IQVIA Holdings Inc Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

IQVIA Holdings Inc (NYSE: IQV) Q4 2025 Earnings Call dated Feb. 05, 2026

Presentation

Operator

It. Sa. Sam sa. It. Sam. It. Sa. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. At this time. I would like to welcome everyone to the IQVF fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press Star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Kerry Joseph, Senior Vice President, Investor relations and Treasury.

Mr. Joseph, please begin your conference.

Kerri Joseph — Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Thank you. Operator Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining our fourth quarter. And full year 2025 earnings call. With me today are Ari Boosby, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ron Bruman, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Eric Scherver, Executive Vice President and General Counsel Mike Fido, Senior Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis and Gustavo Peroni, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Today we’ll 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 and Presentation section of our ACUVIA Investor relations website@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 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 10K 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 supplement four 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 Haru Guls.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you Kerry and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2020 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 Acuvia 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 RNDF 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 continue to invest in developing innovative offerings and more integrated solutions to advance development programs and drive growth commercial success. Examples of the depth and breadth of our clinical and commercial offerings and Significant investments in 2025 include increasing our phase one 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 disease and underserved patient community Seeing great demand among large and mid sized pharma clients for our DAAS 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 assets, data assets with third party data assets with a compliant scalable framework. Advancing the digitization 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 Sabine Vaccine Institute to provide more than 640 Marburg vaccine doses to Ethiopia for a phase two trial during the nation’s first Marburg virus outbreak. Partnering with local health authorities to evaluate safety and efficacy. We need our first full service commercial outsourcing deal in Asia with a large pharmacy. A last example enhancing our capabilities in patient solutions and payer analytics with the acquisition of Cedar Gate Technologies in the fourth quarter. Let us now 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 2 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% sequentially. 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 cancelled. 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. My club reached a new record of $32.7 billion at the end of the quarter, growing 5.3% compared to the prior year.

And encouragingly, EVP 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 portfolios and 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 AW aws.

Within this partnership we make AI more readily available across life sciences, medical affairs and healthcare analytics and enable faster delivery of life saving 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 and 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 today 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 at CV to provide comprehensive AI enabled information and analytics solutions for a major US gastroenter gastroenterology franchise. The top 15 pharma clients chose IQVIA as the strategic partner for a multi year program to deliver analytics and agentic AI solutions across the enterprise. Another pharmacy selected IQVR 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 our nds, I’ll share some key wins in the quarter focusing on large pharma and biotech companies and focusing on AI capabilities.

The top 15 pharma clients selected IQVIA for a major respiratory development program where I Q V has ability to integrate AI driven planning tools to accelerate timelines and improve efficiency was key to secure the win. A large pharma client chose iqvia to manage a large food service program of MASH studies utilizing AI enhanced planning tools and advanced recruiting strategies. Acuvia 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 our clients are purchasing our capabilities. In the clinical space, clients are incorporating real world evidence earlier in clinical development programs and in the commercial space. As I mentioned in prior calls, we are seeing clients increasingly looking to outsource integrated commercialization programs that use IQVS suite of capabilities from analytics to feedback, sales and medical forces. Against this backdrop, we’ve implemented a simplified organization that consists of two reporting segments, Commercial Solutions and rmbs. Under this new reporting segment models, the CSMS segment, which has become more closely integrated into commercial offerings in the TAS segment and represents $788 billion in 2025, revenue is incorporated into the TAS segment which is renamed Commercial Solutions.

Additionally, surgeon 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 RNDS 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. So simply put, Commercial Solutions is TAS plus the CSMS segment minus the clinically oriented real world offerings that were moved to rnds. 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 service. And importantly, for the fifth year in a row, IQVR was named the number one Most admired Company in our category. Finally, this is the last earnings call for our longtime CFO Ron Bruhlman.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge Ron. I’ve been working with Ron for the last three decades. He’s a proven, extraordinary 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 help ACUVIA remain resilient through unprecedented times. On behalf of the entire ACUVIA team, I want to thank Ron for his exceptional service and the good news is he is not going anywhere and only transitioning into a senior advisory role assuming he returns from his upcoming trek in Nepal.

And now to Ron for more details on our financial performance.

Ron Burman — CFO

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 $4,364,000,000. 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 2 points of contributions from Acquisitions Technology Analytics Solutions revenue for the fourth quarter was $1,821,000,000. That’s up 9.8% reported and 7.1% constant currency. R&D Solutions fourth quarter revenue of $2,333,000,000 was up 9.1% reported and 8.2% at constant currency.

And excluding the step down in Covid related work, RDS revenue grew over 8.5% of constant currency. Finally, Contract sales and Medical Solutions or CSMS. Fourth quarter revenue with $210 million increased 18.6% reported, 15.3% at constant currency, and about 5 points of that growth was due to the acquisition we mentioned in the third quarter call. For the full year revenue was $16,310,000,000, up 5.9% reported and 4.8% constant currency. That included tech and analytics solutions revenue of $6,626,000,000 which grew 7.6% reported and 6.2% constant currency. An R and D Solutions full year revenue was $8,896,000,000, up 4.3% reported and 3.5% at constant currency and finally full year CSMS revenue with $788 million up 9.7% reported and 8.2% at constant currency.

Now moving down the p&l Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $1,046,000,000 representing growth of an even 5% while full year adjusted EBITDA was $3,788,000,000 up 2.8% year over year. Fourth quarter GAAP net income was $514,000,000 and GAAP diluted earnings per share was $2.99. Full year GAAP net income was $1,360,000,000 or $7.84 of earnings per diluted share. Adjusted net income was $588,000,000 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 $2,068,000,000 or $11.92 per share, up 7.1%. Now as already noted, we had strong net new bookings growth this quarter which confirmed the improved demand environment that we started seeing in the second quarter.

RNDs backlog at December 31st 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. Okay, now turning to the balance sheet. As of December 31st, cash and cash equivalents totaled $1,980,000,000. In gross debt was $15,724,000,000 which results in net debt of $13,744,000,000. Our net leverage ratio ended the year at 3.63 times trailing twelve month adjusted EBITDA cash flow from operations in the fourth quarter was $735,000,000 and capital expenditures were $174,000,000 which translated into free cash flow of $561,000,000. For the full year free cash flow was $2,051,000,000, 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 $1,244,000,000 at an average price of $169 per share. Now I’ll turn it over to Mike Bidoch who will share details on our 2026 guidance.

Michael Fedock — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Mike thank you Ron. For full year 2026 M, we expect revenue to be between $17,150,000,000 and $17,350,000,000. This includes about 150 basis points of contribution from M and a and approximately 100 basis points of tailwind foreign exchange versus prior year. Our adjusted EBITDA guidance is $3,975,000,000 to $4,025,000,000 and our adjusted diluted EPS guidance is $12.55 to $12.85. Now let me provide some color on the below the line. This guidance includes approximately $610 million of operational DNA 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 rate on our variable debt.

And 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 RDS. This change has better align and simplify our operating to the evolving market landscape. We will provide a full recast of relevant historical financials for the two segments starting with the first quarter 10Q and the 2026 10K and 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 $6,740,000,000 and RDS at $9,570,000,000. With this new reporting, TAS transfers $674,000,000 of real world late phase and real world clinical related offerings into RDS and Commercial Solutions receives the full $788 million 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%. RDS revenue is expected to be between 9.9 and $10 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 $4,050,000,000 and $4,150,000,000. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $920,000,000 and $940,000,000 and adjusted diluted EPS is expected to be between $2.77 and $2.87. Now, before we move to Q and 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& D s, and most recently leading the corporation in a function. I’m grateful for everything he shared with me along the way.

Now, with that said, let me hand it back to the operator for Q and A Operator.

Question & Answers

Operator

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press Star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We request that you please limit yourselves to just one question so that others in the queue may participate as well. We’ll pause for a moment to compile the Q and A roster. Your first question comes from Shlomo Rosenbaum with Skyful.

Shlomo Rosenbaum

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

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, you know, I. I don’t know where to stomach. I wish we were. 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, but 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 made a lot of progress.

We’ve seen this opportunity for our business very early. And again, I stress, it’s an opportunity not to 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, and number three, technology, meaning the AI tools everybody talks about with French names and the processing capability to enable these 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, deidentified, 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 have been doing this for decades, by the way. Many have tried to replicate it. No one has duplicated it. Third, health care 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 health care 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 ontology other industries. 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 product, not the ingredients. And 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. But 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. And 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 iqvm. Bear in mind our agents have been training on our data assets for over a year now and 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 identification 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. So within a workflow there could be 10, 15 or 20 agents that are involved and they work together under the oversight of 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. So 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.

So within one identification process of one workflow, you may have many different tools working together and 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. But it’s a lot more economically rational to outsource it to us and to partner with us. Same here. So I would say overall, in answer to your question, forgive me and I beg your patience for the time I took to answer the question that it’s important to clarify, overall I would say AI gentrification is a positive for our business across both clinical and commercial.

And I understand it’s hard to distinguish between US and other CROs, US and other information services provider. And I try to give you some detail and we could go up 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. But 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 health care organizations possess in house.

So yes, some lower level consulting and analytics work may be displaced, but at the same time we see increasing demand for new offerings, including the next generation information management DAS solutions that I spoke about in my introductory remarks. And by the way, these introductory remarks were written long before the AI drama erupted a couple of days ago. So I hope that addresses your question and I guess anybody wants to add anything here?

Shlomo Rosenbaum

No? All right, thank you very much. Okay, next question.

Operator

Our next question comes from Eric Caldwell with Baird.

Eric Caldwell

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 IQVA 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.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, thank you very much. So look, we’ve been doubling around the payer provider analytics business for some time. We never at scale. I think overall before the Sydney Gate acquisition, our overall payer provider business for the company is like it’s 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. So in the US we looked at several assets before, but you know, nothing that was, that would be, that was of sufficient scale and obviously the valuations were not, 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 provide analytics to payers. It does have a great technology platform as well. It has the right scale. You ask for the numbers. It’s about in 24, it was about $125 million in revenue and it has 35 somewhere. $33 million of adjusted EBITDA, that’s what I have in front of me. 32.7 to be precise. Okay, so. And 25 a little bit higher than that. 140 maybe 140 and about 36. Yeah, similar margins. Yeah. Okay, so that’s for the numbers.

So yeah, it helps improve patient outcomes, higher quality of care, reduce cost across the system. It utilizes data from the customers. I think it has 4 petabytes of data and about 60 million lives. So obviously they don’t utilize data purchase from IQV or other third party. It helps expand our solutions and that has some synergies with our data analytics and technologies.

Eric Caldwell

Thank you very much.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Eric.

Operator

Our next question comes from Justin Bowers with Deutsche Bank.

Justin Bowers

All right, good morning everyone. And Ari, I may add one if I may, but I do recall in your 2019 investor day where IQVO is highlighting its investments in the cloud and AI and ML. And 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. And maybe now is the time where I QVA really starts to, you know, to monetize those investments whereas the rest of the world is caught up. But I think the one question at the risk of oversimplifying is just to understand whether this is an opportunity or risk for your business and is it, you know, is it sort of accretive, neutral or, you know, detrimental to growth, whether it’s RDs or TAs? And I think your, you know, response at the end to Shlomo’s question is that it’s, it’s potentially accretive to the long term growth rate of iqvia.

So I just want to confirm that that’s what you’re messaging or, you know, maybe you can restate the thoughts on, you know, what the impact is or opportunity is for the segment growth rates. And then just, just secondly, it does sound like what you’re seeing in RDS is an improving business environment based on your prepared remarks. And is that, you know, 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, or is it sort of too early to tell and thank you in advance.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, well, thank you. I mean, I don’t really know where to start. It’s really frustrating that, you know, everything we’ve been saying on AI referred to you 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 justification is a positive, has been a positive, will continue to be a positive for us.

IQVR 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 non public granular high frequency data that nobody can license. At that level of debt, which is the level of debt that’s required to build the agents. I don’t know how else to say. 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 health care. Believe me, if it could we would have already been on it. So we are. 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 IQA the natural healthcare AI partner should be evident. You know a little bit, it reminds me just to remind me a little bit over a year ago or about a year ago I was hearing people telling me that R and D investments and investments, 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, so I’ve said what I have to say. You can read me the transcript. I just want to remind you again, AI delivers the most value when it’s embedded in existing workflows. Why do you, 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 healthcare is a no no to begin with. You’re also forgetting regulations. AI is all about productivity. It’s all about enabling people to do more. It will not replace. It will help enhance and improve. Okay, I guess I’m not rnds and bookings. So the metrics, the demand metrics are very strong. They continue to be double digits. Whether it’s qualified pipelines, RSP flow, the book to be again, I’m always pushing back on. You’ve seen that it has improved during the year. We had telegraphed that this quarter had cancellations for futility reasons, but we had very strong bookings.

Look, despite the naysayers who were telling us a year ago that we, we were done booking any business, we booked again $10 billion of business this year, you know, like every other year after cancellations. So you know what, the book to me will be next quarter, the quarter after next year. We don’t project that. So I don’t know. But again, the demand indicators are strong and farming is strong. EVP demand has come back largely because funding has come back. A large pharma has very rich pipeline of opportunities we’re working on. So I don’t see anything here that’s unneeded.

Thank you. Next question.

Operator

Your next question comes from Elizabeth Anderson with Evercore isi.

Elizabeth Anderson

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 trial efficiency, improving trial efficiency. And when I heard that, it seems sort of in line with sort of what you and others have maybe previously said about sort of an increase, 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 like, are they going to need fewer FSP seats or something like that and that would be a drag on revenue or is this, you know, one, I guess, have you heard over that? And 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.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

No, nothing different. With respect to large pharma AI efforts and the idea 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 identification. We climbed on that right away and we’ve been working on it. And in fact, I would say with respect to client clinical trial efficiency improvements through AI agents, large pharma is doing 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 bot.

When you hear large pharma mention AI. 99% of what they mean is using AI simulation tools way, way upstream to try to source through the molecules, to try, decide and anticipate in advance which trial will be most successful. So 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 Ashwauna, they will tell you no, we’ll do more trials and they’ll be more successful. I think there are other theories that will negate that. Most of the innovations, if you go back, actually came fortuitously not because they proved the initial hypothesis.

So, you know, it’s a different discussion. But innovation in pharmaceuticals has often come, you know, per chance, so 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 product improvements. It helps us as well. We work in partnership with our clients and our business is stable and growing and nothing has changed. And we believe that we will continue to grow, gain market share as we’ve been doing and execute on the strategy.

There is nothing new here because an article was published. Nothing.

Elizabeth Anderson

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

Operator

Your next question comes from David Winley with Jeffries.

David Winley

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 so that more than accounted for that margin pressure and maybe you did actually gain some productivity apart from that. So if my question is twofold. Sorry, so one is this 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 re procurement. Has the price taking the price pressure by PhRMA in those reprocurements been their way of extracting that productivity value and then you go get it. Or is it more of a, you know, 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.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I think, you know, again, you know, the procurement you refer to. I’m just going to answer the second part of your question is the procurement is it, you know, is determined rates and so on and so forth. So you could, you would conclude normally that that’s the, you know, it’s the form, not the latter.

David Winley

Okay.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Having said that, obviously in a given trial there still may be, you know, a little bit of negotiation here and there. But look, long term you have, you share productivity gains with the clients. That’s no, no question. No, no secret. But you’re asking about the short term. No, that it is in that sense. What was the first, the first was.

David Winley

Trajectory and pass throughs and how we should think about that.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you, you answered your question yourself. I think the pass throughs.

Ron Burman — CFO

Yeah. The biggest driver of the gross margin decline you saw was, was very strong pass through growth in the quarter.

David Winley

Okay.

Ron Burman — CFO

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

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Right, right. And it’s basically. Yeah, to answer for your question, you, you said by productivity. Yes. I mean we, we offset some of these. We had the productivity gain. You had a quarter with a lot of pass throughs. Then you, you know, there’s just that much you can do. Yeah.

Ron Burman — CFO

You’ll see that the, the SGA margin continues to improve and a lot of. That is productivity related.

David Winley

Yeah, great. Thank you again. Thanks for getting me in. Good luck with, and good luck with retirement, Ron.

Ron Burman — CFO

Yeah, thank you.

David Winley

Okay, thank you. That was our last question off. That was our last question off. Really.

Ari Bousbib — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

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 the rest of the day to take any follow up questions you might have.

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disclose. Disconnect.