Clarivate at Goldman Sachs Conference: AI and Subscription Focus

On Thursday, 11 September 2025, Clarivate PLC (NYSE:CLVT) presented its strategic initiatives at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. The company emphasized its Value Creation Plan, highlighting a transition towards subscription models and AI integration. While Clarivate is progressing in subscription revenue and product innovation, challenges remain in achieving financial targets and managing disposals.

Key Takeaways

• Clarivate aims for 90% subscription-based revenue, currently at 88%.
• Focus on AI and GenAI integration in products and new AI-native solutions.
• Strategic review of non-core assets expected by February 2026.
• Organic revenue growth targeted to match market rates across segments.
• EBITDA margins projected to contract to 41% this year due to disposals.

Financial Results

• Value Creation Plan: Clarivate is on track, targeting 90% subscription revenue.
• Subscription Revenue: Increased from 80% to 88% excluding disposals.
• EBITDA Margins: Expected to contract to 41% this year, with improvements anticipated post-disposals.
• Leverage: Gross leverage at 4.3 times, with a goal to reduce below three turns.
• Share Repurchases: $100 million worth of shares repurchased in the first half of the year.

Operational Updates

• Subscription Model Transition: Phasing out transactional sales in A&G and Life Sciences by 2026. New ProQuest e-books and digital collections introduced.
• Sales Execution: Reorganization of sales teams and leadership changes, including a new Senior VP for Sales in Life Sciences.
• Product Innovation - AI & GenAI: Establishment of a center of excellence for AI innovation. Launch of AI-enabled products like Web of Science Research Intelligence.
• Portfolio Rationalization: Strategic review of non-core assets underway, with findings expected in February 2026.

Future Outlook

• Organic Revenue Growth: Aiming for market growth rates of 3-4% in A&G, 4-5% in IP, and higher in Life Sciences.
• Margin Expansion: Plans to expand profit margins through organic growth and cost management.
• Capital Allocation: Continued debt paydown and share buybacks, with a focus on reducing leverage.

For a more detailed analysis, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: All right, good morning and welcome. I’m very pleased to be joined by Matti Shem Tov, CEO of Clarivate, as well as Jonathan Collins, CFO. Thank you both for being here.

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: Thanks for having me.

Good morning.

Unidentified speaker: All right, I want to start with the high-level discussion of Clarivate’s strategy and transformation, specifically the Value Creation Plan. This plan was announced about a year ago. It has four pillars. The first pillar is to phase out transactional sales in favor of subscription models. Can you provide us with an update on transactional products that you’ve phased out and the subscription products you’re hoping to phase in to replace them? Also, what the revenue mix is right now of subscription versus transaction.

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: Yeah, so thank you for the question. Yes, shifting the business from transactional, volatile, unpredictable, not as profitable, from transaction to subscription is one of the key fundamentals of our Value Creation Plan. We put a plan in place in February when we presented. We are on track for the plan. We are basically doing changes in A&G and in life science. In A&G, we are phasing out the print books and transactional e-books by June 2026. We are on track to complete it. We are also phasing out one-time digital collection sales. At the same time, we have introduced two new products, which are sold on a subscription basis. One is the ProQuest e-books, and the other one is digital collection.

We are very proud of the fact that by now, after six months of this product being on the market, we sold already 70 new customers of this one, including some two recent wins in the UK market for top two prestigious universities in the UK, which we cannot specifically name. Good progress on the A&G side on moving away from transactional to subscription. We’re doing a similar exercise in life science, exiting the real-world data brokering business on the DRG side. We have told the market and told our customers that we are phasing out of this business by the end of 2026. We are on track to comply with this plan. At the same time, we’ve introduced a few new subscription-based offerings on the life science DRG side of Clarivate. DRG Fusion is a modular subscription-based data analytics platform replacing real-world data offering.

Also, in our medtech business, we introduced Commercial Analytics 360. It’s a first step towards transitioning medtech from a transactional reporting one-time business to a subscription base. It’s taking off pretty well. It’s progressing according to the plan. Other products that we’re introducing in life science as well, it’s a disease landscape and forecast reports, also transitioning this business from one-time to subscription, all in all on plan. We are currently, when we started the plan, we were 80% of the company was subscriptions, was recurring. By now, if we exclude the disposal, we are talking about 88% of our business is on a subscription basis, and we aim to be at 90% over time.

Unidentified speaker: That’s a great update there. Now, the second pillar of the Value Creation Plan is to improve sales execution. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re hoping to improve there and what steps remain to be done versus what you’ve already accomplished?

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: Sales execution is high on the agenda. It’s important just to consistently, you know, meet our targets. We have implemented most of the changes we were planning around the sales execution. You can tell by the numbers, the ACV number for H1, for Q1, Q2, and by us reaffirming the numbers for the rest of the year. The changes in our sales organization are impacting the business. We see, you know, greater momentum on our subscription base. We see a better retention rate. We’ve implemented changes to the sales organization in the three different segments, mainly around talent, organization, customer engagement, and salesforce incentives. I can go into some further details in terms of talent. We brought in a few external reinforcements from the respective industry.

We’ve hired a new Senior Vice President for Sales in Life Science, coming from the industry and already making an impact, a lady by the name Dana Edwards. We’ve just introduced a new sales lead for A&G to the North American organization and a few other reinforcements of the management team of the sales organization in different positions. That’s on the talent side. Obviously, we have to take some people out when we introduce the new talent. We’ve also done some internal promotion with regards to the talent. All in all, we are improving our talent base on the sales organization. We’ve done some reorganization, some organization changes, making sure that we are getting closer to our customers. We also improved our customer engagement. We are getting closer to our customers and increasing the number of the people who are involved with sales success.

Lastly, we’ve done some changes to the sales incentive plan to make sure that it’s in line with the company objective and also with our desire and strategy to go stronger into subscription reoccurring. That’s for the sales organization. We are largely done, but there’s always more to do.

Unidentified speaker: Makes sense. Now, the third pillar of your Value Creation Plan involves product innovation. There’s been a lot of emphasis recently on GenAI and what you’re infusing into your products. In fact, you recently launched some new agentic capabilities in your Web of Science and DRG product lines. Can you give us an update on your product roadmap and how much of your revenue mix contains some sort of element of GenAI?

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: Yeah, so I’m a product person by, by kind of by my passion is product. I’m very involved in product innovation. I was pleasantly surprised when I took over the role in Clarivate to see the fast-moving AI innovation in the A&G segment. They’ve created a center of excellence in A&G. Using this center of excellence, they’ve created some unique capabilities around AI innovation in academia and information and services. By this center of excellence, we, is now served more and more, is becoming the center of excellence for AI innovation in the entire company. Officially, it still sits within A&G, but we are using the methodologies, the technology. The concept is, yes, we have a center of excellence in the company for AI innovation. Yes, we do also, and we’ve gone from just doing AI, GenAI, we’re going to agentic AI in different products.

I’m going to talk further about this one. This is the notion, to have a center of excellence, but also to build the team in all the different product areas to be able to handle AI innovations themselves. We’re attending the entire R&D organization in the three different segments to feel comfortable and to do AI innovation within the respective product with the support of the AI center of excellence. I can talk a little bit about a few projects, so not only GenAI, more and more agentic AI in these three segments. Life science, Cortellis, systematically going through AI enablement of the different components of Cortellis. Derwent, on the Derwent AI research, AI enablement of the Derwent AI, AI search. We’re talking about Web of Science. Basically, each and every product of ours is going through a process of AI enablement of the product.

Here, I want to give a little bit of some more details and a bit more flavor about the way we go about AI innovation and it’s tying up to the revenue model as well. We have three types, three categories of product. One, and very important because we have a large book of renewals and existing products serve 80-90% of our business. The notion of AI enablement of existing products like Cortellis, like Web of Science, like Alma, like any other product of the company, systematically AI enablement, it helps us to, on the retention side, to retain the customers. This is one. It also helps us to, you know, to go and acquire or to win new customers. This is one angle. Going into the existing product lines and AI enablement and providing those as part of the ongoing subscription, no additional cost. This is one category.

The other category is where we go to existing products and we create an extension, which is chargeable of the product, and we go to a customer. A good example is Web of Science Research Assistant. You don’t get this specific functionality because you’re just paying your subscription fee. You get it when you pay some extra. The monetization opportunities for existing products by the AI empowerment. Some products we decide, case to case, that we provide the customer with the AI capabilities as part of the ongoing payment, subscription fee, and some is coming from additional fees. The third option is that we provide also products with a completely born AI. They were AI out of the gate. Two examples are MacRisk. MacRisk is a product we’ve introduced in the IP segment, which is completely born AI. It has some extended AI functionalities around the trademark.

A better example, and we’ll hear more about this one, is Web of Science Research Intelligence, which is a completely brand new product that we’re introducing using AI. For the record, we had 10,000 Web of Science customers. Web of Science is a monster product for us. We go to most of the prestigious universities worldwide. They will have Web of Science. We are constantly selling more and more Web of Science to lower-tier institutions. News here with the introduction of Web of Science Research Intelligence, which is an AI-enabled GenAI interactive platform for researchers. We can go and monetize further and upsell into our existing customer base. This product is now in development. We signed about 15 to 20 development partners, chargeable development partners. We’ll see more, we’ll hear more and more about our capabilities around this Web of Science Research Intelligence.

That’s what we have to say about our AI innovation and the monetizing AI as well. There’s a question that I constantly ask about the internal cost of AI. It is manageable. It’s not an extreme cost. In fact, it’s much cheaper in terms of what we pay third-party AI vendors. It’s very economical. We find a very economical way to deal with the AI, the third-party cost for AI, for the AI that we pay internal companies. Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: That’s great. That’s a very helpful update on products. The last pillar of your Value Creation Plan involves portfolio rationalization. You’ve talked about conducting a strategic review of non-core assets, and you’re expecting to announce findings of your review in February 2026. Can you talk a little bit about factors that you’re considering as you conduct this portfolio rationalization, what you’re looking for, what’s really top of mind as you think about assets to keep or dispose of?

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: I think our top of mind in this process is to create shareholder value. We, I said it all along, right from the beginning. Yes, we do subscription. We’re going to go AI innovation. We can improve sales execution. Top of mind for us is to create shareholder value. We’ve gone through some process, and we’re still going through some process of creating value through potential divestiture of some of the assets. The key factor for us is creating value to shareholders, either by creating value for shareholders by making the right divestiture if we come across this divestiture, which creates value to the shareholder, either by divesting in inferior assets that will help us grow faster, or by selling certain assets in a creative multiple to our existing multiple.

We cannot share more and hope we will be providing some further news by the end of in our February call.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Now, the ultimate goal of your Value Creation Plan is to accelerate organic revenue growth. Can you talk about what goal you have for organic revenue growth and by when you hope to achieve your target?

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: I’ve been here for just about a year in my job. I believe we can run and we can get the company to grow in market growth rate. Our understanding, the market growth rate is slightly different between the segments. A&G 3%, 4%, IP 4%, 5%, life science even further. I think we are on the right track and we can get into the market growth rate in years to come. I don’t know that I can give you specific dates, but we should, I believe that we are well positioned and well on the way to get into the market growth rate.

Unidentified speaker: Right. Hitting market growth, of course, is a very good goal. Do you think there’s opportunity to surpass market growth for any of the segments over the longer term as you gain share or perhaps penetrate a segment?

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: I think we have to be a little bit modest and say the company, we’re kind of trailing behind our ultimate goal. I think we, I believe we are getting there to go into market growth rate. For now, once we get there, we’ll have another separate discussion.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, that’s prudent. Let’s dive into some of the individual segments. Within the academic and government segment, what would you say are the most significant product development initiatives that are currently underway that you think can really help drive a further acceleration and growth there?

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: As we saw, we are currently, you talk about A&G. In A&G, we’re now running the A&G with three business units. One is the software business unit. This is where I come from, the library automation, Alma, Polaris. This is the software business. There is the content business. That’s a traditional ProQuest business. There is the Web of Science analytical division. All doing well, all strong, highly recurring business. We are investing in all of the three concurrently. On the software side, we see we continuously update. We AI-enable most of the product with constant innovation. In A&G as well, we have the notion of working very, very closely with the customer. Customer collaboration is key. I can call out on the software side two specific products that we don’t talk about too much. There are up-and-coming ones called the Vega platform.

It’s a new platform we introduced two or three years ago. It’s to do with the library community customer engagement. It’s not a discovery product, but it’s more like we do customer interaction or customer engagement with the library patron using Vega. It’s an up-and-coming product. We have about 100 customers, including the New York Public. We are now taking this into the academic as well. That’s one product innovation. The other upcoming product around software is Alma Spectre, which is further enhancement to provide some universities some opportunities to shine and present their research work and also the different digital collections that they have. It’s a product that, again, it’s being developed with, as always, with some key development. Part of ours is Vega community engagement and Alma Spectre, which is a digital collection management product. We’ll hear more about it. This is, in a way, business as usual.

We develop the products. We upsell the existing customer and to help us sell the other basic product, if it’s Alma, Polaris, or the other software product into our customer base. We are doing this. This is quite well. The other thing that we are doing on the content side, this is the software piece on the content side, constant innovation around content. I think the two products that we are now pushing strongly are the ProQuest e-books offering. Since I mentioned already, we are phasing out of the, or we are phasing out of the one-time business, both on the digital collection and one-time e-book sales. This is an opportunity for us to push those two products. I mentioned 70 customers signed already. That’s the new and the up-and-coming product that we sell in the content side of A&G. Lastly, Web of Science.

Web of Science, I don’t know that Web of Science has got enough attention in the press or in the investment committee. It’s a mega, it’s a monster product of ours. We have 10,000 customers and many more to come. I’m here to talk today about the new addition or the new component or the new additional product in the Web of Science family, Web of Science Research Intelligence. This is the born AI product. As I mentioned before, it helps researchers do the research and helps the research offices of the different universities to explore and to analyze their standing, provide direction. Web of Science Research Intelligence, I mentioned already, training development partners, paying development partners, and we will come. General availability is May 2026. It’s a major development of ours. That’s breaking news. We’ll hear more about Web of Science Research Intelligence. That’s on an A&G side.

Unidentified speaker: That’s helpful.

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: Long answer. Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. You mentioned earlier that the life sciences and healthcare business has the potential to grow faster than the other segments because the market’s growing faster. Can you talk about what you’re seeing in the healthcare market broadly that gives you confidence that the growth there can be faster than the other end markets and provide us an update on what you’re seeing currently with the biotech or pharma subsegments?

Matti Shem Tov, CEO, Clarivate: I think we see, I’ll let Jonathan chime in in a bit, but we see a growth. We see a sustainable environment in the R&D side of the pharma, especially for us when Cortellis is a leading product in this environment and for us doing better execution and AI enablement around Cortellis. I think the business is coming back. DRG, the commercial environment is a bit more challenged, but we continue the journey to introduce new products around DRG, and I think it’s going to pay off when the commercial environment will come back. Jonathan?

Jonathan Collins, CFO, Clarivate: Yeah, within the health sciences, we see a strong and sustained demand for digital research and advanced data analytics. Our pharmaceutical customers and biotech customers in this space are dealing with personalized medicine, genomics, adopting AI into their drug discovery and launch process, and we see a great opportunity for the capabilities that we have to aid that. That gives us a really good feeling about the growth potential in this market. To touch a little bit more on what Matti highlighted, within the R&D space, we’ve made investments in the last year to incorporate the research assistant that was incubated in the A&G segment that we’ve brought to our Cortellis suite of products. We’ve got great feedback from R&D users across the stack there on the capabilities this brings. We saw a really nice improvement in our renewal rates in these products in the first half of the year.

Almost all of the company’s renewal rate improvement performance of about 1% that we saw was driven by improvement in the life sciences area. It is very encouraging to see early investments to bring AI technology into the products and solutions already starting to generate returns and improvements in the marketplace. I think separately, there’s continued pressure in the market to incorporate real-world evidence into the development and the regulatory compliance, and then certainly in the commercialization and market access aspects of that market.

We really believe this investment that Matti highlighted in DRG Fusion is an important way to do that, stepping away from selling large amounts of data and getting back to what DRG was really well known for, and that is a deep understanding of the markets, our disease landscape reporting, our epidemiology intelligence, these great products where we derive insights, and we think we have the capability to deliver much better patient insights through the Fusion platform using that real-world data and evidence to provide more advanced analytics to help our customers get those treatments into the hands of the people that need them the most. Those are a couple of areas where we’ve made investments. We’re excited to see the progress that the Fusion will make, particularly here in the second half of the year and as we go into next year.

Those are things that give us the confidence that it’s an attractive growing market and that we can really partner with our customers and provide value with the things that we do particularly well.

Unidentified speaker: Right. Within the IP segment, can you talk a little bit about how GenAI could potentially change the competitive landscape, either make it easier or more difficult, and then talk about perhaps patent activity that you’re seeing with respect to AI?

Jonathan Collins, CFO, Clarivate: Yeah, Matti gave a great example earlier with the launch of our MacRisk project, which is a product that is an AI-native solution that we developed to help manage the potential infringements and the room to create new brands and trademarks. That’s a great example. We think we’re early to market with that solution, getting great early feedback from early development partners and customers. I think about also not just in the trademark intelligence, but on the patent intelligence side. Over the last year or more, we’ve made meaningful investments in AI-powered search for our Derwent product that went into general release towards the end of last year, early this year. As we mentioned earlier this year, we’ve seen a very nice uptake in searches within the key cohort that use that platform. We’ve seen double-digit increases in search activity.

It’s the first time we’ve seen that in quite some time. That’s an opportunity to take this unparalleled data set, the Derwent World Patent Index, and provide analytics and intelligence for prior art searching, freedom to operate, some of the key use cases for patent intelligence. We’re also very excited, and you’ll hear more about this in the coming months at our Ignite conference with respect to the launch of the Derwent patent watch product. We have a group of key customers here where we’re building infringement investigation workflow capabilities with some AI-native modules or enhancements in that platform that will help customers to manage the process of dealing with potential infringements and determining where to spend money to protect. This is a really exciting new product, and this is AI is enabling that. Those are a couple of examples on the intelligence side.

When we think about our workflow software and our services business, undoubtedly in the coming years, building agentic capabilities into these solutions are going to help make our customers more efficient and more effective through these workflow processes. We think there’s some opportunities not just on the intelligence front, but also on the software and services side of IP. This is a market that we’re starting to see some signs of recovery from an overall demand standpoint as well, which is encouraging.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Stepping back and looking at all three segments, how would you think pricing could evolve as a potential contributor to growth? Where is it now, and how much additional pricing increases can you achieve in the coming years?

Jonathan Collins, CFO, Clarivate: I think Matti touched on this a bit before. Our approach has been there are certain new products and capabilities where we will price discretely. Research Intelligence that we’re building on the Web of Science platform is a great example of that. There are other capabilities that we embed to enhance the user experience and deliver more value. One of the ways of monetizing that is improved renewal rates, which we’ve talked about. We do believe pricing is a part of the equation. As we deliver more value and we provide greater capabilities when we come to that renewal discussion, there’s a potential for us to monetize that through pricing. I think over the last few years, you know we’ve kept up with the rate of inflation. We certainly think there’s an opportunity to do more as we’ve invested in capital spending to deliver some of these capabilities.

We’ll be looking at that carefully across all of our markets and business units within the segments.

Unidentified speaker: Let’s talk a little bit about margins and profitability. This year, you’re guiding for EBITDA margins to contract around 50 bps to 41%, mainly because of disposals. Can you talk about where you think margins will evolve or how they’re going to evolve after these disposals come to an end? What are the key drivers you see for margin expansion going forward?

Jonathan Collins, CFO, Clarivate: Yeah, it’s a great point. There are two things. You hit on a big one for this year that affect us. The other factor is with organic growth being relatively modest, we’re going to be in a time where we believe it’s important to continue to spend to bring these capabilities into the market. That’s pressuring our margins as well too. As the disposals get behind us, that’s actually going to help us. When we model pro forma what the business would look like without these disposals, it’ll actually help to improve our margins. We expect to see that come into the business as we get past those next year. This is the type of, we operate the types of products where we build these products one time. We provide enhancements and maintenance, but we can sell them many times around the world.

The incremental margin profile for organic growth is very attractive. Once we get back to that healthy market growth that Matti described, we’re going to make steady continued progress on that over the next few years. We certainly think there’s opportunity for profit margins to expand just based on that organic growth. The ability to reevaluate the level of capital spending as we move forward and optimize there helps to continue to improve our cash flow conversion.

Unidentified speaker: Right. You talked about investing back into the business. Can you maybe speak to some examples of productivity or cost management initiatives where you’re taking out costs to help drive margins?

Jonathan Collins, CFO, Clarivate: Yeah, I mean, certainly as we brought each of these businesses together, we leveraged the great footprint that we have around the world and the talent and capabilities we have in many of our centers of excellence. We continue to optimize there to drive efficiencies in the business. Our teams are adopting AI-based tools for many of the processes we do, whether that’s software development. More and more of our code is obviously being generated by AI, making our teams more efficient, the opportunity to have greater throughput in the development process. Another big area for us is content ingestions. We continue to develop new tools to help our editorial enrichment and content ingestion teams bring that into our solutions in a much more effective way. These are a couple of the key areas, and new technology is helping us to improve and become more efficient there as well too.

Unidentified speaker: You laid out a framework for where you hope organic revenue growth will improve to. How are you thinking about margins? Longer term, where do you think margins can expand to, and how much margin expansion per year do you think is reasonable over the medium to longer term?

Jonathan Collins, CFO, Clarivate: Yeah, I mean, within the last few years, our margins were in the 42.5% range, about 150 basis points better than where we’ll be this year. We outlined that we think we can get between a half and a full percentage point of improvement through the disposals. Once we get back to organic growth, we haven’t laid out the exact algorithm for that, but once you get to approach 2% to 3%, there’s certainly an opportunity to start expanding margins. We haven’t given a specific number, but have indicated that we think that there’s room to grow here from where we are at about the 41% this year.

Unidentified speaker: Makes sense. With respect to the balance sheet, your gross leverage right now is 4.3 times. Can you talk about how you plan to balance debt paydown, share buybacks, and M&A, and what your broader capital allocation priorities are?

Jonathan Collins, CFO, Clarivate: Yeah, it’s a fair point. We’ve built up a little bit of cash in the first half of the year. As you noted, we repurchased about $100 million worth of shares in the first half of the year, and we built up some cash. On a net leverage basis, we’re still at about four turns at the end of the second quarter. When we think about the go-forward, we’ll continue to do a bit of both, some debt paydown and some buybacks. Last year, we were nearly balanced. We may skew from that just a little bit, but I think the important part is we have flexibility. We have a patient and very efficient debt stack. Over time, we’ve certainly indicated that we want to see that leverage come below three turns, and we’ll continue to prosecute against that over the course of the next few years.

Unidentified speaker: Great. We’re just about at time. Thank you both, Matti and Jonathan, for the great discussion. Please join me in thanking them both.

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