Thomson Reuters Corporation

Good day and welcome to the Thompson Reuters first quarter earnings call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Gary Bisbee, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ruth. Good morning and thank you all for joining us today for our first quarter 2025 earnings call. I'm joined by our CEO, Steve Hasker, and our CFO, Mike Eastwood, each of whom will discuss our results, take your questions following their remarks. To enable us to get to as many questions as possible, we would appreciate it if you'd limit yourself to one question and one follow-up each when we open the phone lines. Throughout today's presentation, when we compare performance period on period, we discuss revenue growth before currency as well as on an organic basis. We believe this provides the best basis to measure the underlying performance of our business. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements. and non-IFRS and other supplementary financial measures, which are discussed on this special note slide. Actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties discussed in reports and filings that we provide to regulatory agencies. You may access these documents on our website or by contacting our Investor Relations Department. Now I'll turn it over to Steve Haskell.

Thank you, Gary, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. 2025 has started out on a positive note with revenue at the high end of our outlook and profits exceeding expectations. Total company organic revenues rose 6%, with the big three segments growing by 9%. In addition, healthy revenue flow through and favorable expense timing boosted margins, driving profit ahead of expectations. We are reaffirming our full year 2025 outlook, calling for organic growth in a range of 7% to 7.5%, including approximately 9% for the big three segments, and for our margins to rise by 75 basis points year over year to approximately 39%. Good momentum continues from many areas in our portfolio, This includes double digit growth from key products including CoCouncil, SurePrep, Peguero, Indirect Tax, SafeSend, CoCouncil Drafting, and our international businesses. We continue to invest heavily in innovation and we remain focused on delivering against a robust product roadmaps. In the first quarter, we launched CoCouncil Tax, Audit and Accounting, an agentic AI assistant powered by the 2024 acquisition of Materia. This new solution automates critical workflows and brings an enhanced user experience for our checkpoint authoritative content. In April, we launched the co-counsel chat experience within both Westlaw and Practical Law, enhancing capability and user experience through a more connected suite of legal offerings. Looking forward to the remainder of 2025, we're focused on delivering new agentic, expert-guided workflows grounded in our trusted authoritative content and subject matter expertise, the co-counsel, Westlaw, practical law, and other offerings. Our capital capacity and liquidity remain a key asset we're focused on deploying to create shareholder value, and we made solid progress on this during the first quarter. In January, we completed the acquisition of SafeSend, for $600 million, and SafeSend is off to a strong start with the integration going smoothly. In February, we raised our 2025 annual dividend by 10% for the fourth consecutive year to $2.38 per share. We remain committed to a balanced capital allocation approach, and we continue to assess additional inorganic opportunities. With our estimated $10 billion of capital capacity through 2027, we are positioned to be opportunistic in a volatile environment. Now to the results for the quarter. First quarter organic revenues grew 6%, organic recurring revenues grew 9%, and transaction revenues grew 1%, while print revenues declined 5%, in line with expectations, a tough comparison that Reuters impacted growth rates. Adjusted EBITDA was essentially unchanged year over year at $809 million, reflecting a 40 basis point margin decline to 42.3%. Turning to the first quarter results by segment, the big three segments organic revenue growth accelerated sequentially from 8% to 9%. Legal organic revenues grew 8%. up from 7% in recent quarters, driven by continued momentum from Westlaw Precision and Co-Counsel, and stronger government growth. Corporate's organic revenues grew 9%, driven by offerings from our legal, tax, and risk portfolios, and the segment's international businesses. Tax and accounting organic revenues grew 11%, and our Latin American business and tax compliance offerings were key contributors. Reuters News organic revenues declined 7%, driven by a difficult comparison from significant transactional generative AI licensing revenue in the prior year period. And lastly, Global Print organic revenues met our expectations, declining 5% year-on-year. And in summary, we're pleased with our Q1 results. Now let me discuss our improving revenue mix, which is contributing to the revenue growth acceleration that we have delivered. Over the past five years, we have been on a journey to become a more innovative and faster growth company. We have made significant strides toward this goal as our current outlook for seven to seven and a half percent organic revenue growth illustrates. In meeting with investors, we're frequently asked two questions about our revenue growth. First, What has driven our organic revenue growth acceleration in recent years? And second, what provides us with confidence in our ability to continue our improved growth trajectory into the future? To shed a bit more light on this topic, we've updated a slide from our 2024 Investor Day, which illustrates the improvement in our revenue mix since 2019. The proportion of our revenue from products growing at double-digit rates has more than doubled, from 11% in 2019 to 25% in 2024, on a much larger revenue base. At the same time, the mix from our declining global print business has fallen. We have taken many actions in the last five years to deliver this improving revenue mix, but I'll briefly mention the three most important. First, we have prioritized resource allocation behind our best businesses and opportunities. For example, our heavy investment in Westfloor has resulted in this key franchise growing at the fastest rate in more than a decade. Second, we have meaningfully increased our investment and focus on innovation, especially with AI. In combination, these efforts have organically increased the number of our existing products growing at double digits. And third, Our portfolio optimization efforts have paid dividends. This includes both the acquisition of strategic and complementary growth businesses, as well as select divestitures of non-core and typically lower growth assets. Our stable of double-digit growth offerings spans the big three segments and includes virtually co-counsel and high-Q professionals, practical law, indirect tax, and Peguero at corporates, And thirdly, Dominio, Confirmation, SurePrep, Cloud Audit Suite, and more recently, SafeSend for tax and accounting professionals. As these products continue to scale and our print mix declines, our improving revenue mix positions as well, but continued strong revenue growth going forward. I'll now turn it over to Mike to review our financial performance.