Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone.

Thank you for joining our fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call. With me today are Ari Bousbib, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Ron Bruehlman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Eric Sherbet, Executive Vice President and General Counsel; Mike Fedock, Senior Vice President, Financial Planning & Analysis; and Gustavo Perrone, Senior Director, Investor Relations.

Today, we will be referencing a presentation that will be visible during this call for those of you on the webcast. This presentation will also be available following this call in the Events & Presentations section of our IQVIA Investor Relations website at ir.iqvia.com.

Before we begin, I would like to caution listeners that certain information discussed by management during this conference call will include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by forward-looking statements due to the risks and uncertainties associated with the company's business, which are discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent SEC filings.

In addition, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call, which should be considered a supplement to, and not a substitute for, financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP measures is included in the press release and conference call presentation.

I would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Ari Bousbib.

Thank you, Kerri, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results.

We closed 2025 with a strong fourth quarter, resulting in full-year revenue growth of 6%, adjusted diluted earnings per share growth of 7%, and free cash flow of $2.1 billion, representing about 100% of adjusted net income. As I reflect on our accomplishments in 2025, I'm proud of the results delivered by the IQVIA team, given that our industry faced significant challenges, with heightened uncertainty around macroeconomic and government policy, as well as continued pressure from interest rates.

This macro environment led to slower customer decision-making and tempered biotech funding. This impacted R&DS bookings and revenue earlier in the year, but as the year progressed, the environment stabilized somewhat, and demand indicators became more favorable, and funding increased.

Despite the environment, we at IQVIA continued to invest in developing innovative offerings and more integrated solutions to advance development programs and drive commercial success. Examples of the depth and breadth of our clinical and commercial offerings and significant investments in 2025 include: increasing our Phase 1 trial capabilities to test new drugs in healthy volunteers with the acquisition of a facility in the UK; expanding our site management organization with the acquisition of Next Oncology, a network of specialized sites serving patients enrolled in early-stage oncology trials; helping clients advance critical programs ranging from global Phase 3 oncology and obesity trials to launching innovative treatments in rare diseases and underserved patient communities; seeing great demand among large and mid-sized pharma clients for our DaaS Plus solution, DaaS, data-as-a-service, which provides AI-ready data as a single harmonized source, simplifying customers' data management and building a strong foundation for AI analytics.

This offering integrates global to local data, highlighting IQVIA's unique ability to merge proprietary data assets with third-party data assets with a compliant, scalable framework; advancing the digitalization of patient support programs to streamline workflows for treatment access and adherence with the recent launch of the IQVIA patient experience platform, which already has six new customers on; working with the Sabin Vaccine Institute to provide more than 640 Marburg vaccine doses to Ethiopia for a Phase 2 trial during the nation's first Marburg virus disease outbreak, partnering with local health authorities to evaluate safety and efficacy; winning our first full-service commercial outsourcing deal in Asia with a large pharma client; and last example, enhancing our capabilities in patient solutions and payer analytics with the acquisition of Cedar Gate Technologies in the fourth quarter. Now let us turn to the results for the quarter.

Revenue for the quarter came in above the high end of our guidance range, representing year-over-year growth of 10.3% on a reported basis and 8.1% at constant currency. Acquisitions represented about two points of this growth.

Fourth-quarter adjusted EBITDA increased 5% versus prior year. Fourth-quarter adjusted diluted EPS of $3.42 increased 9.6% year-over-year.

On the clinical side, net bookings totaled over $2.7 billion, growing 7% year-over-year, 5% sequential. This resulted in a net book-to-bill ratio of 1.18, reflecting the continued improvement in customer trends, as well as solid execution from our sales teams.

I should point out that in the fourth quarter, our cancellations, while in the normal range, were really slightly above the normal range due to a specific idiosyncratic aspects of certain trials that had to be canceled. Key demand metrics for the quarter continued to be positive.

Our qualified pipeline is about 10% higher year-over-year, with growth across all customer segments. RFP flow grew double digits year-over-year, with growth across all segments, largest gains in large pharma and in EBP.

Our win rates improved year-over-year, several percentage points. Backlog reached a new record of $32.7 billion at the end of the quarter, growing 5.3% compared to the prior year.

Encouragingly, EBP funding was strong in Q4, reaching $33 billion according to BioWorld. On the commercial side, TAS continued to perform very well in the fourth quarter, achieving better-than-expected results despite the anticipated tougher year-over-year comparisons.

We delivered growth in TAS of 9.8% reported, 7.1% at constant currency, highlighting the resilience of our broader commercial portfolio. Now a few highlights of business activity in the fourth quarter.

We announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services, naming AWS as our preferred agentic cloud provider to accelerate the industry's digital transformation. With the world's largest pharmaceutical companies already relying on IQVIA and AWS, we believe this partnership will make AI more readily available across life sciences, medical affairs, and healthcare analytics, and enable faster delivery of lifesaving treatments to patients worldwide.

IQVIA was recognized by Everest Group for our AI leadership, the only clinical research organization to receive the number-one ranking for Generative AI Leadership in Life Sciences. You will recall that we started on this AI journey quite a while ago.

Specifically, a little more than a year ago, we announced a partnership with NVIDIA, with whom we have been working for over a year, to build agents into our workflows, both in clinical and commercial, and we have made significant progress to date. In commercial, demand for our AI-driven innovations is gaining momentum with our clients, especially in large pharma.

A few examples: a top 20 pharma client selected IQVIA to provide comprehensive AI-enabled information and analytics solutions for a major US gastroenterology franchise; the top 15 pharma client chose IQVIA as the strategic partner for a multiyear program to deliver analytics and agentic AI solutions across the enterprise; another pharma client selected IQVIA to deploy our AI-enabled patient relationship manager solution for rare disease hub services, improving patient engagement and therapy adherence. On the clinical side, in R&DS, I'll share some key wins in the quarter focusing on large pharma and biotech companies and focusing on AI capabilities.

A top 15 pharma client selected IQVIA for a major respiratory development program, where IQVIA's ability to integrate AI-driven planning tools to accelerate timeline and improve efficiency was key to secure the win. A large pharma client chose IQVIA to manage a large full-service program of NASH studies utilizing AI-enhanced planning tools and advanced recruiting strategies.

IQVIA was selected to manage a pivotal oncology study with end-to-end services and leveraging tailored AI-enabled technology solutions, including patient randomization and drug supply optimization. Now, I'd like to take a minute to share how we are simplifying our organization in 2026 to strengthen collaboration, enhance efficiency, and support continued growth.

Our goal is to better align our teams with how our operating model has evolved to adapt to the new ways clients are purchasing our capabilities. In the clinical space, clients are incorporating real-world evidence earlier in clinical development programs.

In the commercial space, as I mentioned in prior calls, we are seeing clients increasingly looking to outsource integrated commercialization programs that use IQVIA's suite of capabilities, from analytics to field-based sales and medical forces. Against this backdrop, we've implemented a simplified organization that consists of two reporting segments: Commercial Solutions and R&DS.

Under this new reporting model, the CSMS segment, which has become more closely integrated into commercial offerings in the TAS segment and represents $788 million in 2025 revenue, is incorporated into the TAS segment, which is renamed Commercial Solutions. Additionally, certain offerings currently reported in the TAS segment, consisting of Real-World Late Phase, as well as certain other real-world offerings that have become more closely related to the clinical trial business, are moved to the R&DS segment.

The business dynamics and growth patterns of Real-World Late Phase and these other offerings mirror those in the clinical trial business. They represent $674 million in revenue in 2025.

Simply put, Commercial Solutions is TAS plus the CSMS segment minus the clinically oriented real-world offerings that were moved to R&DS. This new segment reporting aligns with industry evolution and the company's operating model.

It has a negligible impact on segment growth rates, as you can see on the chart. We believe our broad and differentiated capabilities position us well to pursue enterprise-wide partnerships across these two segments, as clients continue to consolidate vendors.

I want to take another moment to acknowledge and congratulate our employees around the world. For the ninth year in a row, IQVIA was named one of the World's Most Admired Companies in Fortune's annual survey.

Importantly, for the fifth year in a row, IQVIA was named the number-one Most Admired Company in our category. Finally, this is the last earnings call for our longtime CFO, Ron Bruehlman.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge Ron. I've been working with Ron for the last three decades.

He's a proven, extraordinarily world-class leader who played an instrumental role in shaping and executing our company's financial strategy and transformation. Ron's steady leadership and long-term strategic vision have been essential in building a high-performing global finance organization and helped IQVIA remain resilient through unprecedented times.

On behalf of the entire IQVIA team, I want to thank Ron for his exceptional service. The good news is he's not going anywhere and only transitioning into a senior advisory role, assuming he returns from his upcoming trek in Nepal.

Now to Ron for more details on our financial performance.

Thanks for your kind words, Ari, and I promise I will make it back. Good morning, everyone.

Let's start by digging into the numbers a little bit more, starting with the fourth quarter. Fourth-quarter revenue was $4,364 million.

That was up 10.3% on a reported basis and 8.1% at constant currency. Excluding all COVID-related work, revenue grew over 8% at constant currency.

This included approximately two points of contributions from acquisitions. Technology & Analytics Solutions revenue for the fourth quarter was $1,821 million, that's up 9.8% reported and 7.1% constant currency.

R&D Solutions fourth-quarter revenue of $2,333 million was up 9.1% reported and 8.2% at constant currency. Excluding the step-down in COVID-related work, R&DS revenue grew over 8.5% at constant currency.

Finally, Contract Sales and Medical Solutions, or CSMS, fourth-quarter revenue of $210 million increased 18.6% reported, 15.3% at constant currency, and about five points of that growth was due to the acquisition we mentioned in the third-quarter call. For the full year, revenue was $16,310 million, up 5.9% reported and 4.8% at constant currency.

That included Tech & Analytics Solutions revenue of $6,626 million, which grew 7.6% reported and 6.2% at constant currency. R&D Solutions full-year revenue was $8,896 million, up 4.3% reported and 3.5% at constant currency.

Finally, full-year CSMS revenue was $788 million, up 9.7% reported and 8.2% at constant currency. Now, moving down the P&L.

Fourth-quarter adjusted EBITDA was $1,046 million, representing growth of an even 5%, while full-year adjusted EBITDA was $3,788 million, up 2.8% year-over-year. Fourth-quarter GAAP net income was $514 million, and GAAP diluted earnings per share was $2.99.

Full-year GAAP net income was $1,360 million, or $7.84 of earnings per diluted share. Adjusted net income was $588 million for the fourth quarter, and adjusted diluted earnings per share was $3.42, that was up 9.6%.

That brought the full-year adjusted net income to $2,068 million, or $11.92 per share, up 7.1%. Now, as already noted, we had strong net new bookings growth this quarter, which reconfirmed the improved demand environment that we started seeing in the second quarter.

R&DS backlog at December 31 was $32.7 billion, that's up 5.3% year-over-year, and next-12-month revenue from backlog was $8.3 billion at year-end. Now turning to the balance sheet.

As of December 31, cash and cash equivalents totaled $1,980 million, and gross debt was $15,724 million, which results in net debt of $13,744 million. Our net leverage ratio ended the year at 3.63 times trailing-12-month adjusted EBITDA.

Cash flow from operations in the fourth quarter was $735 million, and capital expenditures were $174 million, which translated into free cash flow of $561 million. For the full year, free cash flow was $2,051 million, representing 99% of our full-year adjusted net income.

In the quarter, we repurchased $212 million of shares, bringing our full-year share repurchase activity to $1,244 million at an average price of $169 per share. Now, I will turn it over to Mike Fedock, who will share details on our 2026 guidance.

Mike?

Thank you, Ron. For full-year 2026, we expect revenue to be between $17,150 million and $17,350 million.

This includes about 150 basis points of contribution from M&A and approximately 100 basis points of tailwind from foreign exchange versus prior year. Our adjusted EBITDA guidance is $3,975 million to $4,025 million, and our adjusted diluted EPS guidance is $12.55 to $12.85.

Now, let me provide some color on the below-the-line items. This guidance includes approximately $610 million of operational D&A, net interest expense of approximately $760 million, which is about $80 million higher than 2025.

This increase reflects the full-year impact of the senior notes issued in June 2025, swap maturities, and refinancing activity we expect to complete in 2026, partially offset by the lower interest rates on our variable debt. Finally, our guidance assumes an effective income tax rate of just over 17%, an average diluted share count of just over 171 million, and assumes that foreign currency rates as of February 4th continue for the balance of the year.

Now, let's look at revenue at the new segment level. As Ari mentioned, we will start reporting 2026 under two segments: Commercial Solutions and R&DS.

This change is to better align and simplify our operating model to the evolving market landscape. We will provide full recast of relevant historical financials for the two segments starting with the first quarter 10-Q and the 2026 10-K.

In the meantime, we have included a recast of 2025 and 2024 revenue in the press release that accompanies this earnings presentation. On a recast basis, 2025 full-year revenue for the two new segments has Commercial Solutions at $6,740 million and R&DS at $9,570 million.

With this new reporting, TAS transfers $674 million of Real-World Late Phase and real-world clinical-related offerings into R&DS, and Commercial Solutions receives the full $788 million of CSMS revenues. For full-year 2026, we expect Commercial Solutions revenue to be between $7.2 and $7.3 billion, which represents growth of approximately 7% to 9%.

R&DS revenue is expected to be between $9.9 and $10.0 billion, which is a little over 4% growth year-over-year at the midpoint. Now, let's review our first-quarter guidance.

For the first quarter, we expect revenue to be between $4,050 million and $4,150 million. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $920 million and $940 million, and adjusted diluted EPS is expected to be between $2.77 and $2.87.

Now, before we move to Q&A, I just want to take a moment to thank Ron for his support, guidance, and mentorship. I've enjoyed working with Ron over the last nine years, first as CFO of the lab business, then as CFO of R&DS, and most recently leading the corporate FP&A function.

I'm grateful for everything he's shared with me along the way. Now, with that said, let me hand it back to the operator for Q&A.

Operator?

Hi, thank you very much for taking my questions. Ari, maybe you could just talk about the concerns everyone's having in the market about the potential for AI to disrupt various established businesses, and if you could just talk about why you think your business is insulated, or why it would be hard to disrupt it, and then why you think AI is really more of an enabling technology for the business versus anything that investors should be concerned about.

I don't know where to start. I wish we would be spending the next few moments talking about our great results for the year and our great guidance for '26.

We're very excited about how business is going. An article was published a couple of days ago, and all of a sudden, it's the end of the world.

I don't know why it was news to people. It certainly is not news to us.

We started on this AI journey a long time ago. Specifically, I mentioned again, we've been working with NVIDIA for over a year to build agents into our workflows, and we've made a lot of progress.

We've seen this opportunity for our business very early. Again, I stress, it's an opportunity, not a challenge.

There really is nothing new here for us other than, obviously, I want to take the opportunity, because it's obviously not clear to people, to clarify what I believe is fundamental misunderstandings of both what our business is and what AI is, and why we're not a law firm. There are three requirements for AI agents.

Number one, significant ready-to-consume data ingredients at scale. Number two, domain expertise.

Number three, technology, meaning the AI tools everybody talks about with French names, and the processing capability to enable this AI agents to work. Now, the first two are absolutely necessary, meaning the data ingredients and the domain expertise.

The third one can be bought, and it's typically a combination of tools that constitute a tech stack from a variety of ecosystem players. I want to focus on these first two.

Let's start with the data. First, our data is proprietary.

You need to understand that our data is not readily available on the web. It's proprietary.

It's not like case law, jurisprudence, company financials, consumer information. It's just not available.

This is a lot more than simply aggregating data, vacuum cleaning everything that's on the web and organizing it neatly for somebody to use with an AI tool. It's just not there.

Second, it's sourced, de-identified, cleansed, curated, and integrated into data lakes that enable fit-for-purpose extraction algorithms to do their work. We do this at a huge cost and on a massive scale, and we've been doing this for decades.

By the way, many have tried to replicate it; no one has duplicated it. Third, healthcare data is dynamic data.

That is, it changes every moment, and it needs to be updated constantly. It's not like a legal case.

It remains the same legal case forever. It's static.

Fourth, healthcare data is subject to significant regulatory compliance, privacy frameworks that vary across countries and geographies. Do you really think that Germany is going to allow, let's call him Jean-Paul, to access and play around with individual healthcare data of their citizens?

Fifth, healthcare data needs to meet interoperability, relevance, completeness, traceability, reliability, and linkability standards under countless ontologies at a scale and level of complexity that has zero comparison to any other industry. Sixth, the data that we sell to our clients is for specific, defined uses.

We do not sell all the data that we source. We sell the final products, not the ingredients.

The ingredients, which have much higher latency and higher levels of granularity, are what you need to train differentiated and specialized AI agents. Now, obviously, I could go on and on about why healthcare data at IQVIA bears no resemblance whatsoever to data in any other industry.

Let me switch to the second important requirement to do AI agentification, and that is domain expertise. In some industries, a couple of lawyers will do to interpret a case.

Not so in healthcare. To build the algorithms required to develop AI agents, you need to have the ability to read, understand, and interpret these highly complex data sets in their proper context so the agents can perform these workflows at the level of precision, accuracy, trust, and compliance required by the regulators in healthcare.

That is, by the way, what we've been calling with our clients healthcare-grade AI. This is why our clients trust us to work with them on their own AI journey.

On the one hand, it helps us differentiate in clinical research and win more business. On the commercial side, we've seen an uptick in demand for AI-enabled analytical offerings.

A lot of what we do with large pharma is being discussed, it's in partnership with IQVIA. Bear in mind, our agents have been training on our data assets for over a year now.

To date, we've deployed over 150 agents covering over 30 use cases across the business, clinical and commercial. Important to understand about how this AI agentification is done, and forgive me if I'm being simplistic and explaining obvious things, a workflow includes many tasks.

Each of these tasks can be performed by an AI agent. Within a workflow, there could be 10, 15, or 20 agents that are involved, and they work together under the oversight usually of an orchestration agent that sits on the top.

Now, for each of these tasks, we choose the model that's best suited to the task. For a particular task within a workflow, it could be OpenAI, for another task, it could be Claude, it could be one of our own tools, or a number of models and tools.

Within one agentification process of one workflow, you may have many different tools working together. The goal is to pick for each task the best suited tool, and of course, optimize the overall cost, as some of these tools are actually quite expensive.

Here is where deep domain expertise is critical to be able to choose the best model and fine-tuning that model on proprietary, domain-specific data to optimize performance. Now finally, the investment required to put this all together is quite significant.

It's only justified if you have the scale across both clinical and commercial, across a broad array of therapies, and across the globe to make the economics worthwhile. Now, we sell to over 10,000 clients, and therefore, we have that scale.

That's why we exist in the first place long before AI came to the fore. Everything we do, our clients could do, but they're not, because it's a lot more economically rational to outsource it to us and to partner with us.

Same here. I would say overall, in answer to your question, and forgive me, and I beg your patience for the time it took to answer the question, but it's important to clarify, overall, I would say AI agentification is a positive for our business across both clinical and commercial.

I understand it's hard to distinguish between us and other CROs, us and other information services providers. I tried to give you some detail, and we could go in more detail in follow-up calls if you so desire.

I hope we can go to the main subject of the call, which is the results and our guidance. Again, our proprietary data assets, which are not scrapable by horizontal AI models, are more valuable than ever, actually.

Our services are differentiated because they leverage deep domain expertise that very few, if any, healthcare organizations possess in-house. Yes, some lower-level consulting and analytics work may be displaced, but at the same time, we're seeing increasing demand for new offerings, including the next-generation information management DaaS solutions that I spoke about in my introductory remarks.

By the way, these introductory remarks were written long before the AI drama erupted a couple of days ago. I hope that addresses your question, Shlomo.

I guess, anybody wants to add anything here? No, no.

All right, thank you very much.

Okay. Next question.

Thanks very much, and good morning. I was hoping to dig into the latest acquisition, Cedar Gate.

Perhaps help us better understand holistically what the value and driver of that acquisition is for the organization and how it fits into the total IQVIA ecosystem, and then technically, could you provide any color on the specific revenue and profit contribution of that business? Is it accretive, dilutive?

Maybe give us a sense of the margin profile, if you could. That would be very helpful.

Thanks.

Thank you very much. Look, we've been dabbling around the payer-provider analytics business for some time, but never at scale.

I think overall, before the Cedar Gate acquisition, our overall payer-provider business for the company is a couple of percentage points of our total revenues, and it's mostly in the EMEA region, in Europe and in the Middle East, with specific technology platforms. In the US, we've looked at several assets before, but nothing that was of sufficient scale, and obviously, the valuations were not rational at the time.

Cedar Gate itself was a great opportunity. Basically, it transforms healthcare data into insights for improved patient outcomes and provides analytics to payers.

It does have a great technology platform as well. It has the right scale.

You asked for the numbers. It's about, in '24, it was about $125 million in revenue, and it has $35 million, somewhere $33 to $33 million of adjusted EBITDA.

That's what I have in front of me, $32.7 million to be precise. And '25, who have the numbers in front of you?

Mike, do you have that? A little bit higher than that.

$140 million maybe?

About that,

yeah.

Yes, about that. Same margin.

$140 million and about 26% or so.

Same

margins, yeah, similar margin. Yeah.

Okay. That's for the numbers.

It helps improve patient outcomes, higher quality of care, reduce costs across the system. It utilizes data from the customers.

I think it has four petabytes of data, about 15 million lives. Obviously, they don't utilize data purchased from IQVIA or other third parties.

It helps expand our solutions, and that has some synergies with our data analytics and technology business.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Eric

All right. Good morning, everyone.

Ari, I may add one if I may, but I do recall in your 2019 Investor Day where IQVIA is highlighting its investments in the cloud and AI and ML. I think a lot of those investments may not have been accretive to cash flow at the time or over the course of those few years.

Maybe now is the time where IQVIA really starts to monetize those investments, whereas the rest of the world has caught up. I think the one question at the risk of oversimplifying is just to understand whether this is an opportunity or risk for your business.

Is it sort of accretive, neutral, or detrimental to growth, whether it's R&DS and TAS, or TAS? I think your response at the end to Shlomo's question is that it's potentially accretive to the long-term growth rate of IQVIA.

I just want to confirm that that's what you're messaging, or maybe you can restate the thoughts on what the impact is or opportunity is for the segment growth rates. Then just secondly, it does sound like what you're seeing in R&DS is an improving business environment based on your prepared remarks, and are we on course to really sort of get back to the 1.2 book-to-bill throughout 2026?

Does the pipeline support that, or is it sort of too early to tell? Thank you in advance.

Thank you. I don't really know where to start.

It's really frustrating that everything we've been saying on AI, you referred to we went back to 2019. It's true, but again, we've been accelerating all of this over the past year, and we've communicated this over and over again.

It's really hard to disprove a generic assertion, like AI is going to displace your business. It's exactly the opposite.

I said before, and I'm going to repeat it again, AI agentification is a positive, has been a positive, will continue to be a positive for us. IQVIA has the largest proprietary healthcare information assets in the world and is the foundation of our value to clients.

That access is not available. We have that access to nonpublic, granular, high-frequency data that nobody can license at that level of depth, which is the level of depth that's required to build the agents.

I don't know how else to say it. Number two, industry expertise and global presence cannot be replicated by general purpose AI, like it can be in any other services.

Our value comes from seven decades of deep knowledge across 100-plus countries, deep understanding of local health systems. It cannot be systemized or replaced by generic LLMs.

It just can't, outside healthcare. Believe me, if it could, we would have already been on it.

Our company is integral to our clients' ecosystem. AI is more likely to augment the client's team, but not to replace us.

Our clients' AI initiatives are enabled by our data services and workflows and people. The scale and the centralization that make IQVIA the natural healthcare AI partner should be evident.

It reminds me a little bit over a year ago or about a year ago, I was hearing people telling me that R&D investments in drug development is over. No one is going to invest in drug development anymore.

I had people stating that as a fact. I don't know what to say.

Okay? I've said what I have to say, you can reread the transcript.

I just want to remind you, again, AI delivers the most value when it's embedded in existing workflows. Why should you build a new wheel if the existing one works, and you can simply optimize it?

Most of what AI does, by the way, it covers 80% of what needs to be done, but you still need to have someone with the subject matter expertise to complete the remaining 20%. Otherwise, you keep compounding errors, and you end up with an incomplete product, which in healthcare is a no-no to begin with.

You're also forgetting regulations. AI is all about productivity.

It is all about enabling people to do more. It will not replace.

It will help enhance and improve. Okay.

I guess I'm done. R&DS and bookings.

The demand metrics are very strong. They continue to be double digits, whether it's qualified pipelines, RFP flow.

The book-to-bill, again, you've seen that it has improved during the year. We had telegraphed that.

We this quarter had cancellations for utility reasons, but we had very strong bookings. Look, despite the naysayers who were telling us a year ago that we were done with any business, we booked again $10 billion of business this year, like every other year, after cancellations.

What the book-to-bill will be next quarter, the quarter after, next year, we don't project that. I don't know.

Again, the demand indicators are strong, and funding is strong. EBP demand has come back largely because funding has come back.

Our large pharma has very rich pipeline of opportunities we're working on, I don't see anything here that's unusual. Thank you.

Next question.

good morning, Ari and everyone, and thanks for the question. I don't want to beat a dead horse, but have you actually seen, I think one of the fears that came out this week, and I'd just be curious your thoughts on it, are that I think Pfizer and maybe some others have talked about using AI in terms of improving trial efficiency.

When I heard that, it seemed sort of in line with sort of what you and others have maybe previously said about sort of just generalized increase in that over time. Have you seen any difference in sort of behaviors from that large pharma segment in terms of what they're asking for you, because I think the fear comes down to, are they going to need fewer FSP seats or something like that, and that would be a drag on revenue?

One, I guess, have you heard over that? Then two, maybe on the financial side, anything you can point out in terms of the cadence of profitability this year that would be sort of different than what we've seen in prior years?

Thank you.

No. Nothing different with respect to large pharma AI efforts, and the ideas that clinical trials can be made more efficient with AI.

We've been talking about this for a long time. The very creation of IQVIA was predicated on this idea and the innovation of new tools that allow AI agentification.

We timed on that right away, and we've been working on it. In fact, I would say with respect to clinical trial efficiency improvements through AI agents, large pharma is doing this with us.

With respect to large pharma work on AI earlier in the process, which you alluded to, that is on discovery, which by the way, this is the part when you hear large pharma mention AI, 99% of what they mean is using AI simulation tools way, way upstream to try to sort through the molecules to try to decide and anticipate in advance which trial will be most successful. That doesn't affect what our business is.

You could conclude theoretically that as a result, they will start less trials, but I don't believe that at all. In fact, if you talk to large pharma, they'll tell you no, we'll do more trials and they'll be more successful.

Because they are on a theory that will negate that. Most of the innovations, if you go back, actually came fortuitously, not because they proved the initial hypothesis.

It's a different discussion. Innovation in pharmaceuticals has often come per chance, to speak, in the course of a trial that was trying to do something else.

Either way, we do not see any change in demand dynamics. We only see opportunities for productivity improvements.

We are on it. We help our clients with those productivity improvements.

It helps us as well. We work in partnership with our clients, and our business is stable and growing, and nothing is changed, and we believe that we will continue to grow, gain market share as we've been doing, and execute on the strategy.

There's nothing new here because an article was published. Nothing.

Super helpful in terms of the preclinical context, too. Thank you.

Super. Hi, good morning.

Thanks for squeezing me in here. Ari, I wanted to ask a question about margin.

Your margin year-over-year was down a little bit in the fourth quarter, but it looks like to us, your pass-through growth was quite high. That more than accounted for that margin pressure, and maybe you did actually gain some productivity apart from that.

My question's twofold. One is the more simple version of: what is the trajectory of pass-throughs, and how should we think about how that's affecting margin?

The bigger question, though, is dovetailing on your productivity points and thinking about how those productivity gains are shared with the client. Historically, my best understanding was kind of the expectation of some sharing.

I guess what I'm interested in is, you've also talked about having been through a period of pretty significant reprocurement. Has the price-taking, the price pressure by pharma in those reprocurements been their way of extracting that productivity value and then you go get it, or is it more of a program-by-program, contract-by-contract discussion with them where the strategy on the trial drives shared efficiency?

I'm just trying to understand how you monetize the efficiency that you're chasing. Thank you.

I think, again, the procurement you referred to, I'm just going to answer the second part of your question is the procurement is it volume rates and so on and so forth, you would conclude normally that it's the former, not the latter.

Okay.

Having said that, obviously, in a given trial, there's still maybe a little bit of negotiation here and there. Look, long term, you have to share productivity gains with clients.

That's no question, no secret. You're asking about the short term, no, that is in that sense.

What was the first question? Oh yeah, First was

trajectory of pass-throughs and how we should think about that,

yeah. Yeah.

You answered your question yourself. I think the pass-throughs

The biggest driver of the gross margin decline you saw was very strong pass-through growth in the quarter. Okay?

There's some product mix impact that gets into that as well. Now as we go into next year, as you saw, we're guiding toward flat overall EBITDA margins, and the pass-through growth will moderate going into next year, into 2026.

Right. It's basically yes.

To answer your question, you talked about productivity, yes. We offset some of this with the productivity gains.

When you have a quarter with a lot of pass-throughs, then there's just that much you can do.

You'll see that the SG&A margin continues to improve, and a lot of that is productivity-related.

Yeah.

Great. Thank you.

Again, thanks for getting me in. Good luck with '26.

Good luck with retirement, Ron.

Thank you.

Thank you. That was our last question, operator.

turn the call back over to Kerri Joseph for closing remarks. Thank you, operator.

Thank you for taking the time today to join us, and we look forward to speaking with you again on our first-quarter 2026 earnings call. The team and I will be available for the rest of the day to take any follow-up questions you might have.