All right, our next section is with Clarivate. 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 solutions company serving customers in university, life science, and legal area. Today, we are excited to have CEO, Jonathan Gear, and also CFO, Jonathan Collins, joining us today. Thank you spending some time with us today, both Jonathans.
Owen, thanks for having us. Great to be with you.
For the people who are listening to the webcast, please feel free to submit your questions online. We'll do our best to address your questions. Without further delay, I think the Clarivate story could still be new to some investors. Maybe both Jonathans, could you please briefly talk about what Clarivate does and your, your value proposition?
Sure, will do, Owen. I'll go ahead and kick it off. We, we play in the space of business information and business analytics. The nature of that space is, is highly predictable, it's a SaaS-like revenue and profit model, highly predictable, highly scalable, great cash flow, low CapEx and great cash flow coming out of it. Owen, as you kicked it off saying, we, we, we play in 3 very specific segments, which are both separate and also linked together and support each other. Half of our business is in academia and government, and we, we call it academia and government, it's primarily academia. We serve the largest research universities in the world, and we do it through 3 different product types.
We provide a, a great product called Web of Science that, Owen, with your great academic pedigree, you know very well. But it is the leading arbitrator of research integrity in the world and is sold to all universities in the world. The second product is around SaaS-based workflow solutions. Both university and public library, their entire systems run on our SaaS software solutions. The third is we're, we're a provider of content, both journals, publications, and books, again, selling it to universities. A&G represents about half of our business. About a third of our business, 30% is our intellectual property segment, and there we're providing really two types of content.
One is around the patent workflow, all the way from patent search, if you have an idea or company has an idea, doing a search, is it patentable? All the way through to docketing, registering that patent, and then protecting that patent through its 20-year life through, through continuing to fill that patent. We do the same on trademarks as well. Our third business is our smallest business, a little under 20% of revenue, but the long term has the most potential secular growth trends behind it. This is where we serve life science and healthcare, and there we're primarily serving large pharmaceutical companies and large biotech companies, providing them with critical content and tools around three different workflows. One around the research and development workflow, the second around the regulatory clinical trial workflow, and the third around the commercialization workflow.
What ties all these three segments together, very, very heavily tied around innovation, investment, and R&D, and that's the core of what Clarivate, what we do.
Got it. So you, you reported earnings last week, and lowered some of your guidance, like 2023 guidance. You highlighted 3 areas of weakness in the Q2 : annuity, real-world data, and consulting. What makes you confident that you're not losing shares to your competitors?
Yes, let me walk through all three pieces, Owen. By the way, I will be transparent. There are some elements of our business we have been losing share, and we're getting it back right now. First, a quick profile on the business overall. 60% of our revenue is subscription, so recurring, absolutely the definition of recurring. 20% is, Owen, as you use the term, annuities. We also use the term reoccurring revenue for this. This is our patent renewal business, where we help our clients renew existing patents. That's 20% of our revenue, and the remaining 20% of our revenue is transaction-based, so one-off series of either data polls or consulting, so not recurring in nature. 80% recurring or subscription, 20% transaction.
What we saw, we pulled down our forecast in our call last week, and we're very disappointed with the outlook for the year. It comes in really two specific areas. It comes within the transactional business, within Life Sciences & Healthcare, and there are two product areas. One, our consulting business, where we sell and we assist pharma companies and big biotech with their go to market and commercialization. The second element, also assisting in commercialization, is we're one of the largest providers of what the industry calls real-world data. This is an incredibly useful set of assets the industry uses to help know where to target market opportunities for their therapeutic outcomes. There are two, two issues there.
One is there is a, a short macro challenge in the industry as, as some pharma companies have, and the industry has pulled back on their commercial spend. We're seeing it, other players in the space, whether direct competitors or just other players in the space, have called it out on their calls also. We're seeing a little bit of, of, of reduction, reduction there. The second piece, we are, particularly with our RWD, or real-world data assets, we're in the midst of a transition from what has been historically for us, primarily a transaction-based revenue, to convert that into a platform and what will become a product and subscription-based product for us. Much more predictable, much more scalable....
a much better outcome both for our clients and for our investors, but we are in the midst of that transition. On the annuities business, which was the other pull down, that, once again, is in our Intellectual Property segment. Again, just a reminder, that's how we're, where we're renewing patents on behalf of our clients. It's roughly about a $400 million annual business for us, and it's split within two different channels. One is where we go direct and support corporations, and these are large, IP-intensive corporations. Think pharma, high tech, manufacturing, companies which are creating or maintaining many, many patents, supported online patents. That's one chunk of our business.
The other chunk is where we serve the longer tail of small and medium-sized businesses, and we do those through our law firm customers, law firm distribution partners. These are, tend to be large, large, regional or global patent attorney firms who support their clients in the journey around patent protection. What- where we saw weaknesses in that latter channel, serving law firm customers and be specific, serving a law firm and their customers, their end users. It came late in the quarter, and your question, Owen, was, are we losing share? We're very, we're very confident we're not. We, we were surprised by the slowdown in volumes. It's an absolute reduction in the volumes which were being sent to us for renewals. We dug into it, and it's really two geographic areas of weakness.
It's in Asia Pacific, and a couple key drivers there, which I'm happy to walk through if you like, but some very specific macro issues. Also in Europe, again, driven by two very specific issues there. As we went and tested, there, there's no global registrar of the number or quantity of patents, but as we tested with individual country-level PTO offices, we found they're also seeing a reduction as well. The reduction we're seeing is, is really driven by, by a couple of these macro trends.
Would you be able to talk about the performance of these 3 areas in July or maybe in early August so far? That they did track in line with your expectation. Any color you can give it to us?
You know, it's, it's a little early for us to show that, show that color, Owen. We, we'll be coming back at the end of the quarter. What I will say is this, as Jonathan Collins and I, we... When we saw the weakness, in the quarter and, and had a view of certainly missed expectations, including our internal expectations for the quarter, we went through a very rigorous look at the out at the outmark for the rest of the year, particularly where we can have swings in revenue. Again, recognizing that the vast majority of our revenue is extremely predictable and where we, we were hurt on these kind of more on the outline views.
John and I went through and basically took the significant amount of the variables out of the forecast for the rest of the year, particularly around real-world data, consulting, and annuities. There, there should be very little variability based upon the forecast that we gave.
Got it. How about the rest of the business? I think we just focused too much on that three weakness or these three areas. How about the rest of the business?
Well, it's, it's interesting. At our Investor Day back in, back in March, Owen, we, we talked about this is a set of assets, we have great set of assets. We also have a great customer base, some of the best customer base in the, in the sectors that we serve, that, that people dream about having. Yet we have been underperforming the market in each one of those three segments of, of academia and government, IP, and life science and healthcare. When we've peeled it back, and what Jonathan Collins and I shared at Investor Day, within those, it's really one specific product area in each one of those three, which is holding down the total.
First, I go to our largest segment of Academia & Government, and the product line that was- even though it was a great gold standard product, our Web of Science product had historically been essentially flat growth and underperforming the marketplace. Still the market leader, but losing market share to competitors, most notably Scopus, which is owned by Elsevier. We started making investments in that platform, starting early last, last year, went through that classic build, launches in the marketplace, and I, I tell you, I wish we'd kind of kept a before and after look to share with investors, so investors could see how remarkably different the new product is. The results, we've really begun seeing the market embrace this in Q1 of this year.
Retention rate going up, new business going up in a very heavy renewal cycle in Q1, continue to see new business climb in Q2. We feel very good that, that A&G segment, which part of our growth mechanism, is to take it from a historical 2% grower to 4%. We feel well on our path to get there, so we can kind of put a check mark by that piece. Within IP, and there's been a lot of noise in the quarter, understandably, about our annuities business, but we feel very strongly that's a temporary, macro-driven... Even with the macro, I mean, this, we could absorb any one of a number of, of bad news. It's, it's a stacking up of kind of 4 macro events which we couldn't absorb in the short term.
We feel strongly based upon historical evidence, that should bounce back to a normal growth. Within IP, once again, there's one specific product we need to fix, that is the Derwent product, which is the product that our customers use during the search element of a patent. At the very front end of the patent, we've been following the same roadmap we did for Web of Science last year of investing, this year we hired a new product leadership team, tailored last year. They brought to Jonathan Collins and myself a business case which we got behind and are investing heavily behind. We're going through a heavy, very heavy involvement with our customers there to make sure we're doing exactly what we need to capture back, share there.
Expect to get that to kind of beta plus, plus by end of next year. I would expect next year, in the first half of next year, to see the same positive green shoots for Derwent that we saw with Web of Science this year. We get that fixed, we've then fixed the IP segment. That's the segment that should be growing 5%-6%. Historically, it's been growing about 4% the last couple of years, CAGR, so that 2% lift will come from lifting Derwent and the related toolset there. Brings us to our final third piece, which is life science and healthcare.
Again, we've, we've taken a hit this year on the transaction piece of the business, but the real growth, that is our smallest piece of our business, Owen, as you know, at about 18% of our revenue. It should be based upon the market that we serve and what our competitors are doing, and the quality of the proprietary content that we have. That should be our fastest-growing segment. While it has been, it's still been growing less than the market rate. We've been very heavily focused on the real-world data platform, building that out, doing the same thing we're doing with Derwent, is the build year for us right now. We expect to kind of brute force launch a couple of therapeutic new product areas at the tail end of this year.
We have the product in place to have that to be a vehicle of very predictable, scalable growth starting in 2024 and beyond.
Got it. That's very helpful. let, let's dive into each segment.
Sure.
like, one by one. Let's start with, academia. Jonathan, you talk about... you made some investments in the past. You saw some good growth and renewal rates in the first and Q2 , so it looks like that investment pay off. Do you have any plan to implement another major upgrade? What is the timeline of this upgrade, if there's any? You know, what is the logical next step to add more functionalities?
Sure, Owen, and let me well guide, help, help guide that, that question. I'll, I'll break the business into three specific pieces. There is, and you'll see it in our Investor Day, we call it research and analytics. That is primarily Web of Science, and I've, I've spoken about that. That's one we had to lift, and we, we feel we have turned the corner on that one. There is still additional work we can be doing, additional functionality we'll be putting into that product. If it, if it maintains, the sub scope maintains its current growth rate, we kind of have solved, solved that one, and it's performing at market rates. The next element is around our workflow solutions, our SaaS solutions, which, as I mentioned in the introduction, that is the, the, the system on which universities run.
At both university, university libraries as well as public libraries, if you walk into it and they're using one of our programs, it's like the SAP or the Oracle. They're, they're running on it. That should, could be a faster-growing segment for us. As I resegmented and created these new segments, I recently hired a new head of A&G, Bar Veinstein. Bar actually was the original person who ran that segment under ProQuest, four years ago, and so he's coming and is part of the leadership team we have right there. We think there's more innovation and growth we can drive out of that segment, that sub-segment, so we'll, we'll see some more uptake there, really driven by innovation. The third element of our portfolio is where we aggregate and pull together content for our library customers.
This includes physical books, e-books, journals, publications. That's gonna grow at a lower growth rate, and it's gonna be kind of a low double-digit growth rate, but it'll be tugged upwards, the segment will be tugged upwards by these other 2 areas. Just in summary, Owen, the nut we had to crack with Web of Science, we cracked it, and we'll continue to invest behind that in, in all 3 sub-segments.
Got it. For this kind of upgrade, how should we think about the pace of investment? Do you have to make, like, so-called a large investment, initial investment upfront, or these sort of investment, it's pretty stable over time? How should we think about that?
Well, these. Appreciate the question. I will say that, that a couple of the products, including Web of Science, including Derwent, and a couple products in life science and healthcare, had been underinvested in for a very long time, 10+ years. They kind of came from the original Thomson Scientific business, which was the kind of origin, if you will, of Clarivate. So we made a decision, Jonathan Collins and I made a decision, entering last year and exiting last year and entering this year, that we had to put some more investment dollars behind it. We're doing it through elevating our CapEx budget. So we, we decided to increase our CapEx budget by about 200 basis points this year, 2024, and probably bleeding a bit into 2025. We'll see when we get a bit closer.
That's kind of the surge that we're using to kind of lift, do a one-time lift of investments. Once we get past that, we feel very confident that our existing model will support any ongoing investments required.
Got it. How about AI? I think you recently make an announcement that you partnered with a company called AI21 Labs to integrate AI functionalities into Clarivate. Could you please unpack for us what, you know, this company, this lab does, and what you offer, and how does Clarivate can differentiate from other AI companies?
Sure, will, will do. I'd like to make a general comment about AI, especially generative AI, which kind of captured our imagination so much this year. Clarivate, we've been working with advanced AI tools for, for decades, literally, literally for decades, machine learning, large language models, and, and the like. I think you'll find if you speak with other business information companies, pure companies, whether they're competitors or, or just peers, we're all... I mean, we wouldn't exist without the use of advanced analytics. It, it helps unlock the content, the value in the content, both structured and unstructured, that we provide. Now, the, the explosion, if you will, of, of generative AI in particular, which I think captured the fancy of the population when ChatGPT kind of went, went public-...
We've been working with these tools ourselves for over 12 months in certain areas. It's very much part of our normal, our normal BAU, our normal innovation. We have to use these tools, we've been embracing them, and we will be embracing multiple tool providers. AI21 happens to be one. I met with them when I was in our office in Jerusalem earlier this year. Partnering with them, initially on our Academia and Government space, but see opportunities across multiple spaces. And I think what you'll find is, is there are several large players, so all the large tech players are investing heavily in this area. There are companies like AI21, which are doing the same.
At Clarivate, we expect to partner with a number of them, we're in discussions of partnership with a number of providers, of gen AI and other advanced AI tools. It's really twofold. They're a way where we can greatly drive internal efficiency around our content production, around our software production, to kind of create additional investment dollars, is why we won't need to raise our investment dollar spend. They're also a great way where we can drop those innovations into our products to make our products even more accessible and the online content even more accessible to our end users. We expect to see a lot more announcements from us on products forthcoming, we see as a key enabler of growth for us going forward.
Got it. Maybe let's move on to intellectual property, IP. You had some step back, you just talked about, but on your last earnings call, last week, you also mentioned that you signed a large patent annuities deal, which will commence next year in 2024. Can you please talk about, like, how did you win that deal?
Sure. This is a great deal, and, and actually goes back to the conversation we just had, Owen. This is targeting the, the law firm channel of our annuities package. This is, I mean, actually, the origin of CPA came out of a coalition created by law firms. That's how CPA Global, which was our, is this, this portion of our board business came from, and it's a fairly stable market. We, we work very hard to partner and try to find new channels and work with law firm partners. This is one we worked on for a number of quarters.
We haven't announced the name, and we won't, but it was a very large global patent attorney firm that I think the announcement I made on the call, I can't say it's the biggest new business sale ever in the history, because we've been around for 40 years. It's certainly the biggest new business sale that this leadership team, including the leadership team from CPA Global, being there 8+ years, has ever seen. What that'll mean, we'll begin onboarding their clients against the same model. This law firm is our customer, but we're serving their clients. They will begin migrating their clients as they go through their renewal process from their existing provider on to us, starting early next year.
Got it. Jonathan, you, you, you also mentioned that I think you're going to roll out some, like, new functionalities in the IP space later this year, and you expect maybe some revenue uplift in 2024. I mean, can you please talk more about, like, what functionalities you, you expect to add, and what make you confident that you can just, like, repeat what you did with Web of Science, you can repeat that in IP?
Well, the biggest turnaround we're going to get is around Derwent, and maybe a quick comment on Derwent. Again, Derwent is our software tool. It came from the original Thomson Scientific. That's kind of where it was birthed from, if you will. This is one of those products which I would put, Owen, under the category it had been underinvested in for years. The remarkable thing about Derwent I'll give a little example. I was visiting the IP department of a large pharmaceutical company 2 months ago. Met with them, went to the conference room. There were a dozen or so people around the table and myself, talked to them about their IP needs. Great, great customer of ours. I asked them about Derwent. What do you think about Derwent?
The people around the table, this is the corporate shared service for doing patents for this company, said, "We love Derwent. Couldn't live without Derwent." This one, one person, one of our users there, clients there, been there for 30+ years. "I use Derwent every day. I couldn't do my job without it." Now, I happen to know within that client, our revenue from Derwent has declined over the last 10 years. What has happened? We haven't lost a client. In general, we generally have not lost a core client because Derwent, for a power user, is the must-have tool, number one. Number two, the underlying proprietary content that we have, this tool is hitting, is viewed universally as the best content in the world when it comes to understanding patents and patent search and patent intelligence. We have the best underlying content.
What we have done over the last 10 years, and shame on us, is we have seeded a lot of the activity which used to be centralized, has now been pushed out into product teams and our various clients, and they're not using Derwent every day, or they're using it incidentally. Derwent is really built for the power user, and so we've allowed competitors to kind of come up through the, the cracks in the floor, and capture the much easier to use user base. Data not as good, but the trade-off has been made. What I feel really good is, first of all, we have the best underlying content and data, which I keep coming back to. Whoever owns the data wins, should win. They should win. They might mess it up, but whoever owns the data wins, number 1.
Number 2, we still have, we still have the customer relationships. We generally haven't lost them. They're generally very, very positive relationships. We see the build, the functionality, and the ease of use that protects the power users, which we will protect for them because they've told us, we want to, we want to maintain this highly tuned engine, but create the tool around it that serves the incidental user. Then allow them to tap into our underlying leading, leading content. That's how we're going to win.
Got it. I don't wanna get myself ahead too much, but after this upgrade, later this year or maybe earlier this year, do you have any plan to have more upgrades on IP, or it's too early to say?
Well, in terms of the products themselves, Owen, you're referring to?
Yeah, in terms of product IP, yeah. New functionalities in IP.
It's an ongoing path, and I think that this, this is what we're catching up with a little bit, is that innovation had stopped. You know, I've, I've been in the chair, CEO chair a little less than a year. One of the things which I'm just passionate about, is measuring how much of our revenue growth is coming from innovation. There's no hard and SEC rule of how to measure innovation, but my back-of-the-envelope is: tell me, tell me how much revenue comes from products we've launched in the last three years. So, Mr. Collins here, he and his team are kinda looking at analysis about first baselining where that comes from. That...
Once we get it right, there's a certain art and science, it's something that we'll certainly share with the investment community, and one of those key metrics we share with you, as we do internally with the board. This is a long-term sustainable growth. That comes, Owen, from constantly innovating in the biz, in the products, finding new ways, moving left and right into the workflow with our customers, leveraging ongoing our proprietary content. This theme of innovation and growth and innovation is one you're gonna hear from me a lot going forward.
I got one question online. I think it's related to Derwent and, Jonathan, the comment you just make, which is about the data. I think there are some questions about whether the data from Derwent, it's publicly available. I think at the end of the day, I think the key question is: how do you differentiate yourself, or how do you differentiate Derwent from your competitor?
Sure. The question is absolutely right. Patent information is publicly available from every PTO office all over, 180 around the world. It's publicly available. It is, however, messy. It is messy because if you're writing a patent, if you think about the world of intellectual property within corporate, you have trademarks, you have patents, you also have your own company trade secrets, that never sees the light of day. When you're writing a patent, you're doing your best to provide enough information to get protection, but not enough that's gonna reveal your own trade secrets and the likes. If you pull out a patent, they have to look at it, and I'd encourage people to look at. Pull a bunch of physical patents. They're not spreadsheets, you know?
They're not, they're not highly structured documents. They are documents out there that are written verbally in the, in the author's own language, written in a very, very precise format by a patent attorney to get the maximal protection. There are handwritten diagrams on this, on this page. It's incredibly unstructured. The Derwent database that we have built over multiple decades has taken that unstructured document. Experts interpret those, that publicly available information, including having IEEE experts interpret the ones for high tech, having chemists, biologists interpret the ones coming out of pharma. True expertise to build our, our database on top of it, which is the, it's just a proprietary Derwent summary of all these databases. That is a multi, multi-decade build. I'll give one example in China. China today, they are, they are creating half...
Over half of the new patents every year is coming out of China. China has been a contributor to new IP now for 10+ years. We have a team, we bought a company called IncoPat, based in China. As we collect this information, we had those same, our same experts, who are experts not only in the patents but in Mandarin, because, of course, the patents in China are submitted in Mandarin. To build the summaries in English and build that, that proprietary content around it, is incredibly hard to replicate. Incredibly hard. Incredibly hard, expensive, and takes time, and that's kinda the secret sauce that we've built on top of what is otherwise publicly available information.
Got it. That's very helpful. Let's move on to your last segment, which is the Life Sciences & Healthcare. I think you plan to roll out some new functionalities later this year and maybe some next year. Again, like, what makes you confident that it can help you grow your organic revenue down the road? And also, would, would that be 2024 or 2025? How should we think about that?
Yes, it's a couple things that go into that play, Owen. First, as a, as a end market, it is has the most positive secular trends for any one of the 3 end markets. You know this, Owen, but we've guided that the end markets that we serve within A&G grow about 4%, within IP, growing about 5%-6%. Within life science healthcare, again, the relevant addressable markets that we serve, growing high single digit, low double digits. It's the most positive trend in terms of money being spent in a world that continues to age, continues to need, need new therapeutic drugs to address health issues, so there's significant market trends behind it. Number 2 is we do have an incredibly strong, again, a proprietary content. In some cases, we're head-to-head.
In some cases, we have unique content that no one else has, we serve, again, as I mentioned in my introduction, Owen, the R&D, regulatory and trials, and commercialization. I encourage investors to think about it in terms of those, those three blocks. The area we're most focused on investing right now in innovation is in that last block, which is commercialization, and therefore, the core assets that we have and own is real-world data. With that, it came with an acquisition we made a few years ago, called DRG. In, in real-world data, we acquire a lot of content from the source, and then we create our unique dataset. For those of you who don't know, real-world data is what the industry calls longitudinal health information.
What that means is, is we have in there, I'll use myself as an example, a completely anonymized view of patient 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, maybe that's me, over my life cycle. This says, "Okay, here are the ailments that I had, here are the drugs, here are the reactions that I had," so on and so forth. Builds at a very granular level, the impact on drugs on a certain type of individual. That micro, ultra micro market information is gold dust to pharmaceutical companies and to large biotech companies as they go to market with their drug information. We're one of the top, top three or four providers in, in the, it's primarily a North America product, one of the top three or four providers in the world who had this product. Now, we have historically sold this.
We collect this information, and we cleanse it, and we have this great data set, and we have historically sold this as a data dump to other companies, and that is frankly a mistake. We pivoted the strategy entering as of exiting last year, this is one of the major investments that, again, Jonathan Collins and I green lit. We brought in a great new leader externally, Henry Levy, who came in from Veeva Systems, a leader in the space, previous work at a CRO, also at Accenture Healthcare, greatly in the space, and he's doubled down on this. We're gonna now productize that platform. What that means, Owen, is. This is gonna be a flywheel innovation machine. We're building a d-- turn that data set into a data platform, on top of which we can build specific therapies.
A therapy might be around oncology, an oncology stream right on top of that. It might be hypertension, it might be vision issues or whatnot, we can take that analytical solution and sell it to every pharma and drug company that's in the oncology market, for example. It is a very, very large space. We're moving up the value chain, we're moving into a product set which, certainly from an investor lens, much more subscription-based, much more scalable, much more predictable. 'Cause one thing that has really hurt us this year in terms of our guidance is the unpredictability of selling these, of these data deals. They're 7-figure dollar deals, very unpredictable as to where they come in, when they come in, it's been very difficult for Jonathan and I to be predictive on this.
It's a very important pivot. It's something that, frankly, Owen, should have happened years ago, but we're doing it now, and we're gonna be a much better business coming out of it.
Got it. I got a, an interesting question, online. Maybe you can address that. The question is: Is that too, is that too much for the company to try to turn around 3 to 4 businesses at the same time? I mean, I, I do have a different view because you do, like, implement it in, like, different phases, but that's the question. Are you better off to just focus on maybe 1 or 2 segments and go all in into that and turn around? I mean, I want to give you some time to maybe clarify that, what you're doing.
Sure, sure. Reasonable question. I think it's a reasonable question and debate to have, but I'll tell you this. Entering this year, and Owen, you'll know this, I restructured Clarivate. Clarivate used to be global sales, global product, global tech, and I would argue under that structure, it would've been very hard. I now have three very distinct segments. A&G, led by Bar Veinstein, a hire who we brought back in. Yes, she used to be with ProQuest years ago, so zero learning curve, driving a lot of change there. Gordon Samson, the former chief operating officer of CPA Global, which was the acquisition we made in the IP space, absolute industry veteran, industry leader, driving the change there. Then Henry Levy, who I mentioned, who I brought in from outside, driving the same in Life Sciences & Healthcare.
Each of them need to fix 1 thing. Each of them need to fix 1 thing. We don't need to fix 12 things. I need, I need Barb to fix life science and actually fix, right. Yes, she absorbed, fixed, now we just need to kind of build the acceleration there. I need Gordon to fix Derwent, and I need Henry to fix our Cortellis data platform. It's not multiple problems, it's 3 specific problems, and we have 1 well underway.
Got it. Adding everything together, we have to go back to your long-term target, which is 6% organic growth in 2025 and 50 basis point margin expansion per year. I mean, does it change your view at this point, or you still want to stick with that plan?
Yeah, we haven't changed any of our LRP that Jonathan and I rolled out in our last press meeting back. I mean, this year is not playing out like we expected it to. However, the fact that we are not in both areas to provide the point five ten. Here at 10, with the compound, equal in the platforms, both in the subs, by the science being made after that, and we're seeing the progress being made there. The impact of seeing this transaction or transaction, and to a lesser degree, we heard this year. Again, I don't have any updated LRP, but nothing on this one. I actually have been in the process.
Okay, got it. Another popular question is, in terms of free cash flow generation, I think you expected to increase the free cash flow conversion from 27% in 2022 to 44% this year, and then, in 2025, it can be over 50%. I think in the first half, the conversion rate, it's already like 51% or so, based on our math. I mean, is there anything we should be aware that your cash conversion may be lower in the second half compared to the first half, or you just want to be conservative?
Sure, and, and, Jonathan Collins, why don't I have you take this question, please?
Sure, thanks for that, Owen. The only difference between the first half and the second half will be some seasonality of working capital that we think is likely gonna have the conversion be slightly lower. You pointed out correctly, all of the dollar year-over-year improvement in free cash flow has been delivered in the first half of the year, principally on two things. Number one, we have meaningfully lower one-time costs associated with acquiring and integrating the businesses. Most of this year's one-time costs are spent to complete the ProQuest acquisition. Those cost synergy benefits that we're going to see are largely have been recognized in the first half of this year on a year-over-year basis. The second item is slightly improved working capital efficiency. We had some investment in working capital last year and a little bit the year before.
This year, we expect that to taper off and be relatively flat. Those two things are where they're really delivering improvement. As we accelerate our growth, as Jonathan just highlighted, and modestly expand our margins, and as we de-lever over time, we expect to be able to continue to tick up that mid-forties cash flow conversion on Adjusted EBITDA up to above 50 over the next couple of years.
Got it. I got some feedback that Jonathan Gear, your answer about the long-term target wasn't super clear. Can you, like, say it again one more time? You, you're not gonna change anything right now, right?
That's correct.
Sorry about that.
There's, there's, the, the impact we've seen this year on our guide has not been on the growth levers that are required to hit our LRP. I don't have any update or change to the long-range guide at this point.
Got it. Final question, we have 1 minute left. Your leverage. I think your leverage was at 2.4x in the Q2 . I think you guided to 4x leverage in 2023, and then 3x in 2025. Now you're at your kind of like very close to your target already. Does it change your, like, decision or any thinking about allocating some capital to buyback this year, or we have to think about next year?
Sure. I'll comment really briefly. Jonathan, I'll ask you to add, add some more color here. The short answer is yes. Entering this year, we entered this year at a leverage ratio well north of 4 times. Given our cash flow and nature of business, there's never any issue of servicing the debt, we do recognize compared to our peer group, that's a high level and on the back of a large ProQuest acquisition. I came into the year very focused on getting the leverage down, along with Mr. Collins here, getting it down to well under 4 times by end of the year. We're still confident on that path. However, given where our share price is right now, and certainly myself and the board see the ROI on buybacks as being a significantly positive tool for shareholders.
We have signaled, and Jonathan signaled on the last call about this. Jonathan, do you want to add just some more color on our view right now of use of cash?
I think you summed it up great. We're in a position in the second half of this year where we can start being more balanced, and we suggested that on the earnings call last week. More to come on that in the coming months.
Sounds great. I think we're running out of time. Thank you both, Jonathan, for your time again, and thank you all for joining us today. Thanks a lot.
Owen, thank you so much for the time today. It's great to have a chance to join you again. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Have a good day. Bye-bye.