Wolters Kluwer S/Adr

Hello and welcome to the Voltus Clua full year 2021 results webcast and conference call. My name is Alex and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Today's conference is being recorded. Please note for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. You will have the opportunity to ask a question at the end of the call. This is done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. At any time, if you require assistance at any point, please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand over to your host, Meg Geldens, Vice President of Investor Relations, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you, and good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining this VoltageClear full year 2021 results call. Today's earnings release and the slides for this presentation are available for download on the investor section of our website, VoltageClear.com. With me today on the call are Nancy McKinstry, our CEO, and Kevin Entrichen, our CFO. We're dialing in to this call remotely from various locations around the world, so thank you in advance for your understanding in case we experience any delays or technical issues during this event. In a moment, Nancy and Kevin will discuss the important features of our full year results. Following their comments, we will open the call to your questions. Before we start, I'll remind you that some statements we make today may be forward-looking. We caution that these statements are subject to risk and uncertainty and may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. Factors that could affect our future financial results are discussed in Note 2 of today's earnings release. As usual, in the presentation today, we will refer to adjusted profits, which exclude non-benchmark items. We also refer to growth in constant currencies, which excludes the effect of currency movements. And we refer to organic growth, which excludes the effect of both currency and the effect of acquisitions and divestments. Reconciliations to IFRS can be found in Note 3 of today's release. At this time, I would like to hand the call over to our CEO, Nancy McKinstry.

Thank you, Meg. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this call. Before I start, I would like to acknowledge our employees, customers, and other stakeholders for their many contributions to our business last year. I will start by giving you the key highlights of 2021, the final year of our most recent three-year strategic plan. Kevin will then take you through the financials in more detail. After that, I'll come back to discuss the divisional developments and our strategy for the coming three-year period. I will then finish with an outlook for 2022. So let's start with the key highlights. I'm pleased to report that we had strong results in 2021, with all four divisions seeing a good recovery. Organic growth was 6%, driven not only by a recovery in non-recurring revenue streams, but also by accelerated momentum in recurring revenues. We saw a significant increase in our adjusted operating profit margin, which reached 25.3% last year. and excluding the effect of currency, we recorded 17% growth in diluted adjusted earnings per share. Adjusted free cash flow reached a new milestone at just over 1 billion euros, a 15% increase in constant currency. The balance sheet remains very strong, and the results led to a marked improvement in our return on invested capital. This past year, we again returned a substantial portion of our free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. We also made significant progress on the ESG front. Expert solutions grew very well. Despite our employees facing the continued extraordinary challenges due to the pandemic, I'm proud to report that we maintained our employee engagement above the high-performing norm, a standard based on leading companies. Last year, we conducted our first diversity, equity, and inclusion survey, which has allowed us to set a baseline quantitative belonging score. We also advanced in other important ESG areas, including cybersecurity and various programs that help reduce our carbon emissions. We have set some new ambitions for these areas that I will come back to later. Turning now to slide five. Looking back at the past three years, which were marked by uncertainty due to the pandemic, I'm pleased to say the strong recovery in 2021 allowed us to meet or exceed nearly all of our strategic and financial goals that we set three years ago. We grew expert solutions from 49% of total revenues in 2018 to 55% of total revenues in 2021. primarily through consistent, strong organic growth of these products. The acquisitions of CGE, Exium Solutions, eOriginal, and Vanguard, and the divestment of several non-core assets also helped to enhance our focus on expert solutions. We also made progress on enriching several of our information products, adding functionality and automation. We are starting to launch the early results of these efforts to positive customer reaction. A lot of the progress was made on our third goal, which was to drive operational agility. We completed several major infrastructure projects, a modern global HR system, the consolidation of customer-facing websites into a single global site, and the implementation of CCH Togetic as our new corporate financial performance management tool. With these summary remarks, I now will turn the call over to Kevin Entrykin, who will provide more insights into our financial performance. After that, of course, I'll return to give you the divisional highlights and the outlook for 2022.