we'll do, and we announced at the time we announced the planned acquisition of ProQuest. We feel really good. If you go back to 2018, we've increased almost 70%, actually 1,800% from where we were to where we're at today with EBITDA, and I'm so proud of the team and just couldn't be better. Important adjusted diluted EPS, we said this year $0.70-$0.74, and we said next year $0.90-$0.96. I'll come back on that in a minute.
Actually, we'll be on a $1.02, a magic $1.02 with run rate cost savings as we exit 2022. What I've always done, and it really feels great here, when we acquire a large acquisition, this will be three, we have to, at the end of the first year, increase all in our adjusted EPS by at least 10% and by 15% or better at the end of year two. It's just critical that we do that, 'cause that gives us the payback. I'm feeling really good about that. Of course, I've always focused on cash, period. Cash per share and adjusted free cash flow, unlevered, will be $950 million-$1 billion in 2022. Again, assuming we get approval to get ProQuest closed.
That gives us great flexibility going forward, and we'll balance off what gives share owners best return, if it's more M&A, if it's share buyback, or if it's a reduction in debt. We're now going to be in the position to use all those levers when we go forward. It's a great place to be as we move into 2022.
That's very helpful color, Jerre. Maybe just can you also talk about, and again, I'm sorry if I missed it, but what's the expected organic growth for fiscal year 2022? Is it gonna be in that 6.5%-7.5%?
I'd like to wait to really lock that up after we get ProQuest closed.
Okay. That's very helpful color. Jerre, maybe switching gears, if you can talk about the One Clarivate initiative, and in particular, you identified $1 billion of targeted revenue opportunity over the next three years. I was just wondering if you could provide some more color on that front. Can you talk about the key upsell, cross-sell opportunities? Thanks.
Yeah, great question, and I'm so excited 'cause we'll go live on January first with having rebuilt the entire company to be focused into those four global markets. Those global markets in total, not splitting each of them out, but in total, are growing about 7% each year. Anywhere from 14% in life science and medical science to about 5.5%-6%, if we didn't take share. Just the business is growing 5%-5.5%, 6% in academic and government. The upside potential we've got is a combination of share, but most importantly, what you ask. That we've got great products that we've sold in these, my words, silos historically. What we now are doing is bringing those together into solutions.
I'd love for anybody that didn't have the opportunity to see Investor Day to at least see the three factual living examples that we gave with Mukhtar, Gordon, and Stefano on the solutions that will sell that we did sell and will sell in. The upside's huge because nobody has the total combination that we do in those four markets. Feels great. We had a lot to get done first, including going from zero inside sales to world-class inside sales, well north of 80% of our customers now, and very specific goals as we go into 2022 for higher retention. Richard and I could talk about that all day, but we would expect retention in our whole team in 2022 to be 92.5%-93%, up from way back when, 89%.
We expect to see in a couple more years, so let's just say in 2024, somewhere approaching 95%. That's a very big deal for us. A lot of that comes from inside sales. The great job Steve did on Investor Day, showing the pyramid of how we're split up. The one thing to remember is that the people on the street and the account execs, on average, will now have 16 customers. At one point before inside sales, et cetera, they had as many as 80. A huge difference. We've spent a lot of time and money, and we'll continue to enhance our back room to make that even smoother too. It's really exciting.
It's interesting in September 2019, there was a meeting of several of us, actually in London, where we laid out five global markets that we thought, with help from outside consultants, that could make the best use of all of our product offerings. We've gone to four of those. Eventually, we'll split off to that fifth one as we grow. There's room to grow for many, many years to come, including we'll look from an acquisition standpoint of what tuck-ins and larger ones that will complement us in those four global businesses. It's exciting. Steve last week had our entire top sales team from around the world together, which was great that we could finally do that in London.
I gotta tell you, the energy of where we're at and all the training we've done and the recruiting, et cetera, it's exciting to be at that point compared to where we were in May of 2019.
That's very helpful color, Jerre. Maybe just if you can focus on the technology transformation. You talked about how when you took over, there were seven different businesses, and obviously under your leadership, Clarivate has been at the forefront of cloud migration with the implementation of Research Intelligence Cloud, selling it as a service, also Singularity. It's been pretty phenomenal. I was just wondering if you could add additional color on how this technology transformation is really helping drive new product innovation and improving your Vitality Index. Thanks.
Yeah, I'll start, and Richard deserves a lot of that credit because he was. When he arrived, there was zero pipeline of new products, improvements, et cetera. If you look, I can still remember the second day I took the lead as CEO. I met Armughan, who was leading, just starting the Singularity effort. I stayed particularly heavy on top of that to support, make sure they got all of the tools they needed and all of the expenses they needed, because we were 100% manual. Today, Richard, tell them where we are with artificial intelligence, machine learning, et cetera.
Yeah. In terms of the core architectures, Ashish, the overwhelming majority of our technology platforms are in the cloud. We've introduced, as you said, artificial intelligence and machine learning to all of our content ingestion processes. That facilitates, you know, timely delivery of content and data to our clients. Above all, the re-architecting of the platform enables us to share our content much more seamlessly across our products than we've been able to previously. That, you know, adds velocity to the rate at which we bring new product to market, 'cause we can move our data around much more dexterously. In terms of the release protocols, a number of our platforms. You know, in Life Sciences, for example, we can now release at will.
We're able to push through upgrades to our products much more seamlessly than previously. We're delighted with the architectural upgrades that we've engineered, and also the introduction of more contemporary technologies to drive the business forward. Just back to Jerre's earlier remarks around the product renovation. Absolutely right. We've got in terms of our product platform and our product roadmaps, it is absolutely night and day compared to where we were three years ago, four years ago. We've got, you know, extensive roadmaps to drive growth. Good roadmaps to drive improved retention rates up to that 92.5%- 93% level that Jerre quoted earlier. Our ambition, of course, is to get to 95% retention rate, which some of our products are already ahead of.
Yeah.
We've got to have all the boats lift across the portfolio up to that 95% level, which we consider them best in class. That's our objective over the next, you know, two years.
Richard, if I could just give them a little color on the data lake we provided for all of the people that were doing the vaccine research that we couldn't have done even a year before.
Yeah. I think in terms of stimulating growth, the monetization of our data assets, both in the science group and the IP group, is a real central tenet for our strategy. We have the research intelligence cloud that you quoted earlier, Ashish, which has all of our scientific data assets. Then we have the IP data hub, which have all of our IP assets, and we have cross-pollination of data assets across those two main pools. Jerre's references to the pandemic and what we did at the outset of the pandemic is pool all of our data assets into a separate cloud-based data lake that housed all of our infectious disease and vaccine data and clinical trial data.
That was made available on a pro bono basis to not-for-profit organizations who are involved in developing the vaccine programs, but also made available to our existing clients as well. You know, in the life sciences space, we're selling to the top 50, top 50 life sciences companies. We all know who the leaders were in bringing those vaccines to market, in the last few quarters. We made our data assets available to those companies to facilitate their research and bring vaccine solutions to the pandemic. We absolutely had a major role to play in accelerating that program.
That's what's so fun about this company. Not only has it got great potential for all of our shareowners and our customers, but it helps change the world for many years to come.
That's great, Jerre. It is truly inspiring. Maybe switching to a topic around margins and margin expansion. Can you just talk about the key drivers for margin expansion? The guidance, maybe both the near term as well as the midterm guidance from 40%-43% in 2022 to 47%-48% in the near term and 50% in the midterm. Thanks.
Yeah, I'll start. Richard will pick up 'cause I'm so proud of our teams that two comments I'd make. Our investors should think of this business being one that will operate at the 50% EBITDA margins or higher over time. Where we'll exit 2021 is very close to that number for sure, a bit above or below. Once we complete the cost takeout, and I give again, Richard and everybody else, great tech credit. We'll have taken out as we exit 2021 over $215 million of savings from the day we started.
We've got another, pick your number, and that will be a full run rate in for the first time in 2022, but another $35 million-$40 million we're working on now inside of our company, plus the $100 million as we merge ProQuest and us together. We'll be well north of $325 million in three and a half years. Most people can't do that. We did it 'cause we had a great team of people. We did get help from the outside, but I just couldn't be happier. We've got the best integration machine I've ever had the pleasure to be involved with. We review everything every week upside down and backwards. Richard?
Yes. I think what's really I'd add to that is the apparatus that we've built over the last two years to facilitate the integration of both tuck-ins, but also more transformational acquisitions into the Clarivate platform. Three centers of excellence, which house customer care and inside sales in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. All of the work that we've spoken about around the technology transformation of the company, including the management of the back office, the investment in the front office to drive growth. As Jerre said, we've got a terrific integration management team. They have a repeatable playbook that we apply to all of our acquisitions. It's a very consistent methodology, and we've got a demonstrated track record in delivering and exceeding the commitments we give the street with respect to transformational acquisitions and the cost-saving targets that we set.
We've done very well, and we'll be moving on to the next program, of course, in 2022.
That's very helpful color, Richard. Maybe just if I can follow up on the free cash flow. Jerre, you mentioned the unlevered free cash flow guidance. You've also guided to a minimum of 60% EBITDA conversion in the midterm. Jerre, you also mentioned the cash available for de-levering, but also accretive M&A. You've done the large acquisition in such a short period of time and several tuck-ins. How should we think about your M&A strategy going forward? Do we take a breather on the larger acquisition or how do we think about M&A over the next three years?
No, thanks very much. Three things. First, let's just get facts as our friends. Before debt payment of our interest, there's the following. Let's say it is $1 billion, just to make it easy, 'cause that's the guidance on leverage we gave. This is one thing I'm so proud of, $65 million cash tax in 2021, 2022, sorry, and we'll spend about 6% of revenue. Simple way to think about that is on CapEx. Ninety plus percent of that CapEx is product development. Those two pieces, you can just do the math. That leaves really about 80% of the EBITDA as available to make the decisions.
One decision could be reduce quickly and further the outstanding debt and bring that down to where we're paying far less in interest. Another decision more likely a combination of doing that, doing some share buyback for a long time to come to make sure there's no concerns by anybody about overhang. Using what makes sense going forward, the rest for larger acquisitions. I would say one thing that it's a bit unique for us, I think, but we have zero overlap with each of the acquisitions we've made, and we'll continue to do that. Zero overlap, meaning no competitive environment, because the markets are so big and we're able to complement what we've done and will continue to do.
As we move forward, we'll look at those, and again, two rules that are critical. Most important is for the larger ones. We won't do them unless we're sure with cost takeout. By the way, we do not include revenue growth cross-selling. I always keep that separate. With cost takeout, we have to deliver at least 10% at the end of year one of the acquisition. A minimum of 10%, adjusted EPS all in, by the way. It's not just on that acquisition, it's for everything to do. That's the critical piece. You know, some of the pricing right now is pretty high, so we'll wait and see how that plays out. Patience. What I've always done is patience, persistence and preferred. I will not participate in auctions.
Yes. No, Jerre, that's been, and you've had a great track record with your M&A, obviously. Maybe just a quick question on ProQuest. Can you just remind people what's really pending for the ProQuest acquisition, your expectation when to close, when you'll be able to close the acquisition? Thanks.
Well, we look forward, as I said, hopefully, that we'll get it approved before year-end, and we'll be off to the races on day one. In a very complementary business that's roughly $900 million of revenue, just approximately. We're, again, no overlap, all complementary in the academic and the government world where we can cross-pollinate what ProQuest does. They're a wonderful company. They do it so well with what we do to give customers, actually give customers a better opportunity to save money, with us helping them reduce costs and have better information than they've ever had before. It's really exciting. ProQuest is a 51-year-old company that was started as a family company and has just done a wonderful job. We look forward, especially the great software they've created to help our customers for years to come.
It's just a lot of great people around the world.
That's great. Maybe just in a minute remaining, I was wondering if I can ask you quickly on the China opportunity, if you can just elaborate on everything that's happening there. How does that represent an opportunity or a challenge for you?
Yeah. No, great. Richard, you pick it up because we look at it every week.
Currently, you know, it's business as usual. We have a terrific academic and government customer segment in China. We obviously sell to, you know, the most prestigious universities in the world across the portfolio. In the case of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences is quoted in our research report yesterday, where we cover highly cited researchers, and these are sort of scientists to advance their particular discipline. The Chinese Academy of Sciences is always in the top five ranking. We have a very, very important footprint in China. We see terrific medium-term and long-term growth opportunities there. Across the portfolio, I think Life Sciences and professional services and obviously consumer products and tech, the other three segments, we see just an abundance of opportunity. We'll continue to invest there, of course.
That's very helpful color, Richard. Thanks. Thank you very much. Jerre, I was just wondering if you had any closing thoughts, closing comments.
No, just two things. Thank you so much for the time today. I'm very, very proud of the people we have in the company and look forward to adding the folks from ProQuest soon, because what we do is a wonderful thing for the world, and I'm proud to be able to do that. The potential that we've started to deliver on is as much fun as I've ever had, and I'm very thankful for that. We'll continue to do our very best to meet or exceed our share owners expectations. Thanks very much for the time.
Thank you, Jerre. Thanks, Richard.
Thanks.
Thank you.