RELX PLC
| Revenue | £9.6B |
|---|---|
| Operating income | £3.0B |
| Net income | £2.1B |
| Free cash flow | £2.8B |
| Operating margin | 31.6% |
| Net margin | 21.5% |
| Return on equity | 87.3% |
| Period | 2025 |
OpenFilings analyst
Our analyst
Agentic read of the latest earnings call — recommendation updates when we process a new transcript. Research synthesis, not investment advice.
Strong execution and recurring growth outweigh, but do not eliminate, disclosure and competitive risks.
Buy: RELX delivered 7% underlying revenue growth, 9% adjusted operating-profit growth and 11% adjusted EPS growth at constant currency, with a 70bp margin improvement to 35.5% and 98% cash conversion.
The core bull case is accelerating AI-enabled Legal and STM adoption on proprietary content, but management still provided no quantified adoption or revenue metrics and largely sidestepped U.S. research-funding risk and rising AI-native competition.
- Ai Enabled Tools
- Legal Ai
- Lexis Plus Protege
- Leapspace
- Stm Growth
- Risk Analytics
Near term
Legal growth reached 10% and STM 6%; investors will look for evidence that the acceleration is sustained rather than a one-period benefit.
The £2.25bn 2026 buyback is already 80% deployed, supporting EPS but leaving less capital for acquisitions or future buybacks.
Exhibitions face uncertainty around remaining Middle East events, though management estimates these represent less than 0.5% of group revenue.
Longer term
Legal+ with Protégé is becoming the default platform for roughly 90% of new-sales value and three-quarters of renewal value; future upside depends on monetising analytics, workflow and additional tools after the initial upgrade.
STM has a multi-year AI product rollout opportunity through Scopus AI, LeapSpace and other tools, but fragmented customers and decision cycles roughly 50% longer than Legal imply gradual growth rather than a sharp step-up.
Risk has sustained approximately 8% annual growth for a decade, but management explicitly said investors should not build a permanently faster rate into projections; product rollout still takes about five years in regulated industries.
The data moat remains strategically important as autonomous driving changes insurance risk: lower accident frequency may be offset by higher repair severity and more complex data requirements.
Internal GenAI is improving product-development speed and efficiency, supporting operating-profit growth ahead of revenue; the durability of this margin expansion needs monitoring as AI usage scales.
Red flags
Management declined to quantify LeapSpace penetration, revenue contribution or retention, relying instead on positive feedback and an almost doubling of active users over March-June, a period that included early customers and trials.
The response to potential U.S. rules making journal subscriptions and article-processing charges unallowable on federal awards was non-quantitative and effectively dismissed the risk; exposure, timing and mitigation were not disclosed.
Management gave no comparable revenue, ARR or engagement metrics against AI-native legal vendors such as Harvey and Legora, making it difficult to assess whether RELX is gaining or losing share in workflow and legal AI.
The company framed Claude for Science and other frontier-model offerings as complementary rather than competitive, but did not quantify the risk that LLM providers could capture research discovery, workflow or content value.
STM submissions grew over 20% while published articles grew 7%; management says this is intentional quality selectivity, but sustained divergence could weaken volume-based revenue growth or signal pressure in the publishing funnel.
Print profit is expected to decline at a high-single-digit rate, while the timing and accounting impact of any publisher legal settlement remains undisclosed.
Recommendation history
OpenFilings analyst view from primary-source filings and earnings calls — not investment advice.
From latest ANNUAL · 2026-06-23
- Current Ratio Low
Red flags
- Current Ratio Low — Current ratio 0.49