Wolters Kluwer

at a glance

We help our customers make critical

decisions every day by providing

expert solutions that combine deep

domain knowledge with specialized

technology and services.

Global footprint

North America

of total revenues

Asia Pacific & ROW

8

%

of total revenues

21,400+

employees worldwide

180+

countries where we serve customers

40+

8

reduction in scope 1 and

scope 2 emissions

Sustainability highlights 2023

We are delivering value

for our customers,

rewarding careers for our

employees, and returns

for shareholders.

“

The passion, commitment, and

efforts of our global team allowed

us to collectively deliver on our

The macroeconomic and geopolitical backdrop of 2023

presented some challenges, but despite this, we achieved our

overall financial guidance, with another year of 6% organic

growth and a further increase in the adjusted operating

profit margin. The year saw our two largest divisions, Health

and Tax & Accounting, grow faster than we had anticipated,

compensating for Financial & Corporate Compliance and

Corporate Performance & ESG, where the interest rate cycle

and market shifts impacted results. It was a year when our

Legal & Regulatory division demonstrated yet again that it has

opportunities and still meet our margin and cash flow goals.

Q

Innovation spending is at record levels. What are you

investing in?

Product development spending is running at 11% of group

revenues, some €615 million in 2023, up in constant currencies.

This investment is critical to supporting organic growth and

to our long-term competitive position. In our world, organic

investment mostly relates to multi-year product roadmaps

new regulations. We follow a rigorous design and development

process, that adheres to our responsible AI principles, to

ensure quality and security while also achieving a return on

investment. We aim to be agile at the same time so we can

pivot or move faster when needed. In 2023, for example, we

quickly shifted attention and funding towards generative AI

opportunities. Our centralized product development team,

DXG, plays a key role in driving innovation with the divisions,

both for existing solutions and the creation of entirely new

products.

digital revenues come from products that have some form of

AI embedded. We see the new Gen AI technology as another

powerful tool that we can put to work with our high-quality,

continuously updated, proprietary content to bring benefits to

customers. We also see interesting opportunities to enhance

our own internal operations with this technology. Gen AI lends

itself very well to certain tasks, such as conversational search,

generating first drafts, or summarizing documents. In 2023, we

released our first generative AI-enabled products and there is

more to come in 2024.

from joining up these units and connecting and integrating

their solutions. Less than a year in, we have started aligning

Q&A with

Nancy McKinstry

5 Wolters Kluwer 2023 Annual Report

product development and have already released the first

connection between Enablon and CCH Tagetik. All four units

have a unique set of assets with the right capabilities to serve

this market.

Are you on track to deliver on the goals of your 2022-2024

strategy?

We are very much on track. We are focused on delivering

great value for our customers, offering rewarding careers for

our employees, and generating returns for shareholders. Our

top priority has been to grow our expert solutions, which

are sophisticated workflow and software applications that

to our existing business. Examples from the past two years

include our new solutions to prepare nurses for exams and

clinical practice, our extension into drug diversion software,

or our push into business licensing. In these three cases, we

made small bolt-on acquisitions, NurseTim and Invistics in

2023, and LicenseLogix in 2022, to accelerate the move. The

new division’s expansion into ESG data collection, analytics,

and reporting for corporations is another example.

On the third leg of our strategy, we made big strides: we

brought nearly all of our technology development teams

performance. What was accomplished in 2023?

Our plan is to advance our own sustainability performance

on a number of fronts. In 2023, we improved our employee

engagement and belonging scores, another step forward in

reaching our goal of being in the top quartile of companies

for these metrics. Another milestone was the validation of

our near-term emission reduction targets by the Science

6 Wolters Kluwer 2023 Annual Report

Our mission is to empower our

professional customers with the

information, software solutions,

and services they need tomake

critical decisions, achieve successful

outcomes, and save time.

Overview

Wolters Kluwer is a global provider of information, software

and services for professionals in the fields of health; tax and

workflow, and support their decision-making with our digital

solutions and technology-enabled services. We continuously

improve our solutions tomeet evolving customer needs,

leveraging the latest technologies to provide benefits such

as advanced analytics, intuitive interfaces, mobility, flexibility,

interoperability, reliability, and open architecture.

Purpose

Our purpose is to deliver impact when it matters most. Every

second of every day, our customers face decisive moments

that impact the lives of millions of people and shape society.

Our strategy for 2022-2024 aims to deliver good organic

growth and improved adjusted operating margins and return

on invested capital, while advancing our ESG performance.

Among the ESG goals in our 2022-2024 plan are to drive

an improvement in our belonging score, to align with the

recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial

Disclosures (TCFD), and to obtain validated near-term science-

based targets. To achieve these goals, our strategic priorities

are:

• Accelerate Expert Solutions: we arefocusing our

growth adjacencies along our customers’ workflows and to

adapt our existing products for new customer segments. We

are working to develop partnerships and ecosystems for our

keysoftwareplatforms.

• Evolve Core Capabilities: we are enhancing our central

functions to drive excellence and scale economies in sales

and marketing (go-to-market) and in technology. We are

focused on advancing our ESG performance and capabilities

and continuing to invest in diverse and engaged talent to

support innovation and growth.

generally be accretive to diluted adjusted EPS in their first full

year, and, when integrated, deliver a return on invested capital

above our weighted-average cost ofcapital (8%) within three

to five years.

Strategy and

business model

50

%

Around 50% of digital

revenues are from

Strategic progress 2023

In 2023, we made important progress on our strategic plans.

First, expert solutions, which include our software products

and certain advanced information solutions, accounted for

58% of total revenues (2022: 56%) and grew 8% organically

(2022: 9%). Software solutions accounted for 45% of total

revenues (2022: 44%) and grew 8% organically (2022: 9%).

Cloud software revenues accounted for 37% of total 2023

software revenues and grew 15% (2022: 17%). Today, around

50% of our digital revenues are from products that leverage

are partnering with Microsoft, Google, and other technology

suppliers.

Second, we made progress on extending our reach into high-

growth adjacencies and geographies. The new Corporate

Performance & ESG division, formed in 2023, sets us on a path

to extend our enterprise software solutions into corporate

workflows for ESG data collection, analysis, reporting, and

assurance. In the Health division, the 2023 acquisition of

NurseTim bolstered our position in nursing education

solutions and test preparation while the 2023 acquisition of

eXperience Group (DXG). We also centralized our branding and

communications teams and created a unified global finance

organization to support the company globally. With regard

to our specific ESG objectives, the most notable advances

in 2023 were the validation by the Science Based Targets

initiative of our near-term emission reduction targets and the

improvements in several important social metrics, notably

employee turnover, engagement, and belonging.

innovation and growth

Elevate

Our Value

Accelerate

Expert Solutions

Expand

Our Reach

Evolve

Our business model

We help our customers make critical decisions every day

by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain