DNB Shareholder/Stockholder Letter Transcript:
2023 ANNUAL REPORT
Powering Innovation
and Growth
01
At Dun & Bradstreet, we help our clients solve mission-critical business problems by
providing trusted, curated data and analytics that help drive informed decisions and
improved outcomes. Our global base of approximately 240,000 clients relies on our Data
Cloud that fuels innovative solutions and delivers insights that empower organizations to
accelerate revenue, lower cost, mitigate risk, and transform business.
Year in Review
Financial
Performance
Simplifying &
Scaling Technology
Expanding & Enhancing
our Data & Analytics
$2.3B
40%
8%
3.8X
95%
+557M
IN REVENUE
NET LEVER AGE
SIMPLIFIED DATA SUPPLY
CHAIN COMPLE XIT Y
OF NORTH AMERIC A
PRODUC TS AND
SERVICES IN CLOUD
GROW TH IN GLOBAL
D - U - N -S NUMBER UNIVERSE
TOTAL ORGANIZ ATIONS IN
DATA CLOUD
+35B
SUPPLIER REL ATIONSHIPS
MAPPED IN DATA CLOUD
Dun & Bradstreet 2023 Annual Report
Developing
Innovative Solutions
Clients at
the Core
27%
~240K
13K
93%
VITALIT Y INDE X
CLIENTS MIGR ATED TO
MODERN SOLUTIONS
L AUNCHED
D&B. AI L ABS
GLOBAL CLIENTS
OF CLIENTS ARE
FORTUNE 50 0
96%
CLIENT
REVENUE RETENTION
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To Our Valued Shareholders:
2023 marked significant achievements for Dun & Bradstreet. Our mission to build a global network of trust that
enables our clients to transform uncertainty into confidence, risk into opportunity and potential into prosperity
has never been more important, and the talent of our team to achieve this in a dynamic operating environment
has made the difference.
Organizations throughout the world are seeking our expertise to help solve their business challenges. Through
our leading market position serving 93% of the Fortune 500, fast growing Data Cloud, innovative artificial
intelligence-fueled (AI) solutions, targeted expansion in new verticals, and solid financial position, we are a
more agile and resilient business with a strengthened foundation for long-term growth. The world and the
businesses within it that ignite global commerce are fast changing and Dun & Bradstreet is changing with it.
Delivering Solid Performance
Our performance in 2023 is evidence of that transformation and growth. While revenue for the full year was
$2.3B and net loss was $47M, organic revenue in 2023 increased 4.3% on a constant currency basis over 2022
and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) was $892 million, an
increase of 3.3% versus the prior year. We finished 2023 with not only our strongest quarter of the year, but also
our strongest quarter since going public in July 2020, which is a testament to our portfolio and execution.
Driving Innovation
Throughout the year, we introduced capabilities and solutions spanning third-party risk management, master
data management (MDM), and Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI). Our Vitality Index, which measures
revenues from our newest solutions, finished at 27%, up from 17.5% in 2022, as we delivered new solutions
and made significant enhancements to existing platforms, shifting nearly 13,000 clients globally to eight of our
newest solutions. As client demand for our newest products rises, we also continue to see growth in contracts
with terms of 4 years or longer, which we believe demonstrates the trust and confidence our clients have in
Dun & Bradstreet.
We continue to bring to market new solutions, most recently for capital markets. Capital markets firms consume
large amounts of data in their evaluation of viable acquisition targets for investment. Dun & Bradstreet s ability
to link and enrich capital markets clients data through our D-U-N-S Number hierarchy, add deeply correlated
performance insights from our alternative data sets, as well as deliver insights on millions of private companies
around the globe, presents a world of possibilities for clients in this sector.
Keeping Clients at the Core
In 2023, we kept focus on enabling our clients to make better decisions with trusted insights and solutions.
Highlights include:
We simplified our data supply chain complexity by 40%, allowing more data to flow through to our solutions.
At the end of the year, our Data Cloud contained records on more than a half billion private and public
companies worldwide. We invested in new and alternative datasets including merchant level transactions,
building and mortgage defaults, social media reviews and Google Places data, among others, to support new
uses for our clients. We added to our analytical solutions 14 new and enhanced scores that leverage machine
Dun & Bradstreet 2023 Annual Report
learning (ML) and AI capabilities. Further, our data and analytical assets sit on a strong technology foundation
that enable us to continually expand our Data Cloud and deliver more capabilities to our clients directly, and
in partnership with our strategic alliances. Importantly, as a responsible data steward, we strive to balance
our commercial obligations and responsibilities with respect for the interests of the organizations and people
about which we process data, in compliance with regulatory and privacy expectations worldwide.
We experienced strong demand for our Finance & Risk Solutions, particularly within third-party and supply
chain risk management. Organizations turn to Dun & Bradstreet to raise the bar on their business partners
and to understand the financial, regulatory, cyber, social and climate risks associated with their third-party
providers. Our Data Cloud contains Ultimate Beneficial Ownership data on 352 million shareholders, climate
risk insights on 270 million businesses, and detailed data-driven Environmental, Social and Governance
ratings on 80 million D-U-N-S Numbers. We also mapped nearly 35 billion relationships between Tier 1,
Tier 2, and Tier 3 suppliers, providing businesses the insights needed to make informed decisions about
their operations at the most critical times.
Within our Sales & Marketing Solutions, we experienced solid growth in our MDM solutions, which are
a foundational component for our clients data strategies, especially with the swift embrace of Gen AI.
MDM offers a means to consolidate, control, and enhance data enterprise-wide to gain clearer and more
trustworthy business perspectives and outcomes. MDM strategies that connect disparate data siloes into one
trusted master data set are critical enablers of scale and improved speed-to-market and time-to-value for our
clients. On top of that, mastered data is essential fuel for Gen AI s power in our clients business operations.
Innovating in Gen AI
Armed with a distinctive position over two centuries as a global provider of trusted business decisioning data
and analytics, we have quickly established a key position in the Gen AI space. Technologies like AI, ML, and
Large Language Models (LLMs) have long been in our suite of capabilities and expertise, and we believe there
is no better company than Dun & Bradstreet to help our clients to fuse these technologies with our trusted
datasets, responsibly apply AI, and tap into our expertise quickly to advance their business. We continue to
develop new AI-powered solutions, innovate through partnerships with Google Cloud and IBM, and apply Gen
AI to tools and processes to boost our own performance.
Looking to the future, we expect the current dynamic environment, including macro trends such as supply
chain disruption, growth in regulatory and privacy considerations, and increasing focus on Gen AI to continue.
Regardless of what lies ahead, our more than 6,000 Dun & Bradstreet team members worldwide embrace our
company mission and exhibit extraordinary commitment to deliver for our clients. We have great confidence in
our future and ability to execute with purpose to capture the opportunities ahead.
Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
William P. Foley, II
Executive Chairman
Anthony M. Jabbour
Chief Executive Officer
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4/25/2024 Letter Continued (Full PDF)