Transcripts
Gartner, Inc.'s management answers for the business every quarter. These are the exchanges that explain it best — verbatim, from the call transcripts preserved in Sources. Each link opens the full transcript at that page in a new tab.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2026
The clearest current statement of what Gartner sells, why its subscriptions hold price, and where the federal drag now stands. · Open the full transcript →
The March air-pocket and April recovery — how decision delays, not losses, move the tape.
Gene Hall (Chairman & CEO); Jeff Mueller (Baird): we had really good January and February, and March decision-making slowed down. B and large, clients and prospects told us they still want to buy from us, but they couldn't make a decision at that time. To your point, as a rule, into April we're seeing many of those deals actually close where clients delayed in March but came through and closed in April.
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Why Gartner holds price: it sells to the top of the org chart, at a small slice of the client's budget.
Craig Safian (CFO); Gene Hall (Chairman & CEO); Faiza Alwy (Deutsche Bank): We're starting at the top of the pyramid where there tends to be much less price sensitivity around those services. And again, if there is price sensitivity, there are offerings that we can provide to clients at different service levels. […] The other thing to think about is that Gartner spend is a very small part of a client's budget. Even our smallest clients have significant revenue, and the incremental difference in Gartner fees is typically a small fraction of their budgets. So price often isn't the primary factor for not buying; it's the broader budget decisions.
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Sizing the shrinking federal book — $114M of CV left as the DOGE headwind laps.
Craig Safian (CFO); Andrew Nicholas (William Blair): we exited Q1 with about $114 million worth of U.S. federal CV spread across GTS and GBS, the bulk of that in GTS. What we saw from a renewal rate perspective in the quarter was a significant improvement on a year-over-year basis.
p. 6 · Read in context →
Q4 & Full-Year 2025 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2025
The full-year framing: the four-part transformation, the subscription economics, capital returns, and the engagement-drives-retention model that underpins the reacceleration case. · Open the full transcript →
Why the sell got harder — and the single lever that protects retention: client engagement.
Gene Hall (Chairman & CEO): Executives have responded to this by slowing and deferring everything possible. This makes for a much tougher selling environment. The value bar is higher, but it also represents a huge opportunity for us. […] Clients who engage frequently with our insights receive greater value and retain at higher rates. This was true in 2025 and every year prior; it is still true today.
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The economics in one paragraph: subscription, paid upfront, free cash flow above net income.
Craig Safian (CFO): The Insight segment is our largest, most important business. It's subscription-based with strong retention, recurring revenue, and excellent contribution margins. We get paid upfront, which allows us to generate strong free cash flow well in excess of net income.
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2025 capital allocation: first investment-grade bond, $2bn repurchased, digital markets sold.
Craig Safian (CFO): We increased leverage with a successful bond offering, our first as an investment-grade rated credit. We generated significant fre cash flow and bought back about $2 billion of stock. And last week, we entered into a definitive agreement to sell the digital markets business, which allows us to focus even more on delivering insights to help our clients address their mission-critical priorities.
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Q2 2025 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2025
Where the two central bear questions — DOGE-driven federal collapse and AI disruption of research — were put to management most directly, and where AskGartner and the data moat were laid out. · Open the full transcript →
How sales capacity is actively reallocated — cutting weak territories, funding higher-opportunity ones.
Craig W. Safian (CFO): we have a practice, which we call territory optimization, which is every time we see turnover, we take a look to see if there's a better investment for us to make. […] trading out poor performing territories or less profitable territories or territories with more opportunity in the short, medium and long term is a no-brainer to do.
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The sharpest AI-threat question: are clients cancelling to use public LLMs? Management says it's unmeasurable.
Jason Daniel Haas (Wells Fargo); Eugene A. Hall (CEO): Are you able to give us any sense of what percentage of folks are citing usage of like a publicly available large language model and therefore, not consuming the Gartner subscription? Is that coming up at all? What percentage is that? […] Yes, that's one of the options, and it's not significant. It's essentially unmeasurable.
p. 13 · Read in context →
Q1 2025 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2025
The quarter the U.S. federal end-market broke; the fullest quantification of the exposure and how management chose to guide and manage costs through it. · Open the full transcript →
The shock, quantified: 80% of the sequential CV decline was federal; federal retention ~50% on $225M of CV.
Craig Safian (CFO): Contract value was $5.1 billion at the end of the first quarter, up 7% versus the prior year. Contract value and CV growth are FX neutral. Excluding the U.S. Federal government, CV grew 8%. Contract value growth with tech vendors continued to improve. Global CV was $63 million lower than Q4 2024, with around 80% of the change attributable to the U.S. Federal government end market. […] Nearly all of our U.S. federal contracts will come up for renewal during 2025, with about 40% having transacted in Q1, the largest quarter of this calendar year. In the first quarter, the dollar retention was almost 50%. At March 31, we had $225 million of U.S. federal CV.
p. 3 · Read in context →
How federal cancellations flow through the numbers — $30M of termination notices still counted in CV.
Craig Safian (CFO); Jeffrey Meuler (Baird): we've got about $30 million worth of termination notices related to contracts that are set to expire later in the year. One way to think about it is it's sort of just normal course. We've just been notified ahead that those things will not be renewing or they will or would have the termination notice in hand. That $30 million remains in contract value because we are continuing to recognize the revenue on it.
p. 6 · Read in context →
Anatomy of a $135M research guidance cut: federal was the outlier; the rest was prudence and Q1 run-rate.
Craig Safian (CFO); George Tong (Goldman Sachs): Your business outlook for 2025 research revenue was downwardly revised by $135 million. Can you elaborate on how much of this reflects updated views on federal contract renewals versu updated views on other customer segments like tech vendors and enterprise functional leaders? […] we took our Q1 experience and we flowed that through across our contract expirations for the balance of the year. We took what we knew specifically about U.S. federal government. We modeled in the new FX rates. And as always, we try and take a prudent approach to how we approach our guidance for the full year.
p. 7 · Read in context →
Guidance philosophy under stress: margins up while revenue is cut — 'belt tightening,' not braking on growth.
Craig Safian (CFO); Joshua Chan (UBS): we're taking the opportunity to make sure that we are managing our operating expense base super prudently and super carefully. But also making sure that we're investing in areas that we know support and drive future growth. We're in a period right now where our CV is growing, call it, mid- to high single digits. Obviously, we firmly believe that we can be at 12% to 16% growth on the research business at a double-digit grow on the overall top line, and we want to make sure that we don't do anything that damages or impedes our ability to get back there when the economic situation is more normal. And so, what we're doing is, I'd call it like a slight belt tightening across the board as we're seeing a little bit of pressure in some areas, but also making sure that we're growing our selling capacity because we know that's a key ingredient going forward. So, we're not chopping anything. We're not slamming on the brakes on anything.
p. 8 · Read in context →
More calls
Q3 2025 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2025 · 12 pages · The mid-year read on whether ex-federal CV was reaccelerating and whether the DOGE and tariff headwinds were beginning to lap, alongside more on the insights transformation. · Open →
Q4 & Full-Year 2024 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2024 · 12 pages · Where the federal risk and the tech-vendor recovery were first framed, and the original 2025 guide the later cuts were measured against. · Open →
Q1 2024 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2024 · 12 pages · The clearest account of the tech-vendor trough and recovery and of AI emerging as the top client demand topic, before the federal shock. · Open →
Q4 & Full-Year 2023 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2023 · 20 pages · The full-year 2023 strategy baseline and tech-vendor softness that set up the 2024-25 story. · Open →
Q4 & Full-Year 2022 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2022 · 19 pages · The peak-growth year framing — record CV growth and the long-term 12–16% research CV algorithm in a strong macro. · Open →
Q2 2021 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2021 · 30 pages · The post-COVID reacceleration and a fuller walk-through of the operating model and long-term margin framework. · Open →