S&P Global sells information that the financial world cannot easily do without. Its five divisions, Market Intelligence, Ratings, Energy, Mobility, and Indices, each charge customers to access data, analytics, and benchmarks they need to do their jobs. Market Intelligence sells data subscriptions to banks and investment firms through tools like Capital IQ Pro. Ratings charges companies and governments a fee every time they want an independent opinion on how safe their debt is, and then charges again each year to keep monitoring it. The Indices division earns a small slice of every dollar parked in funds tied to the S&P 500 and other benchmarks it manages. Energy sells price data and benchmarks to oil, gas, and commodity traders around the world. Mobility, which is being spun off into its own public company in mid-2026, sells vehicle history reports through Carfax and analytics to car dealers and insurers. Most of this revenue is recurring: customers pay year after year because switching away is genuinely costly. The diagram below traces where the money goes.

Five years of financials tell a story of a business that got bigger, absorbed a major acquisition, and then became noticeably more profitable as the dust settled. Revenue grew from $8.3 billion in 2021 to $15.3 billion in 2025. That near-doubling was not purely organic. The 2022 jump from $8.3 billion to $11.2 billion largely reflected the completion of the IHS Markit merger, which also brought a large pile of new debt onto the balance sheet. Gross margin dipped from roughly 74% in 2021 to about 66% in 2022 and 2023 as integration costs hit the numbers. Since then the margin has recovered, reaching just over 70% in 2025, which suggests the combined business is running more efficiently. Free cash flow tells a similar story: it dropped to $2.5 billion in 2022 during the merger integration, then climbed sharply to $5.5 billion in 2025. Net debt rose from essentially zero in 2021 to $11.3 billion in 2025, a direct consequence of the IHS Markit deal. That debt load is worth watching, but the free cash flow the business now generates gives it room to manage.

The recovery in profitability is especially visible in free cash flow. After hitting a low during the merger integration year, cash generation more than doubled in three years.

During the three years ending December 31, 2025, S&P Global returned approximately $15.1 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, even while carrying significant debt. That tells you the business generates enough cash to do both at once. The Ratings segment contributed operating profit of $3.0 billion in 2025 alone, making it the single largest earnings engine in the company. Indices contributed $1.3 billion. Together those two divisions generated the bulk of the group's profits, which means the overall health of S&P Global depends heavily on two things: debt markets staying active enough to keep ratings fees flowing, and assets under management in index-linked funds staying high enough to keep asset-linked fees flowing.

The documented risks are specific and worth understanding clearly. Cybersecurity is the first: S&P Global handles sensitive financial data and material non-public information for customers worldwide. A serious breach could trigger lawsuits, regulatory penalties, and customer losses. The second risk is artificial intelligence. The company is investing heavily in AI but acknowledges there is no guarantee those investments will generate returns, and that AI could allow competitors to build cheaper alternatives to S&P Global's products. Third, free and low-cost information sources are multiplying. If enough customers decide that free alternatives are good enough, subscription revenue could erode. Fourth, the Ratings business operates under tight regulation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, European regulators, and agencies in many other countries. New rules could raise compliance costs, shrink demand for ratings, or restrict how the business operates. Finally, data privacy laws are tightening fast across the United States, the European Union, China, India, and elsewhere. Under European rules alone, fines can reach 4% of global revenue.

The Indices division earned $1.2 billion in asset-linked fees in 2025, up 15% from 2024. That growth depends entirely on how much money investors keep parked in funds tied to S&P benchmarks. When markets fall sharply or investors pull money out of index funds, those fees shrink automatically, even if S&P Global does nothing wrong.

Transaction revenue at Ratings grew in both 2024 and 2025, helped by companies refinancing existing debt at higher volumes. But that tailwind is not permanent. If interest rates stay elevated for a long time, or if credit markets tighten, companies issue fewer new bonds and ratings transaction fees decline. The 2023 operating margin at the consolidated company was 32%. By 2025 it had risen to 42%. Some of that improvement came from the fading of one-time integration costs. The question is how much of it is durable when conditions are less favorable.