Ari Bousbib
Analyst · David Windley of Jefferies. Your line is open
A good question. I did talk about this and -- in the past, and there is no change there. It is true. Again, I mentioned in my introductory remarks, it's not like we've, all of a sudden, moved to a different bullish environment, clients, large pharma to focus on that segment first. It has announced, I mean, there is barely a large pharma company that has not announced a massive cost cutting program, multi-billion dollars, and often that comes first with a review of their procurement practices and their vendors and we are a top vendor to pharma. So there's no surprise here. What I said before is still valid. Those budgetary constraints persist, the cautiousness persists and, of course, we -- it's not like we can price whatever we want. Now clients still need to do some projects, many of them had been postponed and delayed. We see that improving. Our decision timeline had started to improve and now they have improved more dramatically. They're not where they were before this whole cautiousness begun. But they have improved significantly, which is why we feel more confident with the forecast. Pricing, yeah, I mean, look, large pharma clients are more disciplined in their spending and therefore, it's a tougher fight out there in terms of negotiations, no question about that. And it's true in TAS and it's true in R&DS, frankly. At the same time, you've got -- on the R&DS side, on the CRO side, you get really an industry that has kind of segmented itself in a way with three large players and a bunch of smaller ones, including some who are, sometimes desperate for business and becoming more undisciplined with respect to how they go about approaching their bids and so on and so forth and, obviously, clients, fully take -- you can expect clients fully taking advantage of that. So again, the answer to your question is pricing continues to be tough for all the reasons I just mentioned, both on the commercial and on the R&DS side. We, of course, respond with continued increase in our productivity programs, cost containment programs, as well as a lot of deployment of AI within our own operations. Those things take time, obviously, there is always a lag when we implement these solutions before we can get the full benefit. But that's what's happening on pricing. Thank you, David.