S&P Global Inc Earnings - Q4 2025 Analysis & Highlights
S&P Global delivered strong 2025 results with 14% EPS growth and exceeded initial guidance across all divisions, while positioning for continued growth in 2026 through strategic investments in AI, private markets, and energy expansion, despite moderating market-driven revenue growth expectations.
Key Financial Results
Reported revenue grew 9% while organic constant currency revenue rose 8% in the fourth quarter.
Full-year 2025 EPS grew 14%, with results at the higher end of the most recent guidance range and well above initial guidance provided in February.
The company exceeded initial guidance from February 2025 on revenue growth, operating margin, and EPS while returning 113% of adjusted free cash flow to shareholders.
Adjusted operating margins expanded 60 basis points year-over-year to 47.3% in the fourth quarter, or 130 basis points excluding the OSTTRA joint venture divestiture.
The company announced the 53rd consecutive year of dividend increases and repurchased more than $5 billion in stock in 2025.
Full-year adjusted diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of $19.40 to $19.65 for 2026, representing growth of 9% to 10% year-over-year.
Business Segment Results
Market Intelligence reported revenue growth of 7% with organic constant currency revenue growth of 5% in the fourth quarter, with subscription revenue (roughly 85% of MI) growing approximately 7%.
Ratings revenue increased 12% year-over-year, or 10% on an organic constant currency basis, with transaction revenue growing 12% driven primarily by strong issuance volumes in investment grade.
S&P Global Energy revenue grew 6% in the fourth quarter, driven by continued strength in Energy & Resources Data & Insights and Price Assessments.
S&P Dow Jones Indices revenue grew by 14% with double-digit growth across all business lines, including asset-linked fees which benefited from both higher AUM and net inflows.
Mobility revenue grew 8% year-over-year with double-digit growth in Dealer and Financials & Other segments.
Private markets revenue grew 16% year-over-year, driven primarily by the Ratings and Market Intelligence divisions.
Ratings division operating margin expanded 210 basis points to 61.8%.
Indices operating margin expanded 90 basis points to 68.8%.
Mobility's operating margin expanded 70 basis points year-over-year to 35.4%.
Energy division operating profit increased 7% and operating margin expanded by 50 basis points to 45.5%.
Capital Allocation
The company repurchased more than $5 billion in stock in 2025.
The company is targeting approximately $1 billion of buyback in the first quarter of 2026, compared to approximately $650 million in the first quarter of 2025.
Buybacks are typically lighter in the first quarter and build during the course of the year.
The company completed the acquisition of With Intelligence in late November 2025, with the close process shortened to less than six weeks.
The company expects to continue making strategic investments in key growth areas while maintaining disciplined capital allocation.
Industry Trends and Dynamics
Billed Issuance increased 11% in 2025 and surpassed $4.3 trillion, creating a challenging compare for 2026.
The company saw strong pipeline of deals announced in the back half of 2025 and continues to see pent-up demand given the dry powder in the market.
Significant debt issuance from hyperscaler investments in AI infrastructure occurred in the second half of 2025, with expectations for continued issuance in 2026.
The company saw disruption in issuance markets impacting the Ratings business following Liberation Day in April 2025.
Incremental sanctions impacted the Energy business midway through 2025.
Volatility in volume-driven products emerged in Market Intelligence during 2025.
The maturity wall for 2026 shows 12% higher maturities compared to the 2025 maturity wall a year ago, with a stable mix of high yield versus investment grades.
Bank loan syndication volumes have been slower in transactional activity, impacting volume-driven revenues.
Competitive Landscape
Over 95% of the company's revenue is tied to proprietary benchmarks, differentiated data, and critical workflow tools, with expectations that this percentage will increase over time.
The company's workflow tools are described as critical systems of record for customers, involving sophisticated integrations and providing connectivity across industry networks.
The company's workflow tools embed functionality for compliance, risk management, and data integration, with solutions developed and refined over many years to enable mission-critical workflows deployed globally at scale.
Customers are consistently telling the company they don't want to expand their list of vendors and prefer comprehensive partnerships with fewer vendors.
The company has established partnerships with major technology players including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI for AI integration.
The company maintains control of commercial relationships with customers and does not allow LLM providers to train on S&P Global data.
Macroeconomic Environment
The company believes it is entering 2026 with more tailwinds than headwinds despite a very dynamic macroeconomic and geopolitical backdrop.
The company expects two rate cuts from the US Fed in the back half of 2026.
Spreads are expected to remain low in 2026.
The company expects oil prices to remain fairly stable, but lower in 2026 than seen on average over the last few years.
The company sees a reasonably healthy environment for financial services customers with strong commercial engagements.
The energy space continues to evolve in the changing geopolitical landscape.
In the event of macroeconomic distress, elevated market volatility or uncertainty, or a slowdown in economic growth, Billed Issuance would be lower than forecast.
Growth Opportunities and Strategies
The company's strategic vision is to advance essential intelligence through three strategic objectives: advancing market leadership, expanding into high-growth adjacencies, and amplifying enterprise capabilities.
The company delivered exceptional results in private markets, expanding in private credit ratings, significantly enhancing private markets tools like iLEVEL with new AI functionality, and launching private equity benchmarks and indices.
The company announced and completed the acquisition of With Intelligence and partnerships with Cambridge Associates and Mercer to build the most comprehensive solution set in the world for private markets.
In energy expansion, the company launched AI capabilities making research and insights available through Microsoft Copilot, launched enhanced gas, power and commodity flow intelligence, and introduced new integrated energy scenarios.
The company integrated the 451 team with its power team to connect sought-after themes and unlock new insights on data centers and power.
2025 was a leap forward for AI, with the company launching new AI products and features in every division using a platform agnostic approach to GenAI solutions.
The company launched the S&P 500 Onchain in collaboration with Centrifuge in 2025 as part of decentralized finance initiatives.
The Chief Client Office was established to deepen engagement with large strategic customers at the most senior levels, enabling S&P Global to bring the full enterprise value proposition to clients.
The Enterprise Data Office made meaningful headway in 2025 with a goal to reduce run rate expenses by more than 20% by the end of 2027, with the company well ahead of pace to achieve that goal.
The company reduced manual data processing meaningfully, with more than half of total data workflows now processed via automation tools.
The company eliminated more than 10% of applications in use and simplified the EDO technology stack.
Through collaboration across teams, the company shortened the With Intelligence close process to less than six weeks and linked more than 75% of fund manager and investor datasets in less than a month through Kensho Link.
The company enabled Single Sign-On through Capital IQ Pro in January, which immediately helped identify cross-sell opportunities.
The company held 20 regional training sessions for commercial teams and generated more than 200 new sales leads and cross-sell opportunities within the first 60 days of the With Intelligence acquisition.
The company has already realized millions in cost synergies since the With Intelligence deal closed at the end of November.
The company deployed the Automated Data Ingestion tool on iLEVEL in 2025, with nearly 20% of iLEVEL customers opting for that add-in within six months.
The company is seeing very good demand from energy clients for adding the ability to pull energy research into Copilot.
The company is investing in AI for both products and internal productivity, with internal usage accelerating multiple use cases including the enterprise data office, software development process, researcher activity, and analysts.
The company has already been able to simplify, streamline, and save $10 million plus over the last year in the researcher area through AI tools.
The company expects revenue growth to outstrip head count growth over the next several years.
Financial Guidance and Outlook
On an organic, constant currency basis, the company expects revenue growth of 6% to 8% for 2026.
On a reported basis, growth is expected to be approximately 60 basis points higher, reflecting the impact from acquisitions, divestitures, and currency movements.
Excluding the contributions from OSTTRA in 2025, the company expects to expand margins in 2026 by 50 to 75 basis points.
Market Intelligence is expected to sustain solid organic constant currency growth in the range of 5.5% to 7% in 2026, with subscription revenue expected to grow closer to the top half of the range.
Ratings is expected to see organic constant currency growth in the range of 4% to 7% in 2026, assuming Billed Issuance growth in the low- to mid-single-digit range.
Energy is expected to achieve organic constant currency revenue growth of 5.5% to 7% in 2026.
Mobility is expected to achieve organic constant currency growth of 7.5% to 9% in 2026.
Indices is expected to achieve organic constant currency revenue growth of 10% to 12% in 2026.
The company's guidance assumes Billed Issuance will be up low- to mid-single-digits in 2026.
The company's guidance assumes market appreciation of 5% to 7% from January 1 to December 31, 2026, consistent with medium-term targets.
The company's guidance assumes low-single-digit growth in ETD volumes for Indices.
The company expects continued momentum and healthy growth from subscription-based offerings in Market Intelligence.
The company is taking a prudent approach to 2026 guidance for Market Intelligence, reflecting the unpredictability of volume-driven products.
The company's outlook for Energy reflects the market environment and sanctions, with sanctions assumptions remaining unchanged based on the current environment.
The company expects approximately 60 basis points of headwind from customer sanctions in 2026.
The company is not providing 2026 GAAP guidance at this time other than for reported revenue and capital expenditures, due to uncertainty around the timing of the Mobility spin.
Upon completion of the Mobility spin, the company plans to initiate GAAP guidance for 2026 and provide recast financials for 2025.
Mobility Separation
The company announced Mobility Global as the name of the new soon-to-be independent company.
The company has confidentially filed the Form-10 with the SEC and completed senior leadership appointments, including naming Matt Calderone as CFO designate.
In the second quarter, the company expects to file the Form-10 publicly, and the Mobility Global team expects to host an Investor Day and launch its equity roadshow.
The company expects to launch a public debt offering for Mobility at some point in the second quarter, targeting an investment-grade rating.
S&P Global will continue to fully consolidate Mobility Global in financial statements and 2026 guidance until the separation is complete.
Artificial Intelligence and Technology
The company has deployed approximately $1 billion against AI capabilities since acquiring Kensho in 2018.
The company sees AI as a net tailwind for the business.
The company is embedding leading AI technology in products to ensure customers have access to AI functionality without leaving S&P Global platforms.
The company maintains a flexible distribution philosophy, allowing customers to access licensed data wherever they want to use it, including through third-party LLM platforms.
The company has hundreds of distribution partners and is adding LLM players as another group of distribution partners.
The company is seeing increased demand for add-ons and new data as customers use AI-enhanced products.
The company is tracking adoption through retention, renewal rates inclusive of price increases, add-ons, net new revenues, and new product sales.
AI enhancements are helping with competitive wins.
