Earnings call transcript: Springer Nature sees 5% revenue growth in Q1 2025

Springer Nature reported a robust financial performance for the first quarter of 2025, with a 5% increase in revenue to €1,847 million and a 7% growth in adjusted operating profit. The company continues to strengthen its position as a global leader in the research ecosystem, driven by its strategic focus on Open Access and AI technologies. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains a "GOOD" overall financial health score of 2.79, with particularly strong marks in profitability (4.43 out of 5).

Key Takeaways

• Revenue grew by 5% to €1,847 million.
• Adjusted operating profit increased by 7%, with a margin expansion of 63 basis points.
• 50% of primary research articles are now published Open Access.
• The company launched several new journals and AI tools.
• Springer Nature expects revenue guidance for 2025 between €1,885 million and €1,935 million.

Company Performance

Springer Nature has demonstrated solid performance in the first quarter of 2025, building on its strengths in the Research segment, which contributes 77% of its revenue. The company has been proactive in expanding its Open Access offerings and investing in AI technologies, which are key drivers of its growth strategy. This approach aligns with the increasing demand for accessible and innovative research solutions.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: €1,847 million, a 5% increase year-over-year.
• Adjusted operating profit: €512 million, a 7% increase.
• Adjusted operating profit margin: Expanded by 63 basis points to 28.3%.
• Free cash flow: Improved by €54 million to €290 million.
• Adjusted earnings per share: Increased to €1.09.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Springer Nature has set its revenue guidance for 2025 at €1,885 million to €1,935 million. The company aims to maintain its adjusted operating profit margin while targeting a 1% margin expansion in the midterm. Analyst consensus from InvestingPro suggests potential upside, with price targets ranging from €168 to €220. The company’s next earnings report is scheduled for May 12, 2025, where investors can expect updates on these targets. For comprehensive analysis and real-time updates, consider accessing the detailed Pro Research Report available exclusively to InvestingPro subscribers. Continued investments in Open Access and AI technologies are expected to drive future growth, with the Health and Education segments projected to grow by around 3%.

Executive Commentary

CEO Frank Frankel Peters stated, "We delivered strong financial results with revenue growth at 5% and profit growth at 7%." He emphasized the company’s ambition to "outperform the market while growing responsibly and sustainably." Peters also highlighted the value of Open Access, stating, "We are driving OA because it provides greater value to our research communities."

Risks and Challenges

• Changes in U.S. research funding could impact revenue, although limited near-term effects are expected.
• The need for continuous innovation in AI and Open Access to stay competitive.
• Potential market saturation in the Research segment.
• Economic pressures affecting library and institutional budgets.
• Regulatory changes impacting global operations.

Springer Nature remains focused on leveraging its strong position in the research ecosystem to drive growth and innovation. The company’s strategic initiatives in Open Access and AI are expected to support its long-term objectives, despite potential challenges in the broader economic and regulatory landscape.

Full transcript - Simon Property Group (SPG) Q4 2024:

Thomas Geiselhardt, Investor Relations Lead, Springer Nature: Good afternoon, and welcome to the presentation of the Springer Nature Full Year twenty twenty four Results. My name is Thomas Geiselhardt, and I lead Investor Relations at Springer Nature. Today, I’m here in Berlin with Frank Frankel Peters, our CEO and Alexander Danbeck, our CFO. Today’s presentation has two chapters: a business update presented by Frank and an update on the financials 2024 presented by Alexander. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.

Overall, we have about one hour, so that should allow for sufficient time, including Q and A at the end. Before handing over to Frank and Alessandra, I would like to make a few remarks on how we present our financials. For revenues and adjusted operating profit, we present reported numbers and reported changes based on actual currency rates and reflecting the actual portfolio composition during the reporting period. We also show growth rates on an underlying basis, meaning that currency effects and portfolio changes are excluded for a like for like comparison. Our new financial guidance for 2025 is based on the expected underlying performance of the business, which means that the impacts of foreign exchange rates and changes in the composition of the portfolio are excluded.

And with this, I’m handing over to Frank.

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Thank you, Thomas. We’re excited to welcome you to our first full year results as a public company following the successful IPO six months ago. In the appendix, you’ll find a company profile presentation for those that are less familiar with us. To kick off, let’s take a look at the highlights of our performance in 2024. Obviously, we’re very proud of our results, which puts us at the upper end of our guidance.

We delivered strong financial results with revenue growth at 5% and profit growth at 7%. Revenue growth was driven by the Research segment, which grew by 6% and Education by 3%, while our Health business remained stable. Growth in Research was driven by strong performance in our journals portfolio. During 2024, we also achieved an important milestone in our decision towards Open Access by publishing 50% of our primary research articles Open Access on the back of very strong article growth. We also maintained our focus on technology and AI to provide more value to our communities and transform the publishing process.

Today, we have more than 99 AI pilots running across the business. Looking at twenty twenty five, we’ve already seen a solid start to the year, allowing us to expect results in line with our midterm outlook. For those who are less familiar with Springer Nature, let me briefly introduce our company. We’re a global leader in the research ecosystem generating $1,900,000,000 in revenues with 77% coming from research And that’s also where 88% of the $520,000,000 in profit is generated. We operate in three segments, as you can see on the right, Research, Education and Health, each with leading positions in their respective markets.

In research, we’re an essential link in the research ecosystem by curating, validating and disseminating knowledge as we help researchers uncover ideas and share their discoveries. In Health, we support practitioners to stay at the forefront of medical science and in education, we support teachers to advance learning. Our global company with more than 9,000 employees across 40 countries. We also enjoy a high quality revenue base with research contributing 77%. And our revenues are almost equally distributed across the globe.

In research, 62% of revenues are contracted and almost 90% are digital. Let me now briefly explain our strategy on the next slide. Our ambition is to outperform the market while growing responsibly and sustainably. We focus on three key areas in our strategy. One, driving the transition to Open Access two, leveraging technology and artificial intelligence with our domain expertise and three, ensuring that Springer Nature continues to be a great place to work.

We are driving OA because it provides greater value to our research communities with more downloads, more citations and much greater public awareness. At the same time, OA allows us to better align the value we deliver publishing articles with the revenues we generate. With technology and AI, we provide value adding services to our communities across our three segments. In research, it allows us to transform the publishing process improving productivity, speed and quality. And finally, as a people’s business, attracting, developing and keeping talent is key to us.

Our colleagues not only have substantial domain and technical expertise, but they also hold deep relations and high quality relations in our communities. In 2024, we strengthened our team with three new executive leaders. Aleksandra, of course, and Maria, our new Chief People Officer were hired for retired predecessors. And finally Saskia joined in a new role as Chief Digital Officer. These three strategies allow us to increase our performance while growing responsibly.

In 2024, we retained the highest reputation within the publishing industry. We saw continued high author satisfaction and we received a gold rating from Ecovadis for a strong commitment to sustainability. We operate three divisions, Research, Health and Education. Each of them have strong brands, leading positions in their respective markets and they enjoy strong underlying growth partners. We achieved overall revenue growth in 2024 of 5%, the result of strong growth in our Research division at 6%, driven by the strong performance in our journals business.

Education grew 3% driven by strong growth in India and Southern Africa. And finally, our Health business stabilized following further normalization of advertising budgets of our Big Pharma customers. Let me now give you a more detailed update on our business progress starting with journals and research. I’m pleased to share that we saw excellent results in our journals business. Our article growth of 16% was twice as high than the market.

And also we grew our OA share of Springer Nature articles from 44% in 2023 to 50% in 2024, a great milestone. Let me share some highlights along four topics on the left side. First, quality. We’re proud to have 47 journals leading their Impact Factor category as the number one journal. And we continue to lead the top 50 impact factor space with 23 journals, demonstrating the distinctive quality of our premium journals.

Second, new launches. We successfully launched three new nature titles Nature Cities, Nature Chemical Engineering and Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering and 65 new fully OA journals allowing us to secure and expand market share in these areas. OA transition. We had 66 transformative agreements in total, which allowed us to drive the OA transition at scale across all continents. The U.

S. Saw the most activity in 2024, including a TA with LYRASIS that covers 120 institutions. Europe continues to be the most mature transformative agreement market. Finally, research integrity. We made significant investments in our research integrity by scaling our direct specialist team and implementing more automated projects.

We also actively contributed to the SDM Integrity Hub, a cross publisher initiative to support research integrity across the industry. Finally, we published our first editorial DEI report in 2024, affirming our commitment to serve a diverse and global research community. Let’s take a look at our books and services business on the next slide. Starting with books, about 70% of our book revenues are now digital. Overall, we saw an accelerated decline in print despite a good year end finish.

Demonstrating the value of our content, we have seen 35% growth in the usage of our e books. And to support revenues going forward, we have already secured more than 16,000 contracts for new books, allowing us to publish about 14,000 books per year. We’ve also launched two new e book collections for 2025, artificial intelligence and mechanical engineering. And another business model improvement is the Access and Select offering, which allows evidence based purchasing positions for libraries. Let’s move to Services.

As a reminder, early in 2024, we divested our AJE business, which was part of our Services. This unit was negatively impacted by the emergence of AI. As you can see on the right, we have seen good growth in our sponsored events and conferences businesses, where we saw an increase of 43% in a number of events in 2024 compared to 2023. At the same time, our advertising business faced headwinds because of a further decline of marketing budgets in our key markets, for example, suppliers of lab equipment. Our data and analytics products have seen good renewal rates and we were able to secure new customers.

Nature Research Intelligence, our new solution that provides researchers and decision makers with data driven insights has effectively deployed AI. And looking at a new AI solution, our Nature AI Assistant, helping researchers with the reading and writing part of their research, I’m pleased to say that by the end of twenty twenty four, about 600 researchers tested our pilot and an overwhelming majority, 81% reported that will save them time. The open beta launch is expected in the second quarter of the year. Let’s now move to Health and Education. Overall, our Health business remains stable.

Within Health, our international pharma unit successfully refocused on more sustainable budgets of pharma headquarters and our associated medical affair departments. Unfortunately, we also saw three key pharma customers canceling their unsuccessful clinical trials. Qrius, our digital first medical publishing platform saw strong growth done by increased submissions and 39% growth in publications. Our advertising revenues declined due to further normalization of the advertising budgets of our big pharma customers and new health insurance legislation in Germany. Against this background, we have been able to maintain our profit margin in health despite flat revenues due to strict cost management like streamlining our organization.

Now turning to Education, where we saw a growth of 3% in 2024. Growth was driven by strong performance in India and Southern Africa leading to an expansion of open market revenues. And as a result, open market share grew from 72% to 84% in 2024. This positive momentum was partly offset by the loss of our Canalite government business in Mexico. We continued our journey of digitization in education with the global rollout of the Macmillan Education Everywhere platform and Maya, Macmillan AI assistant for tutors.

And finally, we improved our profit margin in education by just over 1% because of a comprehensive cost management program called Elevate. And before I hand over to Alexandra to discuss our financials in more detail, I would like to touch upon our progress with AI, which we see as a great opportunity for Springer Nature. As I’ve told before, researchers don’t like to write and read, they like to do research. And in research, AI is allowing us to transform the publishing process by improving quality, speed and efficiency. The backbone of this transformation is Snap, which is our homegrown submission to accept system supporting more than 1,000 journals and 1,000,000 submissions in 2024.

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from the publishing workflow. To support manuscript submission, we launched the Journal Finder, which helped authors find the most suitable journal in our more than 3,000 journals. Also as part of the submission process, we have developed research integrity tools helping us to check over 2,000,000 end manuscripts in 2024. At the peer review and acceptance stage, we launched our AI enabled editorial assistant called RP, which helps editors with quality checks. Another tool we launched in 2024 is our transfer recommender called T Rex.

And with T Rex, we’re effectively automating the cascading and transfer process. In article production, we used a tool called ACDCX, which allowed us to automate a typesetting of about 1,000,000 pages, saving 60% of production costs compared to pre press vendors. And finally, to drive AI adoption and experimentation across the organization, we launched our own AI Academy, which trained close to 2,000 employees last year and we also made a set of AI tools available to all employees. That concludes the business update. I would now like to hand over to Alexander to discuss our financial results.

Alexander Danbeck, CFO, Springer Nature: Thank you, Frank. I’m happy to share further insights into our annual results. As Frank said, we delivered really strong performance this year. We reported revenue of EUR 1,847,000,000.000 and adjusted operating profit of EUR $512,000,000, including scope changes and actual currency. This reported revenue represents an underlying growth of 5% compared to 2023.

And the adjusted operating profit reflects an underlying growth of 7% benefiting from our operating leverage and efficiency measures. This led to an expansion of the adjusted underlying operating profit margin by 63 basis points to 28.3%. Our free cash flow improved substantially by EUR 54,000,000 to EUR $290,000,000. Entredden by our strong performance and proceeds from the capital increase at the IPO, our financial leverage ratio decreased to 2.3 times. Thanks to our enhanced financial performance, we were able to raise adjusted earnings per share by EUR 0.52 to EUR 1.09.

Let me show you on the next slide how the actual results convert into a like for like logic so that we can compare to guidance. Firstly, we successfully delivered what we promised and achieved results in the upper part of our guidance. You can see above, circled in green, the guidance range given at the time of the IPO and next to it, the performance delivered in the year. We achieved revenue of EUR18842 million and adjusted operating profit of EUR $560,000,000, both at the upper end of our guidance range. Considering also foreign currency effects, reported revenue shown on the left at actual FX rates amounted to EUR18847 billion and adjusted operating profit to EUR512 million.

And as mentioned by Thomas earlier, we refer across our presentation also to growth rates on an underlying basis, meaning currency effects and portfolio changes are excluded for a like for like comparison. This view for 2024 is provided on the far right hand side with EUR 1,838,000,000.000 in revenue and EUR $520,000,000 adjusted operating profit. The next slide provides further insights into our segments for reported as well as underlying revenue and adjusted operating profit growth. As Frank described, we had a really strong year in our Research segment and all other segments performed in line with their respective market strengths. You see here in the right hand column that research was the primary driver of our underlying group resize, delivering 6% revenue growth and nearly 8% growth in adjusted operating profit.

The Education segment also demonstrated good performance, achieving 3% revenue growth and 17% adjusted operating profit growth in key markets. While the Health segment remained stable despite a challenging market environment. And at the bottom right, you see the group’s underlying margin grew by 63 basis points as mentioned before. Our stable reporting group results in the middle columns here were mainly influenced by scoped changes following the divestments of the transport business and ATE within Research. Additionally, adverse foreign exchange effects played a role.

Research was impacted by weaker U. S. Dollar and yen as well as a stronger British pound as we have a considerably higher cost and revenues in British pounds. In Education, a weaker Argentinian pesos was the most relevant. So it has been a strong year and on the following slides you will see the key characteristics of our revenue model, which is a key driver of this performance.

As Frank highlighted earlier, we maintain a significant portion of recurring revenue, supported by a well diversified geographic customer base and strong cash generation. As you see on the left, more than 50% of our group revenue was contracted. And within research, that level is significantly higher with 62. We enjoy a well diversified geographic base and all this leads as you can see on the right to a strong cash performance, resulting in EUR219 million free cash flow in 2024. And this free cash flow is a significant improvement over the previous year.

This was driven by strong operating results, favorable developments in working capital and a reduction in one off expenses counterbalanced to some extent by increased tax payments. Our financial leverage has continued to decrease to 2.3 times, supported by positive operating results and approximately EUR 400,000,000 in debt repayment. Funded by net proceeds from the IPO of about EUR 197,000,000 and free cash flow. We remain committed to our midterm leverage target of 1.5x to 2x. And turning back to the P and L.

We delivered a substantial improvement in adjusted net income for the year. You can see near the top of the table, this reflects the improved financial results following the refinancing at the end of twenty twenty three, partially offset by higher income taxes. And at the bottom, you see this resulted in an adjusted earnings per share of EUR 1.09, an increase of EUR 0.52 over the prior year. Looking next to our dividend policy. For the year 2024, the Management and Supervisory Board will propose a propose a dividend distribution of per share totaling to €25,900,000 And to confirm our midterm guidance, we intend to distribute around 50% of our adjusted net income and dividends will be distributed from capital reserves and will be exempt from German dividends of holding tax.

And finally, a few words to our financial outlook for 2025. Our financial outlook is based on underlying performance. 2024 reported revenue and adjusted operating profit here on the left hand side are therefore to be translated using recent constant currency rates and adjusted for change in scope. Scope adjustments primarily relate to the ATE divestment and amounts to minus EUR 3,000,000 in revenue and plus EUR 2,000,000 in adjusted operating profit. For the constant rate scenario, please bear in mind our methodology is using prior year rates for comparison and we consider in addition the following adjustments.

So FX rates for revenue earned from deferred revenues is adjusted to constant rates. And then in addition, for Argentina, we switched to current year forward rates. And accounts receivable and accounts of papers at spot rate evaluations was eliminated. These FX impacts are impacting revenue with EUR 9,000,000 and adjusted operating profit with minus EUR 7,000,000. This translates in a guidance base of revenue at EUR 1,835,000,000.000 and adjusted operating profit of EUR $5.00 8,000,000.

On this basis, we expect for 2025 revenue in the range between EUR $1,885,000,000 and $1,935,000,000,000 dollars and an adjusted operating profit margin at least at the level of 2024. This reflects our assessment of the positive dynamics in the market as well as the continued investment in our future growth. It also allows for the cost related to the first full year as a listed company as well as the benefits of the efficiencies and process improvements we continue to deliver. And as you can see here on the right, our midterm guidance for the next few years remains unchanged. With that, back to Tom.

Thomas Geiselhardt, Investor Relations Lead, Springer Nature: Thank you, Alexander. Now the call will be open for questions. And as a note here, we’d like to limit the number of questions to two per analyst, so that all research analysts have the opportunity to ask their high priority questions. And with this, I hand it over to the operator.

Operator: Thank The first question comes from George Webb, Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

George Webb, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Hi, good afternoon, Frank, Alexander and Thomas. Yes, I’ll kick off for two, please. Firstly, just on the 2025 guidance on the revenue growth, noting that implied range of 2.7% to 5.4, I think, on an underlying basis. I guess my question is around the width of that guidance range, particularly in the context of other peers. In Forman, I’m sure you’ve seen it guiding around 4% underlying to Taylor and Francis.

I think with RELX expected around 4% as well. You’ve talked to that expectation to outperform the market over time. So wondering if you can piece together how you thought about construction the width of that 20%, twenty five % range? And particularly at the low end of the range, what needs to go less well this year either at the company level or at the market level that might bring up a 2.7% type of number? Second question, just bearing in mind that discussions have moved along a little bit in the number of months around U.

S. Research funding, NIH impacts and things. Just curious at a very high level, the latest you have on how you see those dynamics evolving?

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Thank you. Yes. George, thank you very much. I suggest I’ll start with the latter one and then, Alexander, you can come back with the first one. So yes, good question.

Let’s say the dynamics in The U. S. And how they relate to Springer Nature. Maybe a couple of comments to make to put things a little bit into context. So I think it’s fair to say that we operate in a resilient industry.

Typically over the past decades, growth in GDP, let’s say roughly 3% has translated into growth in Research and Development about 4% has resulted into Art of Growth of about 5%. Second, if you look at Research Publishing, it’s actually less than 0.1% of global research and development funding and library budgets typically account for less than 1% of their respective institutions. Third, if you look at Research Publishing, it’s actually a geographically well diversified industry with roughly a third coming from each continent. And last but not least, what we’ve actually seen in periods of uncertainty and I think the last pandemic is a good example, we’ve actually seen an increase in research output leading to more manuscripts. Now if we look at Springer Nature specifically, I think it’s important to note that in our case, U.

S. Revenues account for roughly 24%. And I think it’s also important to note that about two thirds of our U. S. Research revenues are sitting actually in multi year contracts, it’s actually 70%.

And out of those 70%, close to 80% have already been renewed and enforced. The remainder, most of them have actually already a commercial agreement and we just need to do the administrative processing. I think also the good news is that let’s say, for active renewals in 2026, we actually don’t have that many U. S. Customers that are relevant.

So in that sense, it puts Springer Nature in a good position. I think point number three for Springer Nature specifically is the fact that a little bit over, let’s say, a low double digit number in terms of article output is actually coming from The U. S, which is not unsimilar to let’s say, RELX, Wiley and the others. And roughly a third of those are actually published in full open access. And if you look at the total number of Springer Nature articles, only relatively low single digit share is actually result of direct U.

S. Government research and development funding. And if you look at the NIH funded articles, they are roughly two thirds of those. So basically, you talk about, let’s say, 6% to 7% and around 4%. If you look at 2025, as I said, we expect relatively limited impact because as already mentioned, most of the renewals have already been done and that’s a significant part of our U.

S. Revenues. I think it’s also important to note that actually the Open Access revenues are typically paid by, let’s say, direct funding for research grants, so they’re not sitting in the indirect cost. And I think last but not least, we’ve actually seen pretty healthy submission growth in 2024 and continuing so far in the first quarter in twenty twenty five. Obviously, if you look at the longer term, of course, if it results in significant cuts in federal research and funding, it could have an impact and the same is true if library budgets will be impacted.

But I think it’s also important to realize that under the previous Trump administration, we’ve actually seen an increase in research and development funding of about 4%, which was actually twice as high as the Obama and Biden administration. And we should also not forget the impact of corporate research and development funding, which in The U. S. Is actually four times as high as government research and development funding. And I think another point is, yes, we have seen quite a lot of pressure in certain areas of research, whether it’s in our research related to climate, whether it’s research related to infectious diseases.

But I think at the same time, there might also be an opportunity with increased research, for instance, in technology or energy. So in that sense, it’s making sure that our portfolio is focused on the right areas. So that’s where we are at the moment. I think short term limited impact, longer term, unclear, too early to tell, but maybe challenges, but also opportunities. So I think that probably gives you a reasonable perspective on our position versus what’s happening in The U.

S.

Alexander Danbeck, CFO, Springer Nature: Thank you. Justin, I will take the second question. Charles, this is Alexandra. Let me add a little bit more color around your questions regarding the guidance. I think it’s important to note, our guidance is in line with our confirmed mid target outlook.

But you have to bear in mind a bit that it’s quite early in the year and last year’s guidance was given in October, hence the wider range. Our expectations currently in terms of revenue are gearing towards the midpoint of the guidance and our ambition to outperform the research market by around 1% remains unchanged. And to get some light on how we started into the year, we had a good start into the year and we see continued growth from our Open Access business and also our renews and the progress that we are seeing there is at the same level what we have seen last year, around 80%. And we also do expect that Health and Education will contribute to our guidance in line with their respective markets. In addition, we also remain committed to expand our margin, but at the same time, we want to keep currently our flexibility if we see opportunities to expand or to invest into the business.

But again, when you would have a look at the midpoint of our guidance, again that would assume a margin expansion.

George Webb, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: That’s really helpful. Thank you,

Operator: The next question then comes from Samin Kassap, BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Samin Kassap, Analyst, BNP Paribas: Thank you and good afternoon everyone. At the midpoint of your guidance, what type of organic revenue growth do you expect for Health and Education? You just said to contribute in line with the markets, but does that mean growth or decline? Can you provide a little bit more color on Health and Education organic revenue growth at the midpoint of your guidance? And secondly, can you possibly provide a little bit more color on year to date trends within Research in terms of are we still double digit volume growth in Open Access and books declining and nature growing?

Any more color you could provide at the sub segment level would be great. Thank you.

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Yes. Thank you very much, Sami. Maybe just the quick and easy one. If you look at Health and Education, you should think about growth of about 3% at the midpoint. If you look at, let’s say, Research, how are we doing year to date?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, we had a solid start of the year, which confirms our guidance that Oleksandr just explained. I already talked about the fact that, let’s say, more than 80% of our contracted revenue is already invoiced and the remainder, in most cases, is already commercially negotiated. Just the administrative work needs to be done. I think on full away, I think it’s fair to say that the great momentum is continuing. We saw strong submission and article growth in the last quarter and that essentially continues in the first quarter as well.

The underlying dynamics are changing a little bit. I think it’s fair to say that last year, we saw quite a, let’s say, significant loss of share of the pure full away players. What we’re seeing now is that probably they’ve reached their low point, but we’re actually seeing more market growth. So the market growth according to our information on full Open Access was about is now about let’s say 8% for the year to date. So that’s positive compared to 3% last year and flat the year before.

On books, yes, we saw significant decline in print in the first half of the year. We saw a gradual recovery in the second half of the year. We actually saw a little bit of a positive in the last quarter in terms of print books, so that’s positive as well. And then if I look at the Springer and Nature portfolios with the transition to transformative agreements, we expect those to actually operate in line with our longer term outlook for those portfolios as well.

Samin Kassap, Analyst, BNP Paribas: Thank you very much.

Operator: Our next question comes from Steve Lieschte, Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Steve Lieschte, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Hi there, everybody. Thanks for taking the questions. Just you talked about submission growth. I might have missed it, but have you given a figure for submission growth in 2024? And then any color on year to date, an actual figure?

And then secondly, just on margin, I just wanted to double check, When you say midterm now for the 1% increase, do we take our base year as 24%, so effectively that’s 24% to 27%, just to clarify that, please?

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Yes, maybe a quick one on the submission growth, Steve. It’s essentially $2,300,000 submissions, which you can actually see on the Page 36 of the presentation.

Alexander Danbeck, CFO, Springer Nature: And I would take the second one. So Steve, the base for our midterm outlook is 25. So we expect to extend our margin by one percentage point over the next few years. And the way how we look at it, it will be done the accumulated improvement that you will see on an underlying scenario in each of the respective years.

Steve Lieschte, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Great. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Roman Reshneff, Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Roman Reshneff, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Hello. Yes, thanks for the presentation. I just also have a couple of questions. First one would be on free cash flow. It looks like it improved a bit more than expected supported by more favorable working capital dynamics during Q4.

So looking ahead, do you expect free cash flow to grow at a premium to operating profit? Or do you presume any components to reverse and put some downwards pressure on cash generation? And the second, I guess, there was a recent Wall Street Journal article highlighting concerns over the rapid growth of academic publishing, including issues of quality control and editorial resignations. And Friggan Nature was cited in the article with references to journals being deleted or investigated. So given this scrutiny, do you see the pace of current submissions and overall volume growth as sustainable going forward?

And do you see the need to apply more proactive measures to the research quality control? Thank you.

Alexander Danbeck, CFO, Springer Nature: Okay. Wilma, let me start with the free cash flow question and then to put some perspective on that. Yes, as you can imagine, I’m very pleased with our performance on free cash flow in 2024. And it has been nicely in line also what we talked about earlier. So with regards to working capital, it turned out that we had no additional working capital needs for education.

So ultimately, we came in then flat with regards to working capital. And that’s the kind of ambition that we also have for the future. When you think about the dynamics in our working capital, so structurally, we should be negative on the research side. We had slight requirements on the education side. But all in all, I would expect to remain flat on that.

What you have to be in mind when you think about operational part of the free cash flow, that has been just the dynamics that I explained. Timing wise and you also see when you go back to the slide that I explained the revenue characteristics and how this is translating into cash flow, Q1 and Q4 are with the strong quarters in our free cash flow generation, and I remain I expect this will remain intact. Nevertheless, you also have to be in mind considering the size of the contract that we are negotiating. There could be timing impact and things could slip from one quarter into the other. So that’s just something conceptually and from a timing aspect also to be considered.

For the free cash flow as a whole, the driver also for the years to come will be the improvements that we see in our operating results. Last year, we had increased number of one offs. You might remember the additional payments for The UK pension funds, the refinance and costs. This has been drastically lower this year, and I also do not expect in the foreseeable future something like this to repeat. Something to be considered in addition for the development of the free cash flow will be the development on interest payments because you have seen we continue our trajectory and further reducing our debt.

Due to the lower leverage ratio, we will also see an improvement in our interest rates. And that ultimately will contribute then also to the interest payments that you are seeing and is an additional driver for improving our free cash flow. And regarding the tax payments, you know what has been our guidance on that and this remains intact. So just to give you a bit of composition and the areas of improvement that we do see for the free cash flow.

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Yes. Thank you, Alexander. So research integrity, of course, a key topic for us because at the end our reputation is our most important asset. If you look at research integrity, basically we talk about three different types of cases. First, we talk about an author making, let’s say, a mistake, which can happen.

Second, somebody changing the outcomes of an experiment on purpose to still be able to publish an article. I think those two cases will always continue to happen and they always happen. The third case, which is something that was, let’s say, more emerging over the past couple of years is the case of paper mills, which is basically, I would call it, organized crime to basically sell fake articles to authors to get published. Now if you look at Springer Nature, I think we’ve always been at the forefront of, let’s say, being transparent, but also being open. And I’m very happy to say that we’ve actually created a site website, which you can visit, where you can actually see what we’re doing on research integrity, where we actually also transparently talk about the number of cases we have seen in a number of retractions.

Maybe to put things a little bit in perspective, I already mentioned earlier the 2,300,000 submissions we had last year. That led to 480,000 publications. And last year, we had about 3,000 retractions altogether. Now it’s important to note that those 3,000 retractions don’t relate to the publications in 2024, but they relate to all the publications we have made in the past as well. So we talk about millions.

So as a percentage, research, the retractions are an extremely small percentage of the overall total. At the same time, every retraction is one to many. So that’s why we invest. We invest in people and already talked about, let’s say, the direct team that we have, another leadership of a gentleman called Chris Graff. We have expanded the team to about 50 people today, but we also have an extended team, both internally and externally, just a bit over 300 people.

And we’ve actually also made significant investments in AI tools to safeguard, let’s say, research integrity and some of those are, for instance, things like Snapshot, which identifies fake images. We have a tool called Geppetto, which looks at, let’s say, fake text. We have a tool called Iceberg, which is effectively targeting paper mills because it looks at patterns and submissions. We have a tool called Referee, which looks at the whether the references are correct. So I think we are doing everything as a company, but also together with other companies in the industry through the research integrity to fight research integrity.

And I think we’re on a good path. I’m not going to say we’re over the fluff, so to say, because that’s dangerous. But I do think as an industry, we’re all committed to basically attacking research integrity. And I do think that publishing more articles doesn’t mean that you compromise on research integrity. That’s not true.

Because whether you publish one, two or three articles, you just want to take the same rigor in publishing those.

Roman Reshneff, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Fair enough. Thank you very much.

Operator: The next question comes from Connor O’Shea, Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.

Connor O’Shea, Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux: Good afternoon. Two questions from my side. Could you just remind us what your exposure to in proportion of revenues is to Japanese yen in research and at a group level, please? And also if you have any updated comments on the likelihood of you doing any licensing deals with LMM models in 2025 or thereafter? Thank you.

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Yes. Well, I will take the second one first. But we’re doing any licensing deals. I think we’re open to those. I think our position on licensing deals has not changed.

And we are in discussions with companies. And if you think about the fact that we publish about 14,000 books per year, I think obviously we’re an important party to talk to. What is really critical for us is that there’s appropriate attribution to the original author That is really critical. By the way, we actually did some research of authors recently, which was just completed. It was actually positive to see that about two thirds of book authors are actually positively towards have a positive attitude towards their, let’s say, book being included in LLMs.

So that’s actually a positive as long as there is proper attribution and of course also we need to make sure that they get the proper royalties for that. So from that perspective, we’re still in discussions. At the same time, I think we’re also a little bit wait and see because we’re also working on our own nature research assistance and other AI tools, which of course we don’t want to we wanted to take maximum advantage of our own content. So that’s where that discussion or that topic currently stands.

Connor O’Shea, Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux: Okay.

Alexander Danbeck, CFO, Springer Nature: And I take the yen question. So, Conor, the proportion of yen for our group revenue is around about 3% to 4%. And when you think about the development of the euro yen exchange rate and the impact on revenue, kind of full of sum to look at that would be an increase or decrease in of five would result for us in an increase of revenue or decrease of revenue of around about €2,000,000 And then the corresponding adjusted operating profit impact would be around in the same direction, EUR 1,500,000.0. So we are currently long on yen and this has been also explaining the impact that we see directly on the adjusted operating profit. With regards to the development impact, we expect to be more stable with regards to the proportion of yen to our group revenue.

Connor O’Shea, Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux: Okay, very clear. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Konrad Zuma, OTOBHF. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Konrad Zuma, Analyst, OTOBHF: Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is about your Open Access revenue growth. I think you reported 44% growth in the first half and you indicated at the time that it was likely to slow down in the second half. Can you give us the growth rate for the full year, please?

And my second question is on your AI initiatives. You’ve mentioned 90 in this call. I think you mentioned 65 at the IPO timing. Have you noticed any tangible revenue contribution yet from the AI features that you have now embedded into your products, please?

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Yes. On the OA side, yes, we indeed showed the revenues for the first half of the year 44%. We don’t show any more, let’s say, details behind below the research level. But if you look at publications, we have continued to see strong publication growth throughout the year and strong submission growth throughout the year. As I mentioned earlier, the dynamics around, let’s say, full OA growth are changing a little bit from, let’s say, us taking away share as a result of the full OA players contracting towards us taking share and the market growing overall.

So I already mentioned that this year, year to date, we’ve seen market growth. And at the same time, we also see, let’s say, a payoff of the investments we’re having made in launching new journals. We did 66 last year. We had also quite a high number the year before. And of course, we have expanded our footprint in Asia, but most importantly, of course, India and China.

So in that sense, let’s say the momentum is longer prolonging longer than we expected originally about nine months ago, which I think is a positive. Your next question around AI, yes, so basically we’ve expanded the number of pilots both across the Publishing workflow, but actually also in our units, like for instance, I gave the example of Maya in Education. I think it’s fair to say that if you look at the impact of artificial intelligence at this stage, I don’t think we can attribute, let’s say, an additional revenue line to that. That’s not true because if you look at, for instance, Ask ADIS, it provides more value to customers, hence leads to higher renewal rates, but it doesn’t generate a standalone revenue line. Indirectly, of course, if we look at something like T Rex, it does actually allow us to publish more articles and that, of course, does support revenue growth.

And especially if I look at the cascading and the transfer process, we’re actually seeing quite some positive momentum there as well. Last but not least, of course, AI is also helping us to improve research integrity, which is, as I mentioned earlier, quite an important one for us as well. I talked about Nature Research Assistance, which I think is a positive development. We’re expecting the beta launch in the second quarter this year. My expectations in terms of revenue growth is that I don’t think it will be a big revenue growth driver this year.

And also next year, I think our prime focus will be on driving penetration for that new service. Okay. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Nick Dempsey, Barclays. Please go ahead.

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature0: Yes. Good afternoon, guys. So my first question, I guess it looks in Q4 as though research achieved 3% organic revenue growth after doing 7% for the first nine months. I guess a lot of those revenue streams in there are pretty predictable and stable through the year. So was it a big slowdown in full Open Access that drove that difference or something else going on?

And the second question, just in terms of the tax rate for 2025, you talked in your IPO perspective about a one off benefit for tax in 2025. Kind of understand is that going to show up at lower tax rate, is it going to show up in 2025 in your adjusted tax that goes into the adjusted net income calculation or just the reported net income line in the P and L? And then lastly, is it a benefit at all in cash tax or should we ignore it in cash tax?

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature: Yes. Thank you. I’ll take the first question. If you look at the first question, indeed, our growth of Research was 3%. It was actually driven by compared to 2023.

In the last quarter of twenty twenty three, we are actually quite significant one offs. Now the last quarter in research is always a quarter is a quarter where libraries, but also others are spending their end of year money. And in Q4 twenty twenty four versus Q4 twenty twenty three, there was about $10,000,000 less one off revenues coming from various sources, whether you look at things like archival product sales or it’s actually revenues that we got from third party distributors, copyright fees and a little bit of advertising. So actually the let’s say the reduction was more sitting in the one offs in our normal portfolios than actually in the full Open Access portfolio.

Alexander Danbeck, CFO, Springer Nature: Kent, then I’ll take the tax question. So next, first, to shed some light on the impact that we were talking through 04/25 at the time of the IPO. So after the change in our finance structure and conversion of the shareholder loans and the B shares from our major shareholders into equity, we are now in a position that we can form a tax group in Germany. And this will allow us then to utilize the losses carry forward that we have at the KGA level. And this ultimately is triggering then a deferred tax income in ’twenty five, and we’re now going to implement this tax pool.

And with that, also reduce a tax rate into an area we’re talking about 21% it would come down to. You’re rightfully connecting this to the adjusted net income. We have not defined that line as an adjustment yet, so it would be not adjusted in our calculation. Nevertheless, just think about the way how we talk about our dividend policy, we are talking about around. And what is important for us and also in terms of consistency and reliability for our shareholders, we want to make sure that we have a consistent improvement in our dividends that we are paying so that ultimately when we have these kind of exceptions we are not adjusting for in our adjusted net income, there could be a way to think about it in a percentage.

I’m not saying something now instead of the management or the Supervisory Board, it’s ultimately up to them to make a proposal for what will be the dividend proposal. But this is the way how we’d connect the dots and think about it, how it will impact the adjusted net income. Does this provide sufficient color, Nick?

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature0: Also about the cash tax. So when I’m flowing, when I’m trying to link the P and L tax rate into the cash tax rate, that might working with 21% or 32% or roughly 30 something?

Alexander Danbeck, CFO, Springer Nature: Yes. So what you have to think about is the cash tax impact, it is deferred taxes, so it has not a cash impact. So that’s the first important thing to consider. And the guidance that we also have provided under the tax payments remains intact. So we expect that it will grow with the low single digits based on what we have seen in 2024.

So this is also remains intact and it’s not impacted by what you have it is impacted, but this is already factored in what we have provided as guidance in how the tax payments further develop.

Frank Frankel Peters, CEO, Springer Nature0: Okay. Thank you, Alexandra.

Operator: You’re welcome. So thank you for the Q and A session. As there are no more questionnaires, I’d like to hand it back to you, Mr. Geisler.

Thomas Geiselhardt, Investor Relations Lead, Springer Nature: Thank you. Okay. So this concludes our today’s call. Thanks again for dialing in and goodbye.

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