Earnings Call Transcript - CLVT Q3 2023

Operator, Operator

Good morning. Thank you for attending today’s Clarivate Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. My name is Flam, and I’ll be your moderator for today’s call. It is now my pleasure to pass the conference to our host, Mark Donohue, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Donohue, please proceed.

Mark Donohue, Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With me today are Jonathan Gear, Chief Executive Officer; and Jonathan Collins, Chief Financial Officer. Both will be available to take your questions at the conclusion of the call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and webcast and is copyrighted property of Clarivate. Any rebroadcast of this information in whole or in part without prior written consent of Clarivate is prohibited. An accompanying earnings call presentation is available on the Investor Relations section of the company’s website, clarivate.com. During our call, we may make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the business or developments in Clarivate’s industry to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance achievements or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Information about the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results or performance can be found in Clarivate’s filings with the SEC and on the company’s website. Our discussion will include non-GAAP measures or adjusted numbers. Clarivate believes non-GAAP results are useful in order to enhance an understanding of our ongoing operating performance, but they are supplement to and should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to GAAP measures are available in our earnings release and supplemental presentation on our website. After the prepared remarks, we will open the call to your questions. And with that, it’s a pleasure to turn the call over to Jonathan Gear.

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Before I begin, I would like to share some thoughts about the situation in Israel. Clarivate has over 500 colleagues in our Jerusalem office and the recent terrorist attacks changed their lives. While the reports should not allude to any colleagues that day, everyone in the office knows someone who has been impacted by a loss or casualty or the ongoing crisis. Our colleagues are our number one priority, and we have established a fund of $200,000 for the local team to use to support colleague connections and community outreach. We have arrangements in place for operational continuity at all levels and do not expect any disruptions. All of us at Clarivate hope for peace in the region. Now let me turn to our third quarter results. I am pleased with the progress of our business this quarter, which demonstrated sequential improvement in two of our three operating segments, while also achieving our company’s highest organic growth on a consolidated basis since I joined Clarivate a year ago. We are moving in the right direction. Despite the ongoing challenges in the macro backdrop, which are having a greater impact on our transactional businesses, we leveraged several key wins highlighting the resilience of our business and the mission-critical nature of our data and products. We continue to innovate our products and establish new generative AI solutions in our IP and life sciences and healthcare segments. As discussed at our Investor Day in March, driving value enhancements to our mission-critical data through product innovation is core to our long-term strategy. We remain focused on accelerating organic growth to industry growth rates and continue to see generative AI as a very large untapped opportunity for our company. Revenue in the quarter was $647 million, an increase of $11 million on an organic basis or 2% growth. This was in line with our expectations. Our performance was driven by strong momentum in Academia & Government as they returned to positive organic growth in life sciences and healthcare. We continued to face temporary headwinds in IP such as a delayed contract start date with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and moderate impact due to the ongoing strike by US actors, both of which I will elaborate on momentarily. Adjusted EBITDA of $281 million and EPS of $0.21 were both up from last year and we continue to make progress towards our long-term EBITDA margin targets at 42%. Jonathan Collins will discuss this in more detail. Now, turning to our segments, beginning with Academia & Government, last quarter, you heard me discuss improved performance in A&G as our investments are helping drive new subscription business, account updates and higher retention. This quarter, I'm happy to report we were able to build an implementation with organic revenue growth accelerating to 3%. This is our strongest growth quarter since last year's second quarter. We believe this is confirmation that our strategy is paying off. In the quarter, growth was strong across content aggregation transactional sales, which had historically been a strength for us, but we also recorded wins with three major universities for workflow solutions. Accelerating adoption of our workflow solutions through our risk analyzer products has been an important area of focus for us and is a prerequisite to bridging our gap to industry growth. I'm confident we will get there, and this quarter is just the beginning. In October, we were selected by Yale University to provide its library services and discovery platform. By implementing Alma and Primo, Yale will unify its workflows and data onto a single platform, elevating the user experience and enhancing services within its library ecosystem. As a reminder, Alma is our cloud-based library management platform which unifies print, electronic, and digital collections, while Primo provides fast access to scholarly materials and tools to discover new content. Yale will implement these services in both its main and law libraries, and combining the benefits of generative AI with trusted content sources will enable users to find new insights quickly and at scale. Another win in the quarter was OhioLINK, which is the entire state of Ohio's academic library consortium of 117 member libraries. OhioLINK chose Alma for its cloud-based shared library services platform as it bolsters its investment in higher education technology infrastructure. A key factor behind our win was the investments we have been making in the Alma platform and our roadmap which best meets the consortium's current and future expected needs. In addition to Alma, OhioLINK will implement Primo, and a wider suite of Ex Libris products that will enhance services for users, staff, and administration. Lastly, we established the Academia & Government innovation incubator late in the quarter. We expect this will further accelerate our strategy to advance knowledge through research and education by introducing novel solutions for our customers and academic users. As part of the incubator's first program, we made a small, but important acquisition of Alethea, an AI-powered student engagement platform. Alethea facilitates meaningful engagement with academic texts, class readings and assignments to provide personalized and adaptive guidance, which helps to achieve better learning outcomes and student success. As you can tell, we're seeing strong momentum in our A&G business and I was very pleased with the performance this quarter. We remain confident that we are well on our way to bridging the gap to market growth rates. Moving to IP, in the quarter, organic revenue growth faced pressure from the ongoing US actors strike which began in mid-July and affected our trademark business. Trademarks are a critical part of the movie industry where film studios use trademarks to protect movie titles and register other elements related to films, which can pave the way to potential licensing and merchandising agreements. We also saw a delay in the start date of a new contract with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which was awarded to Clarivate earlier this year. This enhanced contract was saved by the client and we received word that the contract will start in early first quarter of next year. The delay will have a modest impact in Q4. I am pleased to share with you that we secured a multi-year deal with a large Indian telecommunications provider to deliver patent services. On the product side, we launched Forecast in September. Forecast is an AI-powered tool that delivers powerful capabilities for predictive budgeting and is fully integrated with leading IP management systems. The rising cost of managing IP as a strategic asset is an issue of increasing importance for customers, and Forecast enables IP professionals to create budget scenarios to make smarter filings and maintenance decisions while collaborating more seamlessly across their organizations. Net of all this, the view of our IP business remains the same. I remain confident that the slight pullback on organic growth for IP is only a short-term event and we continue to expect to return to normal growth next year. Turning to life science and healthcare, I am pleased to report improved performance with positive organic growth for the first time in four quarters of 2% year-over-year. Though we remain cautious about the macro and are still seeing pressures on parts of our transactional business as a result of the lower drug approval pipeline last year and a still challenging funding environment in biotech, we did see some pockets of relief in the quarter. Our consulting business delivered 7% growth in the quarter, and we secured a large engagement with a global top 20 pharma to extend our partnership in epidemiology analytics supporting market access and clinical trials. We also signed a strategic agreement with a leading US biotech to accelerate commercial and market strategies for their lead drug candidate. Lastly, in a regulatory and safety portfolio, we continue to demonstrate consistent growth, which is up 5% from last year. As I shared with you at our Investor Day, commercialization is a key area of focus for us to align with market growth rates. Real-world data offers our customers a wealth of information around the activities and outcomes of key healthcare providers, patients, and payer stakeholders. Analyzing medical and pharma claims and other specialty data sets enables many factors to maximize their impact and launch planning by understanding the diagnosis, referral, treatment, and reimbursement dynamics among stakeholders in their target markets. We continue to add to our existing datasets to drive further value to our customers. In the quarter, we enhanced our real-world data business with additional German hospital prescription data that will reinforce our position as a leading provider of real-world data solutions in Europe. We're also making progress on our software platform. In August, we launched Enhanced Source powered by generative AI as part of the latest iteration of our patent pending platform. The new capabilities enable clinical, regulatory affairs and strategy teams to interact with complex data sets using natural language to obtain immediate and in-depth insights. The beta version of the enhanced source platform is now available to select customers and general availability is anticipated later this year. As part of the commercial launch we further extend the platform by integrating additional data sets across our Cortellis line, including clinical trials, deals, drug discovery, and more. This is all part of our long-term strategy to enhance the value of our critical data through more analytics and insights, while shifting an even greater mix of our business through subscription. In closing, we have a great business with an unparalleled suite of mission-critical products, world-class customers, and a long-term strategy intact. Like everyone in the industry, we wish we knew when the macro pressures would ease; nonetheless, we made financial progress in two of our three operating segments. More importantly, we are not standing still. Our company is accelerating its innovation efforts, and we're seeing positive early signs of our strategy based on our customer conversations and highlighted wins but understand, we still have much work to do. I’d like to thank my colleagues for their continued dedication, collaboration and hard work. I look forward to sharing our progress with you all again in three months' time. With that, let me turn the call over to Jonathan Collins to walk you through our financials.

Jonathan Collins, CFO

Thank you, Jonathan. Good morning, everyone. Slide 11 is an overview of our third quarter results compared with the same period last year. Q3 revenue is $647 million, an increase of $11 million or 2% versus 2022, driven entirely by organic growth as the impact of the MarkMonitor divestiture was offset by foreign exchange. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded 80 basis points over the prior year to 43.5% in Q3 on strong cost discipline and the cost synergies from the ProQuest acquisition. Third quarter net loss was $7 million, an improvement of $4.4 billion, as a result of the non-cash goodwill impairment charges associated with the CPA Global and ProQuest acquisitions reported in the same period last year. Adjusted diluted EPS, which excludes the impact of one-time items like the impairment, was $0.21 in Q3, a $0.01 improvement over the same period last year, primarily due to higher adjusted EBITDA. Operating cash flow was $163 million in the quarter, a decrease of $44 million, due entirely to higher working capital requirements, primarily stemming from the intra-annual timing of payments in our IP renewals business. Please turn with me now to Page 12 for a closer look at the drivers of third quarter top and bottom line changes from the same period last year. Our third quarter revenue and profit results are right in line with our expectations and were driven by four key factors. First, revenue was up $11 million on organic growth of 1.7%. As Jonathan highlighted, the organic growth in the A&G segment is the best it's been in over a year as we continue to see the benefits of accelerated growth in the research and analytics sub-segment due to the investments in the Web of Science product. Our LS&H segment grew on a transactional basis due to soft comps from last year, despite the pressure in the subscription file we forewarned of stemming from the soft real-world data sales in the past few quarters. These segments more than offset the headwinds we continue to see in our IP business due to macro pressures. The profit conversion on the organic growth was particularly strong as a result of the cost discipline we are exercising over the business. Second, inorganic activity, namely the divestiture of the MarkMonitor business last year, lowered revenues by $19 million and profit by $11 million this year. Third, cost synergies from the ProQuest acquisition contributed $10 million of incremental profit. And finally, the translation impact of subsidiaries denominated in foreign currencies increased revenue by $20 million as the US dollar remains weaker than a basket of foreign currencies compared to the same time last year. The profit increase was negligible as transaction gains incurred in the third quarter of last year did not recur this year. Please turn with me now to Page 13 to step through the conversion from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow and how we allocated this capital in Q3. Free cash flow was $102 million in the quarter, a decrease of $39 million over the same period last year, bringing the year-to-date conversion on adjusted EBITDA to 46% and the cumulative improvements so far this year to $159 million. Interest payments were $40 million in the quarter, nearly flat over the prior year, as the impact of base rate increases were offset by the lower debt quantum due to the deleveraging in the fourth quarter of last year and the first half of this year. Cash taxes were $14 million lower than the same period last year as we recognized the benefit of planning initiatives. Working capital was a use of cash of $64 million in Q3, when it was a source of $12 million in the same period last year. This change was driven primarily by the timing of payments within our patent renewal business in the IP segment. Year-to-date, working capital is essentially flat. We expected it to remain so for the full year. Capital expenditures were $62 million in the quarter, in line with the prior quarter in last year's third, as we continue to invest in product innovation. We do expect third quarter free cash flow to repurchase $13.8 million shares of our stock at an average price of about $7.20. Please move with me now to Slide 14 for our current view on the remainder of 2023. Our third quarter results place us on track to deliver full year results near the midpoint of the ranges we provided in August. We expect organic growth will approach 1% in the fourth quarter, resulting in full year growth of about 0.5%. This is slightly below the midpoint of the range as during the quarter we received word from the USPTO that a large contract we were awarded earlier this year has been delayed from Q4 until Q1 of next year. Additionally, we will experience the aforementioned effect of the actors' strike on trademark transactions and anticipate tepid year-end spending in life sciences. We continue to expect revenue near the midpoint of the range at $2,635 million as the modest organic growth effects are offset by a later closing of the small divestiture in our IP segment and a slightly weaker US dollar. We anticipate adjusted EBITDA of $1,115 million yielding a profit margin of about 42.25% at the midpoint of the ranges. We continue to expect adjusted diluted EPS to be about $0.80. Finally, we anticipate free cash flow near the midpoint of the range at about $475 million. Please turn with me now to Page 15 for a closer look at the full year top and bottom line outlook, which is unchanged from our prior guidance. Similar to the third quarter results, our full year outlook for revenue and adjusted EBITDA is driven by four key factors. First, organic growth will add about $15 million to the top line, funding a comparable amount of incremental cost leaving the profit impact for this component to be flat. From a segment perspective, we anticipate A&G will continue accelerating their growth from historical performance to the market rate we outlined at the Investor Day in March, IP will decline slightly, and LS&H will decline this year due to the macro pressures we highlighted. Second, the divestiture of MarkMonitor last year will deduct about $65 million of revenue and about $30 million of profit this year. Third, we've completed the integration of the ProQuest acquisition, enabling us to deliver the remaining $40 million of cost synergies this year, accounting for all this year’s expected margin expansion. Finally, we anticipate a $25 million foreign exchange tailwind on the top line as the US dollar has weakened slightly compared to a basket of foreign currencies. The small headwind to the bottom line is caused by the transaction gains realized late last year that we do not expect to recur this year. Please turn with me now to Page 16 to walk through how we expect the more than $1.1 billion of adjusted EBITDA will convert to nearly $0.5 billion of free cash flow and our plans for allocating the remainder of this capital in Q4. Nearly all of the $170 million improvement in free cash flow projected for the full year, which is largely due to lower one-time costs and augmented by improving working capital, has been delivered in the first three quarters of the year as we anticipate fourth quarter free cash flow will be roughly in line with the same period last year. As a reminder, last year we incurred more than $200 million in cash outflows associated with one-time costs related to the acquisitions and expected improvement about $155 million this year as we incurred about $60 million to complete the ProQuest integration. We do expect the cash interest increase of about $25 million as base rates were up considerably over last year. Our working capital requirements have leveled off this year and will yield an improvement of about $56 million. We remain on track to increase capital spending by about $40 million to accelerate organic growth. The impact of all of these changes is about a $170 million improvement in free cash flow to approximately $475 million at the midpoint of the range, which is an increase in the conversion on adjusted EBITDA of 15 percentage points. We expect to use all of our fourth quarter free cash flow and an additional $50 million of cash on the balance sheet to prepay another $150 million of our term loan bringing the full year total to $300 million, and our net leverage to just below four turns. Please turn with me now to Page 17 for a look at how we're tracking to our long-term financial objectives. You'll recall that when we outlined the financial objectives for our business at our Investor Day in March, our primary aim was to accelerate our organic growth. The first area we committed to improve was the Research and Analytics sub-segment within A&G, and this segment group business remains on track to achieve its growth plans with continued momentum, delivering organic growth in the third quarter in excess of 3%. However, the economy-related end-market softness facing our LS&H and IP segments leaves us behind the pace we expected, but we remain laser-focused on the product innovation that will help us to lift these segments to their market growth rates over the next few years. While slightly tracking behind on the first objective, we made solid progress towards the other three we outlined. Our second goal is to maintain durable profit margins as we invest to accelerate our growth. We executed on this objective in the third quarter as our margins expanded by 80 basis points even as we increased our operating and capital expenditures to drive product innovation. The third objective we outlined was to significantly improve our free cash flow, which we delivered in the first nine months of the year with an increase of 73% on lower one-time costs and improved working capital. Finally, we committed to allocate our capital in a disciplined manner. We've demonstrated balance in this area by repurchasing $100 million of stock in Q3 and remain committed to deliver our year-end leverage targets through continued debt prepayments in Q4. The entire Clarivate team remains completely focused on the solid execution that will deliver all of these financial objectives. I want to thank all of you for listening in this morning. I'm now going to turn the call back over to Flam to take your questions. And as a reminder, please limit yourselves to one question and then return to the queue for any additional. Flam, please go ahead.

Operator, Operator

Our first question comes from Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Toni, your line is now open.

Toni Kaplan, Analyst

Thanks very much. Just in light of a few additional 13D filings during the quarter, can you just give us your latest thoughts on whether you think these three businesses are more valuable together? What synergies do you generate from having them together? And if there are any assets that you view as sort of not as core to the portfolio? Thanks.

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Hi, Toni. Yes. Thanks for the question. Yeah, I mean, first obviously, we always feel great about the investors set that we have and the kind of renewed interest and the new commitment from some of those that you mentioned is just fantastic. We feel very lucky to have them as part of our investment community. In terms of the portfolio, really as I highlighted in my remarks, nothing has changed. We're so very focused on executing against the plan that we have right now. One of our feedback we're getting is that we're very close to market growth rates. We made improvements in life sciences and healthcare. Again, we have some short-term market headwinds in IP, which we are focused on improving and we think will turn around next year. So it's really telling, nothing has changed in our markets. We're always looking at where we should add to our portfolio and where we can make improvements, but we feel very good about the collection we have right now. Thank you.

Mark Donohue, Head of Investor Relations

Next question, please.

Manav Patnaik, Analyst

Thank you. Good morning. I just – apologies if I missed it but, if you could break out the subscription growth and the non-subscription growth in the Academia & Government side? and just talk about how these new contracts you highlighted and the demand can you talk about directionally help that subscription run rate perhaps?

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Sure. Thanks for the question, Manav. Throughout our A&G business, we've highlighted in the first three quarters we've seen improvement in our renewal rates in that segment, and we've seen some new business growth largely driven by the Web of Science product. We made a pretty meaningful investment in that product late in 2021. In 2022, we saw significant increases in monthly active usage. We followed that up with some really nice augmentations or enhancements to the product in 2022. You'll recall we significantly increased the number of journals that receive a journal impact factor and we started doing some very thoughtful integrations with some of the ProQuest products like the dissertation and PCs collection. That’s put us in a place where we've seen nice improvements in the renewal rates that have helped to improve the subscription growth rates in the A&G segment. As Jonathan highlighted in his comments, we had a nice quarter in Q3 on a transactional basis within A&G, but that business can be a little bit lumpy from quarter to quarter. It wasn't great in Q2, but we saw a really nice growth rate in the third quarter. The fourth quarter is important for that business from a transactional perspective. So the entire team remains heavily focused on delivering a strong year on the transactional side to augment the improvements we've seen in subscriptions.

Mark Donohue, Head of Investor Relations

Thank you. Next question, please.

Surinder Thind, Analyst

Thank you. Just a big picture question here. When we think about the cyclical exposure that you have in the business and the commentary from last quarter on some of the one-time items, and then we kind of look ahead, how would you characterize the upside or the downside that's kind of left in that part of the business as we move through the current economic cycle while maintaining your current levels? Or if perhaps things were to get a little tougher from a macro perspective?

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Great. Thanks, Surinder. It’s great to have you on the call. Just a couple of comments: we are facing those macro pressures right now. We faced them for the last few quarters, particularly with the trademarks since summer last year. Our view is that, as we talk to clients to get a sense of their spending patterns from a macro impact, this is kind of as bad as it gets. We see it in a few different areas. For the most part, I break it down: Academia & Government, which is largely insulated from macro pressures. It’s very government budget-driven and tends to be very solid. So half our business, I would say, is heavily insulated. On the other parts of our business, we are seeing the downside this year from that. Thank you.

Mark Donohue, Head of Investor Relations

Thank you. Next question, please.

Tom Ross, Analyst

Good morning. This is Tom Ross on for Andrew Nicholas. I wanted to dive into the macro factors you saw last quarter affecting transaction revenue. I was wondering, I know you saw some improvement in consulting; could you talk about those other factors and how that progressed through the quarter and how you are seeing those trends as we head into 2024?

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Sure. Yes. First in life sciences and healthcare, again, it's really on those commercial budgets. If you think about a pharma company, they have strategy, business, R&D, and once a product gets approved and gets market access, it goes into launch. What we're seeing and we've seen throughout the year is that the pharma industry in general is very tight on commercial spend this year. The impact we are seeing is specific to the commercial side within life sciences, and healthcare.

Tom Ross, Analyst

Thank you.

Mark Donohue, Head of Investor Relations

Thank you. Next question.

John Mazzoni, Analyst

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I'm on for Seth this morning. I wanted to get a quick one in on the kind of OCC subscription growth really around just what your expectations are for 4Q as well as any initial thoughts into ’24?

Jonathan Gear, CEO

You'll recall that at the August call on Q2's results, we indicated that we expected to see some headwinds in Q3 on the subscription file and we did. That's almost entirely from our life sciences business where we see a pullback on the updates for real-world data based on what the sales pattern had been in the preceding three to four quarters. So, that played out as we expected. We do expect a sequential improvement in our subscription growth from Q3 to Q4. January is a very important month in our renewal cycle; a lot of work going on this month and next month. We will have a much better line of sight into the subscription growth across the business when we are together in early March for the year-end results.

John Mazzoni, Analyst

Great. Thanks for the color.

Owen Lau, Analyst

Good morning and thank you for taking my questions. You talk about Yale selecting Clarivate for AI and big data and also how you are leveraging the cloud. Could you please broadly talk about the progress of any more capabilities such as AI in your products? What are some of the key product launches in the near term to increase engagement with existing and potential customers? Thank you.

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Got it. Owen, thank you for your questions. As we've discussed before, we see AI as a game changer for information and tech-enabled content companies like ourselves. We're really seeing it in a few ways. First, enhanced search capabilities. The ability to use AI to find the right content, the right curated content faster drives incredible efficiencies for our customers. This is true across all segments. As we roll out our products and test with our clients, we are leveraging AI and expect to enhance curated services across all segments. Another area is using AI as a way to unlock additional content insights to help our clients in their workflows. We have been reacting to our clients' needs to help them manage their IP portfolio, and Forecast is something we launched which helps enhance the value of our offerings. We're investing heavily in these areas. Those are just a few examples.

Owen Lau, Analyst

Thanks.

Ashish Sabadra, Analyst

Thanks for taking my question, and thanks for providing more detailed Q4 organic guidance. The fourth quarter is a seasonally strong quarter for commercialization revenues, my understanding particularly for the real-world data and the DRT business. I was just wondering what to assume from that business perspective? And how is the transition the progress on the platform to deliver these therapeutic RWD solutions directly to the end-users? How is that progressing? Thanks.

Jonathan Collins, CFO

Thank you for the question, Ashish. You are spot on: the fourth quarter is a seasonally higher quarter for our life sciences transactional business, particularly includes commercialization products and services. We usually look to capture year-end spending. We have better line of sight into the year-end availability of funds. However, we trimmed the expectation there just modestly as part of the change in the organic outlook for Q4. We've made really good progress in building out better content and higher quality information with tools relevant for our life sciences customers. We expect to share more about our plans for 2024 during our year-end earnings for early March.

Mark Donohue, Head of Investor Relations

Thank you. Next question, please.

Peter Christiansen, Analyst

Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for the question. I just wanted to follow up on the previous question. As we think about the setup for discretionary revenue – discretionary spending from your clients, perhaps outside of life sciences, just wondering if you can frame that in terms of what you're seeing on the A&G side as we get into the fourth quarter and should we be mindful of any year-over-year comparisons for fourth quarter? Thank you.

Jonathan Collins, CFO

Thank you for that, Peter. I'll touch on the other two segments. So, on A&G, it is the largest transactional quarter of the year. Signs there are good from a school year budgeting standpoint, particularly in the US. We are seeing good signs there, which helped lead to solid performance in Q3. There's plenty of work left to do in the next couple of months to ensure we get our share or more than our fair share of that funding. But overall forces in that area are positive. On the life sciences side, we are expecting real-world data sales to be down in the fourth quarter, which will pressure our life sciences transactional business. We are also focused on building out a solution set to sell directly to customers, which will also have an impact in Q4. Commercial budgets should be a modest tailwind for us moving into 2024.

Peter Christiansen, Analyst

Thank you.

Shlomo Rosenthal, Analyst

Thank you. Jonathan, I want to ask a little bit about some of the contract movements that we’re seeing. There was commentary about the LS&H business impact of midterm cancellations and renewals. What does that mean exactly? Are you getting cancellations? Can you give us a little bit more color on the USPTO contract? Is there any concerns or anything over there? I would assume that's a pretty big contract with marquee customers? Any color on what's going on among these contract movements would be helpful?

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Sure, I’ll start by answering your question about the USPTO. We have a great relationship with the USPTO in Alexandria. They awarded us an enhanced contract earlier in the year through a government review process, which was public. We received word that it will start early next year, but there were never any concerns about losing it. As for LS&H, we’ve seen pressure on renewal rates due to budgetary pressures, causing some impact to our outlook for the fourth quarter.

Shlomo Rosenthal, Analyst

Thank you.

George Tong, Analyst

Hi, thanks. Good morning. In life sciences and healthcare, you saw negative subscription revenue growth because of lower real-world data sales and some cancellations. Can you elaborate on your broader strategy for managing your real-world data product to drive improved growth?

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Sure. This key strategy shift began in the middle of the year post-Henry Levy joining the business. We decided to focus on our real-world data platform, selling it directly and enhancing its value ourselves rather than relying on third parties. This will result in a short term impact on revenue, but over time, it will create a more sustainable and higher growth product line moving forward. Thank you.

George Tong, Analyst

Got it. Very helpful. Thank you.

Jonathan Gear, CEO

Thank you everyone for joining the call. I feel very good about the overall results in the quarter. We are making good progress, though there's still work to be done. We are seeing the expected progress. So, thanks again and have a great week.

Operator, Operator

This concludes today's Clarivate third quarter 2023 earnings call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.