The company completed several acquisitions, including Visible Alpha and ProntoNLP, to enhance its offerings in key areas such as AI and financial technology. These acquisitions reflect a strategy of expanding capabilities through targeted investments.

S&P Global completed the sale of the PrimeOne business and Fincentric, indicating a strategic shift towards core operations. These divestitures allow the company to concentrate resources on areas with higher growth potential or strategic alignment.

S&P Global aims to expand into major geographic and product markets, including energy transition, private markets, and emerging markets. This indicates a focus on capturing new opportunities and diversifying revenue streams.

The financial results are still being impacted by the merger with IHS Markit Ltd. with merger costs and amortization of intangibles. This suggests that the full integration process is ongoing.

Management is focused on enhancing its capital allocation framework to assess and reallocate capital to the highest value opportunities, including strategic investments and returning capital to shareholders. This indicates a disciplined approach to capital management.

The company is driving continuous commitment to risk management, compliance, and control across the enterprise. This focus is crucial for maintaining the integrity of its operations and safeguarding its reputation.

The company acknowledges the increasing risk of cyber attacks due to its size, scale, and role in the global markets. This includes risks related to third-party service providers and the protection of confidential information.

The company operates in highly competitive markets that continuously change to adapt to customer needs. The inability to innovate and compete with new or enhanced products and services of competitors could impact profitability.

The company is involved in numerous legal proceedings and is often the subject of government and regulatory proceedings, investigations, and inquiries. These proceedings could result in adverse judgments, damages, fines, penalties, activity restrictions, reduced demand for products and services, or negative impacts on cash flows.

The company acknowledges intense competition in credit ratings, financial research, market data, index-based products, automotive data, commodities analytics and price assessments, and related news and information. Competitors range from traditional providers to non-traditional providers.

The competitive landscape experiences consolidation through mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, or strategic partnerships, resulting in competitors that are better capitalized or able to gain a competitive advantage through synergies.

In some countries, governments provide financial or other support to locally-based competitors, particularly credit rating agencies, and may establish official credit rating agencies, benchmarks, or procedures for evaluating local issuers.

Operating-related expenses increased 6% as compared to 2023, primarily driven by higher compensation costs, increased incentives and higher technology costs, partially offset by a decrease at Engineering Solutions due to its sale on May 2, 2023.

Selling and general expenses remained relatively flat, increasing less than 1%. Excluding the impact of higher IHS Markit merger costs in 2023 of 4 percentage points, higher acquisition-related costs in 2023 of 3 percentage points, higher employee severance charges in 2023 of 2 percentage points and higher disposition-related costs in 2023 of 1 percentage point, partially offset by legal settlement costs in 2024 of 1 percentage point, selling and general expenses increased 9%.

The company is still working to achieve operational efficiency, as evidenced by the ongoing restructuring plans and the continued efforts to streamline the management structure.

The company is investing in innovation, new offerings, and enhancements, including new ways to deliver products and services through AI. These investments sometimes do not achieve market acceptance, profit, or the level of profitability that we expect or have experienced historically.

The company's utilization of cloud services is critical to developing and providing products and services to customers, scaling the business for future growth, accurately maintaining data, and otherwise operating the business. Any implementation involves risks inherent in the conversion to a new system, including loss of information and potential disruption to normal operations.

In recent years, more public sources of free or relatively inexpensive information have become available, particularly through the Internet, and advances in public cloud computing and open source software are expected to continue. Moreover, AI is being used in a way that is significantly increasing access to publicly available free or relatively inexpensive information.

The company has returned approximately $21.9 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends. The Board of Directors approved a quarterly common stock dividend of $0.96 per share.

The company issued $750 million of 5.25% senior notes due 2033 and recognized an $8 million loss on extinguishment of debt, including a tender premium paid to tendering note holders.

The company entered into a revolving $2.0 billion five-year credit agreement that will terminate on December 17, 2029. This credit facility replaced the previous credit facility and was canceled immediately after the new credit facility became effective.

Commitment fees for the unutilized commitments under the credit facility and applicable margins for borrowings thereunder are linked to the Company achieving three environmental sustainability performance indicators related to emissions, tested annually.

The company has faced and could in the future face negative perceptions or publicity with respect to our sustainability and corporate responsibility policies and practices (including DEI) or our ESG products, methodologies, or scores

The physical commodity and commodity derivative markets may be impacted by decisions by market participants and policy makers to address climate change. In addition, the transition to renewable energy and a net zero economy involves changes to consumer and institutional preferences around energy consumption.

The business is impacted by general economic conditions and volatility in the U.S. and world commodity and financial markets. Economic conditions and volatility across the globe are generally affected by negative or uncertain economic and political conditions.

Military conflict, such as the ongoing military conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East, introduce volatility and uncertainty into the global capital and commodities markets and negatively impact general economic conditions.

High or increasing interest rates or credit spreads, volatility in financial markets or the interest rate environment, significant political or economic events, defaults of significant issuers and other market and economic factors may negatively impact the general level of debt issuance.