Thomson Reuters Corporation

and welcome to the Q3 2021 earnings call. My name is Joanne and I'm your event manager. During the presentation, your lines will remain on listen only. And if you require assistance at any time, please key star and zero on your telephone and a coordinator will be happy to assist you. I'd like to advise all parties this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. And now I'd like to hand over to Frank Golden, Head of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today for our third quarter 2021 earnings call. I'm joined today by our CEO, Steve Hasker, and our CFO, Mike Eastwood, each of whom will report our results and will take your questions following our presentation. To enable us to get to as many questions as possible, we would appreciate it if you would limit yourselves to one question each, and one follow-up when we open the phone lines. Throughout today's presentation, when we compare performance period on period, we discuss revenue growth rates before currency, as well as on an organic basis. We believe this provides the best basis to measure the underlying performance of the business. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements and non-IFRS financial measures. Actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties related to the COVID pandemic. and other risks discussed in reports and filings that we provide from time to time to regulatory agencies. You may access these documents on our website or by contacting our investor relations department. Let me now turn it over to Steve Hasker.

Thank you, Frank, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. I'm pleased to report the momentum we saw in the first half of the year continued in the third quarter. Our revenue and sales performance was strong, exceeded our expectations, and position us well for Q4 and 2022. We expect to close out the year on a strong footing and appreciate the efforts of our sales and our go-to-market teams. This strong performance demonstrates our markets remain healthy and growing and our products across legal, tax, corporates and risk fraud compliance fit the needs of our customers. our products enable them to effectively equip their professionals to better serve their clients. We're also seeing improving customer engagement, including 8,000 registrations for our annual legal, tax, and corporate synergy conferences around the world. These conferences are our premier events for professionals who want to understand the future of their professions, learn the latest trends, and experience how tools and data-driven technology can transform their firms, organizations, agencies, and roles. Our leadership team, including the president of our corporates business, Sunil Pandita, and the president of our tax and accounting professionals business, Elizabeth Bistrom, will be joining nearly 2,000 of our customers for the upcoming Synergy conferences in November in Nashville. And as I mentioned last quarter, our customers continue to exhibit confidence in both an improving economic environment and in their own prospects. This potent ecosystem plays to our advantage, and we will continue to capitalize on the opportunities we are seeing to drive growth and expand our positions. Now to the results. Our third quarter results reflected a standout performance. four of our five business segments recorded organic revenue growth of 6%. That performance resulted in total company organic revenue growth of 5%, putting us well above the 3.5 to 4% third quarter guidance provided in August. Our healthy markets are providing us with a tailwind. That tailwind, coupled with our nine-month results, give us confidence in our prospects for the fourth quarter. As a result, we've once again raised our full year revenue and free cash flow guidance. Full year total company organic revenue growth is now forecast to be between 4.5 and 5%, and approximately 6% for the big three businesses. Free cash flow for the year is now forecast to be approximately $1.2 billion. Turning to our change program, we're making consistent progress as we work through as we work toward becoming an integrated operating company. As of September 30th, we recorded runway savings of about $130 million, putting us on a path to achieve $200 million by year end. I'll remind you our aggregate savings target is $600 million by the end of 2023, $200 million of which we plan to reinvest in the business. Finally, we were active during the quarter executing on the $1.2 billion share buyback program we announced in August. We've already bought back $1.1 billion of stock and we expect to complete the program before year end. So given the progress we're making, we also reaffirmed our guidance for 2022 and 2023. Now to the results for the quarter. Third quarter reported revenues were up 6%, with organic revenues up 5%, thanks to strong results from the big three businesses and Reuters. Contributing to this performance was strong organic growth of more than 20% from our Latin American businesses and nearly 10% growth from our Asia and emerging markets businesses. Adjusted EBITDA declined 7% to $458 million due to costs related to the change program. resulting in a margin of 30%. Excluding change program costs, adjusted EBITDA margin was 33.5%. Adjusted earnings per share for the quarter was 46 cents compared to 39 cents per share in the prior year period. Turning to the results by segment, the big three businesses achieved organic revenue growth of 6% for the quarter. Legal's third quarter performance was again strong with organic revenue growth of 6%. This was legal's second consecutive quarter of 6% growth, its highest quarterly growth rate in over a decade. The US legal market continues to be very healthy across the board for small, mid and large-sized firms, as well as for government and across geographies. For example, Westlaw Edge continues to achieve strong sales growth and ended the quarter with an annual contract value, or ACV, penetration of 60%, achieving our full-year ACV penetration guidance. Second, practical law, as reported in the legal segment, continues its strong performance, again growing double digits. We forecast similar growth in 2022 and continue to invest in this key legal workflow initiative. Third, our government business, which is managed within our legal segment, continues to perform and grew 10% organically. And fourth, FindLaw grew over 10%, and our legal businesses in Canada, Europe, and Asia all grew mid-single digit in the quarter. Legal again achieved strong sales for both the quarter and nine-month periods, recording double-digit recurring sales growth, reflecting customers' willingness and ability to invest in productivity-enhancing products. Turning to the corporates business, organic revenue growth increased to 6% from 4% in the first half of the year. This improvement came from increasing demand from customers for our legal, tax, and risk products. And in tax and accounting, organic revenue growth of 6% was stronger than expected thanks to our audit solutions products and a strong performance by our Latin American tax business, which is called Dominio, which grew more than 20%. Reuters news organic revenues also increased 6%, the second consecutive quarter of 6% growth. This was driven by the professional business, which includes Reuters events, which grew over 60% and continues to recover from the negative impact of COVID-19 in 2020. Finally, global print organic revenues declined 5%, less than expected, due to a continued gradual return to office by our customers and higher third-party print revenues. In summary, it was another strong quarter, but we're taking nothing for granted. We continue to invest in the businesses to enable us to further support our customers and properly position us for 2022 and beyond. We still have much work to do in executing our change program, and we've assembled a talented team over the past 18 months who are working well together and clearly understand our goals and our timelines. I'm very pleased with our progress to date. One additional comment regarding growth. As you can see on this slide, momentum has been building for our big three businesses over the past 11 quarters, which we believe will continue in the fourth quarter and into next year. I know many investors have historically viewed our markets as slower growing and have perceived our legal and tax businesses in particular as low single digit growers. We firmly believe that's not the case, and in fact think that with successful execution of the change program, combined with appropriate investments, we can improve growth on a sustainable basis. Our markets are broad and dynamic, and we have strong positions in the right sub-segments. Also, we have numerous levers to pull across our businesses, and we're investing in our strategic seven initiatives, which are performing well, and we expect they will continue to do so. This confluence of factors places us in a position where we believe we can grow mid-single digit on a consistent basis over the cycle. These factors position us well to achieve the upper end of the range of our 2022 revenue guidance of 4% to 5%. We'll discuss our 2022 guidance further when we report our fourth quarter and full year results in February. Let me share an example of products that we believe will contribute to sustainable mid-single-digit revenue growth that I just referred to. First, you'll recall at our Investor Day, I discussed our goal of becoming a content-driven technology company, which includes excelling at product innovation, and successfully integrating our products to provide customers with a seamless offering while delivering an excellent customer experience. We expect this will further improve customer loyalty and increase retention as we continually enhance our products, adding to organic growth. And at Investor Day, I highlighted seven strategic priorities reflected on this slide. Those include several of our legal workflow solutions, IQ, Practical Law, and Contract Express. Last month, we released the latest version of HiQ. This release features key integrations with Practical Law, Contract Express, Elite 3E, and Microsoft Teams, and includes more than 50 enhancements and upgrades. It's an example of an integrated workflow solution that customers are asking for. It helps legal professionals and other corporate professionals working with the legal team to identify their work and improve client satisfaction. This leverages contract express to automate and prove documents. It enables lawyers to structure matters with practical law. And it integrates Elite 3E data with HiQ visualization tools to provide greater transparency around client spend and work in progress. This is truly an integrated legal workflow solution and an example of content-driven technology. Today, these four legal products are growing double-digit, comprising over 10% of total company revenue and are contributing to the improving growth in both our legal and corporate segments. HiQ is just one example of how we're building holistic solutions for our customers through greater product innovation and integration. I expect to share more such examples of product innovation with you in the coming quarters. One final example of how we're driving innovation before I turn it over to Mike. Two weeks ago, we announced the establishment of a $100 million corporate venture capital fund focused on the future of professionals. Thomson Reuters Ventures will concentrate on investments and portfolio support for companies building breakthrough innovations that will allow professionals to operate more productively and with greater insights. It will focus across the legal, tax and accounting, risk fraud compliance, and news and media markets to identify and support innovative companies to help our customers deliver more to their clients. The fund will be overseen by our Chief Strategy Officer, Pat Wilburn. It's an example of how we're thinking about driving more innovation across the company and seeking new opportunities to further strengthen our businesses. Now let me turn it over to Mike for more detail on the results of the quarter.