Okay, great. We'll kick things off. Thanks, everyone, for your patience running a few minutes late here, but thanks, everyone, for coming. My name is Michael Ryskin. I'm on the B of A Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, and I'm excited to host the next section with IQVIA. I'm joined by Ron Bruehlman, Chief Financial Officer. Ron, thanks so much for coming.
Thank you.
We'll jump right into things. Just sort of first question, you reported 1Q results just a couple of weeks ago. Can you really run through the key points you'd like us to take away from the quarter, how it played out?
Sure. Well, look, I think Ari said on the call that it was kind of a boring quarter, and some of our sell-side analysts picked that up in their report. And by that, we mean it was pretty much to expectations. If we start with Technology & Analytics Solutions, or TAS, the growth there was relatively modest, but we anticipated that, and we had signaled that on our fourth quarter call that we're still seeing cautiousness among clients and growth would be slow in the quarter. If we look at it on a constant currency ex-COVID basis because there was still some COVID-related work with the UK government in the first quarter of the prior year, it was about 3% growth. Now, on the R&D Solutions business, again, to expectations but stronger based on our strong backlog coming in.
Now, again, we have kind of the COVID overhang still affecting R&DS. We're going this year from about $400 million in total COVID-related revenues last year to $100 million this year. Most of that decline is coming in R&DS and most of it in the first half. So if you were to do a constant currency ex-COVID, again, for them, the growth was about 8% or so. And you saw that we maintained guidance with one exception, and that's for revenue. We adjusted downward by $75 million due to FX, but that had no impact on profit. And as I'm sure we'll get into later in the session, the underlying indicators of demand, particularly in the R&DS side of the business, remain pretty robust. So we're very encouraged by that. No change there. So quarter two expectations and no surprises is how I would characterize it.
That's great. We like boring. Boring is good. The one thing that did get called out a little bit from some clients was you flagged this $250 million CNS cancellation, somewhat of a larger deal. But like you said, you were able to offset that elsewhere and maintain the guide on constant currency. For programs like that, how would that typically play out over multiple years? Can you just sort of walk us through the dynamics between the dollar amount, the impact on book-to-bill, sort of the timing?
Sure. Well, we did have one large CNS cancellation. It was one that was in the news that many of you are familiar with. Obviously, we don't like to highlight individual clients in our discussions about cancellations. But anyway, I think this one was pretty much in the public domain, and it was just short of $250 million. And ordinarily, we won't disclose or spike out cancellations. They happen all the time. Every quarter, there are multiple cancellations, but they tend to be smaller. In total, every quarter, they add up to hundreds of millions dollars of cancellations. That's just the nature of the business. But this one, in and of itself, was so large that we thought we needed to disclose it. Our reported book-to-bill was 1.23, which is running a little bit below what we had been in the past.
And if you exclude that particular cancellation, it was pushing up towards 1.35. Of course, we can't. We have to take the cancellation. But just to put it in context, and another thing to put this in context, if we were to just look at gross new bookings, that is, before any cancellations in the quarter, it was at the second highest level ever. And we tell you this just to say, look, this is indicative of strong underlying fundamental demand that continues in the industry. Now, how did we offset it? Well, like I say, we always have cancellations, and there are always puts and takes. This one happened to be particularly big. We did have some visibility to it coming into the call, the fourth quarter call. And we set our guidance accordingly around that.
But we also had, in the quarter, we won a large respiratory vaccine trial that burns pretty quickly. That helped us as well. So it was all kind of, other than the fact it was a little bit on the large side, kind of in the normal course of business, and we were able to work it all out within our guidance and don't see any drama for the balance of the year. Now, just to put this in context, this particular trial was actually it wasn't even a trial. It was a program, and it was a series of trials that were going to burn, I think, through 2028 or 2029. And there was probably less revenue this year than there was in some of the future years. So it wasn't a huge hit to our revenue for the year.
OK, OK. And talking to that underlying strength, you flagged gross bookings, second highest all-time. How would you characterize sort of the health of the end market, especially let's focus on small biotech. How does that compare versus 12, 18 months ago? Obviously, there's a lot of noise in March of 2023.
Well, if you go back a couple of years or more, there was a lot of concern about emerging biopharma funding. 2020 and 2021 were record years of over $100 billion of funding. And then in 2022, it dropped back to what we consider to be more normal levels, that is, pre-pandemic levels of just over $60 billion. And there was a lot of angst about that. And I'd say for five, six quarters consecutively, we fielded questions, how is this going to affect you? Are you concerned? And so forth. And our answer was consistently, no, we're not concerned, first off, because it hadn't dropped so much. It's just back to pre-pandemic levels. Secondly, we tend to work a little bit in the later stage. So we're not immediately affected by funding levels. It takes a while to work its way through to us.
We also have customers that, on the whole, are very well funded. About 10% of our backlog is pre-commercial EBP. That is, companies without any revenues that really depend heavily on the funding. Now, fast forward to the first quarter, and we had a record level of emerging biopharma funding. I think it was $47 billion, which was more than three times the first quarter of last year and about two-thirds of what the total amount of funding was last year. So that's very encouraging. Obviously, we want to see more rather than less. So I think that the funding is starting to flow back into the sector. It's going to take a while to work its way into our RFPs and into our bookings just because that's the way it works. But we're pretty encouraged by that on the emerging biopharma side.
On the large pharma side, I think the R&D level remains surprisingly robust and consistent. And I say surprisingly a little bit because I might have expected some impact through the Inflation Reduction Act. And in fact, some of our large pharma clients have reevaluated their portfolios and shifted around their spend, canceled some things, and reevaluated, and so forth. But on the whole, it remains pretty good. If you have good science, it's going to be funded, and that's what's happened. The bigger impact probably that we've seen, and I don't know that it's due to IRA, although it may be partially, is just that our large pharma customers have become more cautious about their spending on sales and marketing. And we've been talking about that now for the better part of nine months, a year that we've seen cautiousness on the part of clients there.
It's hard to put your finger on the reason. I'd say one reason was probably that we saw a sharp decline in COVID-related projects. Some of the companies that had benefited quite a lot from COVID-related spend went out and were very free in terms of their budgets. Then when the revenue started drying up, felt that they needed to pull in. So we've had a number of clients come to us and say, we really need to cut costs. Our SG&A as a percentage of revenue has gone up too much. There's another reason for it, too. Actually, net pricing hasn't been that strong for the industry. Gross pricing continues to go up, but net pricing hasn't been that strong.
So we've had clients come to us and say, look, as one of the largest vendors to pharma, they'll come to us and say, we need tens of millions dollars of cost reduction this year. And you can't just say no to a large client. So we've had to work with those clients. And there are various ways of doing it. You can give here and return for more business there. We bring them outsourcing ideas that save them money. There are a variety of ways that we can deal with those requests that satisfy both sides. But without question, we've seen a slowdown in the spending on the TAS side of the business.
Do you think that on that last point, the pricing phenomenon, the being a little bit more cautious, do you think that's temporary? That's transient? Is that just a function of 2024 and sort of, like you said, looking back over the last couple of years and saying, look, maybe we were a little bit too free with spending, and we got to be a little bit more cautious? Things reset as you go through 2024 and then 2025. You're back to a more normalized environment?
Yeah, absolutely. Look, IQVIA and our predecessor on the TAS side, IMS, has been in the business since 1954, I believe, when IMS got started. So we've been through any number of cycles for a variety of reasons in the industry. And the spending always comes back. And as we look right now out at the picture, our pipeline is at a record level. We're starting to see decision timelines shorten on our commercial solutions side of the business. So that's helping as well. Certainly, in a kind of a non-quantitative sense, more anecdotal, our conversations with customers indicate more positivity. So as we look out into the second half of the year, we do see growth rates improving.
And in fact, of course, the compares get easier in the second half of the year because we saw revenue start decelerating, the growth decelerating in the second half of last year. So we're very much of the belief we have indicators that the business will begin coming back in a more meaningful way in the second half. And what I would point out is, despite the fact that we've seen the slowdown, we still have growth in the TAS business. We don't have perfect competitors or peers that we can point to there. But we do have a number of that we run into that are publicly traded in various parts of the business. And we've seen a number of them actually have low single-digit negative growth. And so we know this is not just an IQVIA phenomenon. It's an industry phenomenon right now.
But we have enough experience with this, and we have enough forward-looking indicators that we're confident it'll come back.
OK. Then maybe sticking with TAS, since you were just talking about that, you talked about some of that recovery later this year, maybe in 2025. How should we think about margins as that volume comes back? Sort of what's the profitability flow through as that business reaccelerates?
Well, you saw in the first quarter, overall, our EBITDA margin was down 10 or 20 basis points. I can't remember the exact amount. Part of that was just the slowdown in volumes that we had. There's always volume leverage. The greater your revenue growth, the easier it is to drop through. If for no other reason, your SG&A is not going to flex with your volume growth. But the other thing that's affecting us is some of the higher margin parts of our TAS business, like the consulting and analytics business, are the parts that aren't growing particularly in fact. In fact, consulting and analytics was down slightly year-over-year in the first quarter.
As that comes back, and that is the truly most short-cycle part of the business, as that comes back as we fully expect it will, then that will be helpful just from a mixed standpoint to our margins as well. We expect margin improvement as we go through the balance of the year just based on volumes coming back and the sales mix shifting in our favor.
OK, great. On TAS, the other place where we've gotten some questions is your expanded partnerships with Salesforce regarding the OCE business. What's been the early feedback you've gotten from customers? Or have you seen a response from some competitors following this announcement?
Well, from customers in general, I would say it's been positive. Some neutral, many positive. Let me just back up for a second to give some of the history there. I think it's worthwhile. Our major competitor in that space that you all know, I think, was 2007 when they launched their CRM platform. We didn't actually get into the business until we acquired Cegedim in the mid-teens. We weren't actually, at that point, even all that interested in the business. It was something that came along with the Cegedim's health care business. But we decided, look, if we're going to have the business, we're going to do something with it. In 2017, we replatformed from the old Cegedim kind of in-house platform to Salesforce as our platform and built OCE around that. We had a lot of success with that.
We have over 400 clients now, 100,000 seats. Now, a lot of these, admittedly, are smaller clients. We do have three or four large pharma clients. But our competitor had locked up large pharma. And it's really, really difficult to dislodge CRMs because you have to change an entire Salesforce out. Now, what this competitor did was they decided they were going to replatform on their own platform, Salesforce onto their own platform. And that kind of opened the door for us. And we had discussions with Salesforce, look, what do we want to do? And we really thought it made sense to go to kind of the next generation and build a new CRM platform on their Life Sciences Cloud and make it just absolutely best in class.
We both agreed it made sense for Salesforce, because they wanted to get into Life Sciences in a bigger way, to take the lead on that but to build on all the functionality in our OCE platform. That's what they're going to do. The plan is to release the new product towards the end of 2025. We will jointly market with Salesforce on that product. We have a revenue share arrangement. At the same time, we're going to continue to support all our old customers on OCE up through 2029 and transition them over time, hopefully, to the new CRM platform. In fact, it's interesting. We even had one large pharma client for part of their business after the announcement signed to go on OCE, even though over time, we'll obsolete that, and we'll move to the new platform.
There's still a lot of interest in that. We'll continue supporting our customers on that platform basically through the end of the decade.
OK, some really helpful context there. I want to go back to R&D just briefly, just one last point I want to touch on before we move on. You talked about big pharma demand. You talked about underlying biotech. Just seems like really robust or possibly even improving markets elsewhere, everywhere. We've now seen reports from, I think, all of your publicly traded peers for the calendar first quarter. Any changes in the competitive market dynamics? Are there any share gains? Or is there any new developments in the market in terms of indications, therapeutic areas? Just sort of what's driving the strong growth?
Well, look, to the share gain question, I think it's good to look at that over a multi-year period. One of the reasons is you don't have precise quarterly information to be able to track it. There are just too many trials and too many CROs in there and so forth. Our backlog has grown 30% in the last three years. That's high single-digit growth. We know the industry as a whole has grown at about half of that rate. That's indicative that we've had share gain. I think early on, a lot of the share gain came from some of the smaller players. That continues to an extent. I think recently, we've seen a couple of our large competitors stumble a little bit.
So even though it's hard to kind of say, oh, we took share from this company or that company precisely, sometimes you're bidding on different work. There's no question when you look at our book-to-bill and our backlog growth and all of that over a long period of time that we've done well. And we've gained share there. Now, as to the areas that are strongest, I mean, again, I think it makes sense to look over a longer period of time. Certainly, oncology has been a huge growth area. Neurology has been a very good big area. Immunology has been a big area. And we still get some large cardiology trials. They drove a lot of the growth in the industry if you go back a decade or two. But that work hasn't gone away. And that's where we really excel.
Because you really need these big, complex trials that involve multiple geographies where it's hard to find patients sometimes. That is our sweet spot. That's the way the industry is moving, be it from EBPs or from large pharma.
OK, that's helpful. Ron, I have to ask you a couple of margin questions. Let's run through this real quick. One is the shift from full service to FSP. Can you talk us through the margin dynamics there? How is that going to play out longer term?
Yeah, well, look, there's no question that FSP margins are lower than full service margins. If you look at it just on services revenue, I mean, it's a good 10 points or more of difference that you see. If you include pass-throughs, say you look at it on an ASC 606 basis, then the margin differential shrinks to a few hundred basis points. But obviously, for any given trial, you're getting more total revenue out of a full service than you would if you got that on an FSP basis. The shift has been relatively gradual. I want to say over the last couple of years, it's moved a couple of points. FSP is about 15% of our total R&DS revenue. If you were just to look at the clinical side of things and exclude the lab and other things like that, it's a little bit over 20%.
It's still largely full service. The shift is pretty gradual. I mean, just to give you an example, in the quarter, all the growth in our bookings was in full service, not in FSP. Now, that varies quarter to quarter. Again, you shouldn't look at just one quarter. We see a gradual shift going on there. Will it sustain? Don't know. We've seen this be a little bit like a pendulum over the years where you'll get a period where pharma says, we want to go towards more towards the FSP. For a long period of time, it will. Then it'll start to shift back when they realize that they're maybe not getting the cost benefits that they thought. I would say, too, that there's a little bit of nuance to this in that sometimes we'll start out with an FSP trial.
It'll morph into a hybrid trial because the sponsor will come back to us and say, well, we really like you to add this or this or that service, which are more akin to the full service. So there's full service. There's FSP. And then there are in-betweens as well. So yes, although there is a shift there, I wouldn't say it's like a sea change.
OK, and taking everything you just said and incorporating in terms of sort of the LRP, the long-term margin outlook, you've got the FSP full service dynamics. You've got the recovery in TAS and the flow through there. How do you think about the margin opportunity longer term? And where do you have the most operating leverage in the model?
Well, we have targeted, historically said, look, over the longer term, 20-30 basis points of margin expansion per year. Now, some years, like last year, do more. Some years, you do less. You might do none. But we definitely want to drive continued margin expansion. But I wouldn't say that that is the principal focus. Because there are limits to what you can do with margin expansion. And really, to grow the business, to grow your market cap, to get better returns, you need to grow the top line. That's where the focus has to be more than anything. So we'll work in all sorts of areas to be more efficient. First and foremost, just the overhead area. We've probably taken out a third of our real estate costs since COVID, just as an example. You see we're continuously driving down the SG&A ratio.
We're trying to move into businesses that are higher margin. We're doing more automation. Obviously, AI is going to be very big. And we've been, incidentally, in AI for a long time. It's become kind of the flavor of the day now. But we've been doing this for a very long time. And we see good cost benefits there.
OK, all right. Just a couple of minutes left. I want to run through one or two last ones. One is on capital deployment. I mean, I think M&A has always been a part of IQVIA's DNA.
Yeah, I think she asked him right there.
OK, all right. I want to ask on capital deployment. It's been a part of IQVIA's DNA for years, whether it's M&A or share buybacks or dividends. How would you talk about how would you think about the balance between the three for 2024 and then going forward?
Well, it's a perennial question. And the way I would answer it is the way I typically have answered it is say, we're going to spend a certain amount on internal capital. And it's going to be, call it, probably between 4%-4.5% of revenue. And that's it. That's about as much as we think we can spend productively. After that, with our free cash flow, we're going to look first at acquisitions. Because acquisitions help us fill in holes in our portfolio and give us the platform for growth. We will do share repurchase opportunistically when we feel that the stock price has just gotten to unreasonably low levels, like it did in the fourth quarter of last year. And we did quite a bit. Debt pay down, honestly, other than, OK, we pay down the revolver, some of the near-term debt maturities we have are pretty favorable.
So we're not inclined to pay those down. And you can pay down your term loans. But then once you pay those down, they go away. It's not like a revolver where it's constantly an evergreen. So I'd say debt pay down is less of a priority for us. But our interest expenses stabilize now. We don't expect it to be a drag like it was last year. It should be more or less flat year-over-year. So it's less of a priority. And eventually, we'll get a little bit of benefit out of falling rates. But we're not counting on it. Because nobody knows when that's going to happen. That much is very clear.
OK, great. We're essentially out of time. I'll just ask my closing question. What would you say is most underappreciated or misunderstood about IQVIA? What would you like to clarify? You know.
That's a great question. You know, we are so well covered now that I think people understand us pretty well. But I still think that people just don't quite understand the power of our data assets. And I'll give you a really simple example. In the case of artificial intelligence and generative AI, you're only as good as what you train the models on. And if you were to go out and ask all the questions we ask of and our clients ask of us about if you were to ask those of ChatGPT-4, 5, whatever, you would get non-answers back. AI won't give you the type of answers that you can give to your clients without our data. And so I don't think people fully appreciate how powerful that is, the data and the insights we have, and what an advantage that gives us going forward.
Great, thanks so much. With that, we're going to wrap it. Ron, really appreciate you coming. Everyone, thanks for joining.