Q&A Details

Relative Margins / Long-term Profit Margin Potential: Could you walk through the relative profitability by region or by “established”/”leading”/”emerging” classification for DBRS Morningstar? Larger credit ratings firms (i.e. Moody’s, S&P) have substantially higher margin profiles than DBRS Morningstar at a larger revenue base / scale – would you kindly walk through at what level of sales investors should expect DBRS Morningstar could achieve a similar margin profile?

June 11, 2021

While scale definitely matters, we feel comfortable with our profitability in “leading” segments, even as our overall revenue is currently of modest size relative to our larger competitors. In Canada, where we enjoy a leading position, our margins benefit from a higher proportion of fundamental credit ratings, as well as higher proportions of recurring revenue such as surveillance and data product fees. In the US and Europe, our core profitability is lower given the higher percentage of transaction-based business such as structured finance, as well as our ongoing investments to further expand our footprint. Our goal, over time, is to turn more of our “established” market segments into “leading” segments, which we believe will favorably impact our margin profile.