IQVIA Holdings Inc. (IQV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, and thank you for joining our webinar on how IQVIA, Alibaba Cloud and Salesforce are working together to help shape the future of life science solutions for China. Before we get started, I'd like to provide some information on the logistics for today's presentation. Today's webcast is being streamed through your device without a dial-in, so please check your speaker volume to ensure it's turned on. At the bottom of your audience console, there are multiple engagement tools for your use. If you have any questions for our speakers during the webcast, you can click on the Q&A icon to submit your question at any time. We will follow-up with you directly following the webinar to answer your questions, or as always, you can reach out directly to your account representative to speak live. As we get started, I ask you to keep in mind the safe harbor statement. Noting that today's presentation includes future release information from each of our presenters and is based on the information available today. Thank you again for joining us today. I am Susan Hill, representing IQVIA Technologies, and I'm pleased to be here to announce IQVIA's new partnership with Alibaba Cloud, which enables IQVIA's Salesforce-based commercial and clinical solutions to be locally hosted in China. I am joined today by Jeff Fish, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Salesforce; Hao Lin, Head of Business Development and Sales at Alibaba Cloud; and Tommy Xu, Head of Technology Solutions for IQVIA China. Over the course of our discussion, my colleagues and I will take you through our shared perspectives on how this collaboration of market-leading technology companies will allow us to provide innovative and compliance solutions to China. We will first overview the China market environment and our new partnership, and then each of our partners will then share their perspectives on the market, and then Tommy will provide an overview of our technology offering in China. The life science industry in China is a dynamic and growing market and has unique needs requiring specialized and compliance solutions. There are several market conditions that have historically posed challenges around technologies for this region. Most of us are familiar with the increasing number of compliance regulations adopted both globally and within China, which are focused on data privacy. And what we believe is that these are important and will be continuing trends throughout the world. But China is also a unique market from a business and social perspective, requiring specialized approaches to interact with customers. This requires targeted and innovative approaches to address the unique way to manufacturers, health care professionals and patients interact with each other on a daily basis. China also has uniqueness from a technological perspective, driven both by technology and regulatory issues, the data in China is very siloed, creating challenges with coordinating consistent views of customers. But this also leads to performance challenges with both connectivity with applications, data and people, both inside and outside the Greater China region. You will see shortly how IQVIA has partnered with Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud to address these. But first, let's look more closely at the regulatory environment. China has seen an evolution of data privacy and residency regulations enacted by the People's Republic of China over the past several years that has created a need for life science companies to have solutions to support these requirements. The Cybersecurity Law, or CSL, enacted in 2017 that limit to the transfer of personal important data outside of the People's Republic of China. The Data Security Law or DSL, enacted in 2021 that created a new framework for processing of collected or generated data inside and outside of China. The Personal Information Protection Law, or PIPL enacted in 2021, requiring the local storage of personal data in Mainland China. IQVIA has been partnering with Salesforce globally for many years in providing our solutions to global and local customers in China. But up until now, these are have only been hosted outside of China. With our new Alibaba Cloud partnership, we are proud to be the first and only life sciences technology company with the ability to provide our Salesforce based products locally hosted in China, all backed by China's leading cloud infrastructure provider, Alibaba Cloud. We at IQVIA Technologies, a global market leader for commercial and clinical technology solutions are committed to bring locally hosted products to China, to help life science organizations, drive health care forward and get the right treatments to patients faster and in a compliant manner. IQVIA is fully committed to our multinational local China customers by providing the only single global Salesforce platform that customers can leverage in China and around the world. This single global platform incorporates features to address specific local market and compliance needs across all regions around the world. Our long-standing level partnership with Salesforce has allowed us to provide an end-to-end health care ecosystem on the market-leading Salesforce engagement platform, supporting all stakeholders through all stages of the product life cycle. The addition of Alibaba Cloud to our collaboration will now expand the portfolio of health care-focused solutions you'll have access to in the local region of China. I am honored to formally announce IQVIA's partnership with Alibaba Cloud. The first and only life sciences collaboration to deliver locally hosted Salesforce-based products in China. IQVIA is the leading global provider by technology and service solutions to life sciences industry. Salesforce is the global leader in CRM, providing engagement platforms to support all stakeholders through all stages of the product life cycle. And Alibaba Cloud is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group and offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide inclusive of China. This collaboration opens new avenues for joint innovation for the China region with IQVIA and Salesforce continuing to work towards market-specific life sciences needs all powered and hosted locally by Alibaba Cloud. I am now happy to introduce Jeff Fish, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Salesforce, who will take you through Salesforce's vision and strategy for China. Jeff?

Thank you, Susan. Now I'll be talking about the partnership between Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud. Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud entered into a strategic partnership to exclusively host and operate Salesforce products in the Greater China region. This partnership is unique in many ways. For one, Alibaba Cloud is not only our exclusive hosting provider, but they're also our development partner for certain products that we bring into Mainland China. On top of that, they are also our operator, meaning that Salesforce products that are hosted and maintained in China on Alibaba Cloud will also be operated by Alibaba. That is a unique partnership for us and one that we're proud of, and the reason why we entered into a partnership with the world's #3 cloud provider and China's #1 cloud provider. Our product strategy in Mainland China has 2 parts. Our first part are our China digital experiences. These are products that are built inside Mainland China by Salesforce employees that support unique China market needs. This would consist of our social commerce product and our social messaging products. These are our commerce and marketing products, specifically for Mainland China, designed in Mainland China and developed in Mainland China in partnership with Alibaba Cloud. The second part of our strategy are global core products. These are Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and our Salesforce Platform. These products are very similar to the rest of the world and delivered inside Mainland China and operated by Alibaba Cloud. I'm very happy to share that these 2 products come together to make our 360 Strategy inside Mainland China for our customers. And now I'm very happy to share that the Salesforce CRM and the Salesforce Platform, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and the Salesforce Platform will all be launching this year in Mainland China. This is something that we've been working on for a long time, and something we are happy to share that our first multinational customers will be onboarding this summer and will be generally available before the end of the year. Now with that, I'll hand it off to Hao Lin to talk a little bit about Alibaba.

Thank you, Jeff. Hi, my name is Hao Lin. I'm going to talk about the role Alibaba Cloud plays in this partnership. First, let's talk Alibaba. Most people know it as an e-commerce company, but Alibaba Cloud is a vertically integrated commerce economy. It has online and offline commerce for consumers and businesses. It has consumer services such as food delivery and travel booking, and it provides a team such as music, sports and games. Behind all that we have diverse business units supporting our vertical business. We have timing, which is our largest logistics platform in China. We have [ Amap ], which is the largest digital marketing platform in China. We have an Financial, which has the largest digital wallet globally. We have Amap, which is similar to Google Map for China. And then we Alibaba Plan, the third largest public cloud company globally and by far, the largest in China. And as importantly, the technology aren't for Alibaba. How is that significant? Alibaba and Alibaba Cloud have been leading digital transformation for industries in China by leveraging technology and know-how from our business units. And Alibaba Cloud provides these capabilities to our customers. So when you work with Alibaba Cloud, you work with Alibaba. Next, I'm going to talk about benefits that Alibaba Cloud provides for this partnership. First, compliance. China compliance has 2 parts, infrastructure and data. Alibaba Cloud provides fully compliant infrastructure with the cybersecurity law. It also provides secure infrastructure in China to store, process and protect data. In short, Alibaba Cloud provides this partnership and its customers, tools to help comply with Chinese regulations. Next, technology. Certainly, Alibaba Cloud has infrastructure that are goal for China. It also can seamlessly connect global systems that are needed to function with IQVIA and Salesforce now that they will be in China. And then different technology capabilities such as image recognition, Chatbots in Chinese that you can leverage to further you business in China. Last but not least, innovations, which is my personal favorite. We're thrilled to be partnering with IQVIA and Salesforce to innovate for the China market. As I said before, when you look at Alibaba Cloud, you get the entire Alibaba ecosystem. And which is the largest data infrasystem, we have the richest domain knowledge, and then we have algorithms that are hired by DAMO Academy, our research institution. And now I'm going to pass it over to Tommy for IQVIA, who's going to talk more about our collaborations. Thank you.

Thank you, Hao, for sharing with us Salesforce lending plan AliCloud. Today, I'm here to talk about how IQVIA orchestrated customer engagements to support omnichannel customer engagement strategy of life science companies in China. Until the orchestrated customer engagement with a commercial customer engagement platform that enables life science companies to connect and align wealth, marketing, medical and other customer-facing functions across the organization by streamlining communication and coordinating across all personnel and digital customer interaction, hosting helps life sciences, organization, personalized relationships with health care professionals, increasing the effectiveness of other engagements, delivering superior customer experience. They are currently over 350 customers across more than 130 countries, including global and local customers in China, who have adopted IQVIA's with the solution to help them transform their approach to interacting with their customers. Every day, these customers take advantage of our capabilities to orchestrate and personalize interactions across personal and channels with health care providers to deliver the most relevant and impact for information to drive positive patient outcomes. IQVIA is DNA Salesforce-based life science ecosystem in China designed to be compliant with recent data compliance requirements in China, and we will have the NextGen intelligent ecosystem with a superior user experience, providing business transformation capabilities on an open platform with ultimate extensibility. We are trusted by leading pharmaceutical companies in China to bring innovative solutions to address the unique business and compliance needs of China. Now with the support of Alibaba Cloud to continue to expand our capabilities with their ecosystem. IQVIA remains committed to our long-term partnership with Salesforce and the continued evolution of our OCE product range and extended commercial ecosystem. Equally important, we remain committed to the inherent benefit and the innovation that our open cost system approach drives with expanding goal networks of Salesforce-based partners and expertise. I'd like to provide a more specifics about the OCE approach and capabilities for omnichannel engagements. OCE integrates all touch points across customers facing role, supporting sell brands, macro science data and key account managers with all the functionality of transitional customer relationships, management plus closed loop marketing, now matched mobile access and advanced embedded intelligence. OCE is supported across the multitude of application. So it can be utilized appropriately in any market. This includes web browsers, iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows devices as well as natively within returns, allowing to reach our customers in China, where they already are WeChat is a major channel for pharmaceutical companies to reach their customers, both continuously to develop and further support our WeChat strategy in this critical market. In addition to supporting face-to-face and recharge engagements, OCE has been designed to support a wide range of channels like SMS, e-mail, remote detailing and integrating with external touch points. By leveraging IQVIA OCE, we believe it will significantly improve your personalized omnichannel customer engagement experience. There is a lot more I'd like to share about our China market specific capabilities like recharge. But with limited time today, I encourage you to counter that to learn more. Let us now come back to Susan Hill to ramp up our discussion today.

Thank you, Tommy. At IQVIA, we see our ongoing partnership with Salesforce, a new partnership with Alibaba Cloud to be the continuation of a long-term commitment to the Greater China region, enabling us to continue to build and deliver truly innovative commercial and clinical capabilities. IQVIA is proud to be the only company who can deliver Salesforce-based technology offerings to all markets globally, confirming our commitment to our multinational and local China customers, a single global platform incorporating features to address specific local market and compliance needs across all regions around the world. IQVIA in collaboration with Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud will continue to focus our investments in providing solutions to address the business needs of our shared customers, utilizing the best-in-class technologies available. We look forward to engaging with you to support your need in the Greater China region as well as around the entire world. Thank you again for your time today to learn more about how IQVIA, Alibaba Cloud and Salesforce are working to shape the future of life sciences solutions in China. Be on the lookout as further details become available as we move forward, or if you'd like any additional information on the partnership or our OCE offerings, we welcome you to contact your IQVIA account representative or scheduled demo of the platform on iqvia.com/oce. Further, the on-demand version of today's presentation will be shared and available via the webinar link you utilized today. So with that, on behalf of today's presenters, IQVIA Technologies, Salesforce and Alibaba Cloud. I'd like to thank you for joining us, and we hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.