Stephane Bello
Analyst · the Bank of America
Thank you, Jim. And it's a pleasure to speak with you today. Consistent with what we've done in the past, I will speak to revenue growth before currency throughout today's presentation. And reported revenues are also highlighted on each slide. Second quarter revenues were up 2% due to acquisitions. Organic revenues declined 1% primarily due to the lag effect from negative sales in our Financial & Risk segment last year and to the timing of revenues in our IP & Science business. Overall, our Professional businesses once again delivered a robust performance, growing 6% during the quarter, 1% organic, while F&R declined 1% and was down 3% organically. More on that in a moment. Adjusted EBITDA was up 3%, and the related margin increased 40 basis points, reflecting the continuing progress we are making to rightsize the business and bring down our cost structure in a sustainable way. Underlying operating profit was up slightly, and the margin decreased 10 basis points to 18.3%, reflecting higher depreciation and amortization expense from recent product launches and acquisitions. And finally, foreign exchange only had a nominal impact both on EBITDA and underlying operating profit margins during the quarter. Now let me provide you with some additional color on the performance of our individual businesses, starting with our Legal segment. The U.S. legal market remains challenging with little growth in demand from law firms. That said, we are pleased with the progress our Legal business continues to make as it is benefiting from having invested in growth areas over the past few years. During the quarter, Legal grew 5% and grew 1% organically. Now this 1% organic growth rate represents a sequential improvement over the flat organic growth we reported in Q1. And it is worth noting that this improvement also came on the back of a more pronounced decline in print revenues. U.S. print revenues continue to be a drag, declining 7% during the quarter as law firms and governmental agencies continued to cut discretionary spend. For perspective, U.S. print was down 2% in the first quarter and down 1% in the second quarter last year. So if you exclude U.S. print, revenues rose 8% during the second quarter, 2% organic. Now let me remind you that print revenues are often impacted by seasonal factors and publication schedules resulting from content availability from courts, offers [ph] and so forth. For the third quarter, we anticipate that print revenues will decline by about 10% versus the third quarter last year for these very reasons. We expect Q4 and full year print revenues to be down mid-single digits. Subscription revenues were up 8%, 2% organic, which is in line with prior quarters and which reflects the mix of a challenging core legal research market, offset by expanding sales in our newer lines of business. As we discussed last quarter, a 7% decline in transaction revenue led to slower growth in the first quarter, which we expected to be temporary. And in fact, transaction revenues did bounce back during the second quarter, increasing 4%. Now looking at the performance of our 3 subsegments. U.S. Law Firm Solutions revenues increased 1%. This is our largest subsegment, representing about half of Legal's revenues in the quarter. And within that subsegment, Business of Law revenues increased 7%, led by FindLaw, while research-related revenues declined 1%. The second subsegment, Corporate, Government and Academic, which is about 25% of our Legal business, that segment declined 1% with Corporate up 6% and Government down 5% primarily relating to print cancellations at the federal, state and local levels as they contend with cost pressures. And our third subsegment, Global Legal, which is also 25% of the total, achieved revenue growth of 23%, 4% organic, driven by the acquisition of PLC and good growth in Latin America. EBITDA and operating profit both increased 2%, and the corresponding margins were down 80 basis points primarily due to the decline in print and research-related revenues I mentioned earlier. Now turning to Tax & Accounting. That segment posted another quarter of very solid performance. Revenue grew 7%, of which 3% was organic. And that was driven by strong growth across the business except government. Subscription revenues, which represent about 2/3 of Tax & Accounting's revenue base, grew 6% organically. This strong revenue growth reflected the continuing strength of our offering and the healthy conditions prevailing in the global tax and accounting market. Once again, all our business segments, excluding Government, performed very strongly during the quarter. Managed Solutions grew 4%, our Professional business grew 13% and the Corporate Tax business grew 20%, 9% organic, with strong growth in Latin America. Now we continue to experience challenging Government business. And as a reminder, Government accounts for less than 5% of Tax & Accounting's total revenue base. However, we do believe that this can be an attractive market segment for us and that our business will turn around. In fact, we believe that the worst of the Government segment's performance is behind us and that it should have much less of a negative impact on Tax & Accounting's overall results going forward. From a profitability standpoint, EBITDA grew 10% during the quarter, and operating profit increased 12% with the related margins up 130 and 110 basis points, respectively. Now turning to IP & Science. Revenues grew 9% with organic growth down 1%. Total growth was driven by the MarkMonitor acquisition, which closed in the third quarter of last year. Organic revenues were negatively impacted by a decline in transactional revenues related to the timing of onetime sales of our Web of Knowledge and Web of Science products. Transaction revenues, which represent about 1/4 of the total, were up 2%, but the organic growth was down 1%. Subscription revenues, which are about 3/4 of IP & Science total revenue base, were up 12% with organic revenues flat due to delayed renewals in our Life Sciences business, which we expect will be realized in the second half of the year. And I'd like to remind you that the quarterly revenue growth for IP & Science can be uneven and that growth is best viewed on an annual basis for that segment. As such, the second quarter results of the business are not representative of what we expect for the full year performance. EBITDA increased 5% with the margin declining 90 basis points to 33.8% due mainly to the MarkMonitor acquisition. And operating profit was flat with the margin declining 210 basis points for the same reasons. Financial & Risk revenues were down 1% with a 2% contribution from acquisitions. So organic revenue was down 3%, reflecting the continued impact of our sales performance over the past 12 months. Recurring revenues, which are about 3/4 of the total revenue base of F&R, declined 3%. Transaction revenues were up 22%, 5% organic, as a result of increased volumes for FXall and Tradeweb. And Recoveries revenues declined 4% due to a combination of desktop losses and the fact that some exchanges had moved to billing customers directly. As a reminder, Recoveries are low-margin revenues, which are passed through to the exchanges. The EBITDA margin for F&R was up 40 basis points, a strong performance given that organic revenues declined 3% during the quarter. F&R is doing a very good job in gradually reducing its cost base by managing its headcount, lowering contractor costs and shifting down platforms. Operating profit declined 5%, and the margin declined 40 basis points due to the higher depreciation and amortization from new products and acquisitions. Now we'll briefly review the results for the individual segments within Financial & Risk. Trading revenues declined 6% primarily due to declines in Equities and Fixed Income, which resulted from the flow-through from our sales performance over the past 12 months. Investors revenues declined 1%. Enterprise Content rose 9%, while Investment Management declined 4%. Banking & Research and Wealth Management were essentially unchanged from the prior period. Marketplaces revenues grew 6% driven by 13% growth at FXall and 5% growth at Tradeweb. Organic revenues declined 1% due to desktop cancellations. And finally, our Governance, Risk & Compliance business grew 13%, nearly all organic. Let me now turn to review our consolidated results. Our second quarter adjusted EPS was $0.48 per share, unchanged from 1 year ago. The impact of higher interest expense in the quarter was offset by a more favorable tax rate. Currency had a $0.01 negative impact on EPS during the quarter. And for the full year, we remain comfortable with our guidance of $470 million to $490 million for interest expense as well as an effective tax rate for the year of 11% to 13%. Turning to free cash flow. Total free cash flow increased 11% during the quarter and 14% excluding disposals. For the first half of the year, we posted a decline in our reported free cash flow of $152 million. This is not reflective of what we expect for the full year performance, which, to remind you, is between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion. There were 2 main factors impacting free cash flow negatively for the first 6 months. First, the timing of our CapEx spend. As a reminder from our first quarter call, we had a large multiyear software contract renewal, which impacts the timing of our reported CapEx this year versus last year. And this impacted the year-to-date results by about $70 million. And second, based on the timing of disposals, we had far more cash from businesses outside of ongoing operations last year than we do this year. And this impacted results by $71 million. So for the full year, we continue to expect disposals to have a negative impact on reported free cash flow of about $140 million. This brings us to our 2013 outlook, which we reaffirm today as reflected on this slide. So let me simply conclude by saying that in the face of what is likely to remain a difficult external environment for the balance of the year, we know that we must redouble our focus on what's in our control, that is innovation-driven growth and scale initiatives, so that we can continue to improve our free cash flow performance in the near term. With that, let me turn it back over to Frank for questions.