Earnings Call Transcript
RELX PLC (RELX)
Earnings Call Transcript - RELX Q4 2025
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we delivered strong financial results in 2025. We made further operational and strategic progress, and we continue to see positive momentum across the group. Underlying revenue growth was 7%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 9%, and adjusted earnings per share growth was 10% at constant currency. All four business areas continue to perform well. On this chart, you can see the relative sizes of the business areas and their growth rates with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth in each business area. In Risk, underlying revenue growth was 8% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 10%. Strong growth continues to be driven across segments by the development and rollout of our deeply embedded AI-enabled analytics and decision tools with over 90% of divisional revenue coming from machine-to-machine interactions. In Business Services, which represents over 40% of divisional revenue, strong growth continues to be driven by financial crime compliance and digital fraud and identity solutions and strong new sales. We continue to expand our differentiated data set, build out our global fraud infrastructure and more deeply integrate advanced authentication and behavioral intelligence. In Insurance, which represents around 40% of divisional revenue, strong growth continues to be driven by innovation and adoption of contributory databases and market-specific solutions, supported by positive market factors and strong new sales. We continue to expand our products across the insurance continuum and across the insurance lines, while adding data sources and analytics to enhance value for our customers. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. In STM, underlying revenue growth was 5%, and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 7%. Improving momentum is being driven by the evolution of the business mix towards higher growth, higher value analytics and tools supported by the increasing pace of new product introductions and strong new sales. Databases, Tools & Electronic Reference, which represents around 40% of divisional revenue, delivered strong growth, driven by higher value-add analytics and decision tools and we continue to expand our solution set built on our industry-leading trusted content with an ongoing series of new releases. In Primary Research, which represents a little over half of divisional revenue, good growth continues to be driven by volume growth. The number of articles submitted continued to grow very strongly across the portfolio by over 20% in 2025, and the number of articles published grew 10%. Going forward, we expect good to strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. In Legal, underlying revenue growth improved to 9%, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 12%. Strong growth continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth, higher value legal analytics and tools. In Law Firms & Corporate Legal, which represents around 70% of divisional revenue, double-digit growth is being driven by continued adoption of our core AI-enabled legal platform and integrated Agentic assistant, Lexis+ AI and Protege. Ongoing releases of new functionality and deeper integration with our comprehensive, verified legal content is enabling us to increase our value add and serve an increasing number of use cases. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered strong underlying revenue growth of 8%, reflecting the improved growth profile of our event portfolio and good progress on our growing range of value-enhancing digital initiatives. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 9% was ahead of revenue growth with margins now significantly above historical levels. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with an improvement in adjusted operating margin over the prior full year. Our strategic direction is unchanged. Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools. This is being supported by the continued evolution of artificial intelligence, which is enabling us to add more value to our customers as we embed additional functionality in our product and to develop and launch products at a faster pace. Our revenue growth objectives for the business areas remain: For Risk, to sustain strong long-term growth; for both STM and Legal, to continue on their improving growth trajectories; and for Exhibitions, to sustain strong long-term growth. When combined with continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, the result is a higher growth profile with strong earnings growth and improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I'll be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and Q&A.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
Thank you, Erik. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by providing more detail on the group financials. As Erik said, underlying revenue growth was 7%, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth ahead of that at 9%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved by just under 1 percentage point to 34.8%. The strong operating result flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which at constant currency increased by 10%. Cash conversion was again strong at 99%. After acquisition spend of GBP 270 million and the completion of the GBP 1.5 billion buyback, leverage ended the year at 2.0x at the lower end of our typical range. Given the strong overall performance, we are proposing an increase in the full-year dividend of 7% to 67.5p per share. Looking at revenue, you can see how all 4 business areas contributed to the overall 7% underlying growth. As we discussed at the half-year results, we have separated out the reporting of print and print-related revenues and profits, reflecting changes to how we manage the distribution of print versions of our content. The proactive steps to reduce our involvement in print-related activities continued in 2025, resulting in a reduction in associated revenue of over 20%. For the group as a whole, total revenue growth at constant currency was 4% after the portfolio effects in Risk, Legal and Exhibitions and after the step-down in print activities. In addition, there were cycling effects in Exhibitions with 2025 being a cycling out year. In sterling, total revenue growth was 2% impacted by the relative strength of the pound against the dollar compared to the prior year. Here, you can see the 9% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. As Erik mentioned, we continue to manage cost growth to be below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, Risk, STM and Legal each delivered underlying profit growth 2 or 3 percentage points ahead of underlying revenue growth, while Exhibitions was 1 point ahead, reflecting a better cycling in the year. The profit contribution from print and print-related activities declined but at a lower rate than revenue. As I said at the half-year results, going forward, we expect profit from print and print-related activities to continue to decline in the high single digits each year in line with historical trends. Portfolio effects and the decline in print were a slight drag, leaving total adjusted operating profit growth in constant currency at 7%. There was a similar currency effect on profit as there was on revenue, giving adjusted operating profit growth in sterling of 4%. With profit growth ahead of revenue growth, margins improved across all 4 business areas, driving the overall improvement of 90 basis points to 34.8%. Margins were up by 40 basis points in Risk, 70 in STM and 80 in Legal. Exhibition margin increased by 250 basis points, aided by prior year disposals and the effects of cycling. Turning to the group adjusted income statement. You can see here the underlying growth was 7% in revenue and 9% in operating profit. The interest expense was slightly lower, with the decrease reflecting lower average interest rates partly offset by higher average debt balances. The effective tax rate was 22.5%, in line with the prior year. Net profit was up 8% at constant currency and up 5% in sterling to over GBP 2.3 billion. With the lower share count as a result of the buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 10% at constant currency and up 7% in sterling to 128.5p. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion was strong at 99%. EBITDA was over GBP 3.8 billion and CapEx was GBP 525 million, equating to 5% of revenue. After interest and tax, total free cash flow was over GBP 2.3 billion. And here's how we deployed that free cash flow. We completed 5 small acquisitions with total consideration of GBP 270 million and made 2 small disposals. The most significant acquisition was IDVerse, an ID document verification platform for business services in Risk, which completed in the first quarter of the year. Dividend payments were GBP 1.2 billion, and as I mentioned earlier, we completed GBP 1.5 billion of share buybacks. Overall, year-end net debt was GBP 7.2 billion. Including pensions, the ratio of net debt to EBITDA calculated in U.S. dollars was 2.0x at the lower end of our typical range of 2 to 2.5x. Our priorities for the use of cash remain unchanged. Organic development is our number one priority with CapEx consistently around 5% of revenues. We augment that organic development with selective acquisitions with this level of spend typically being the most significant variable in our uses of cash, depending on the opportunities that arise. Average acquisition spend over the last 10 years has been around GBP 400 million per annum, with 2025 a little below that average. We pay out around half of our adjusted earnings in dividends and have increased the dividend every year for well over a decade. Leverage has typically been in the 2 to 2.5x range. Strong cash generation, improving EBITDA and modest acquisition spend in the year mean that leverage at the end of 2025 was at the lower end of that range. We continue to return our surplus capital through the share buyback with GBP 2.25 billion of spend announced today for 2026, of which GBP 250 million has already been deployed. With that, I will hand you back to Erik.
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Thank you, Nick. Just to summarize what we have covered this morning. In 2025, we delivered strong financial results, and we made further operational and strategic progress. Going forward, we continue to see positive momentum across the group, and we expect another year of strong underlying growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit as well as strong growth in adjusted earnings per share on a constant currency basis. And with that, I think we're ready to go to questions.
Operator, Operator
We take the first question from George Webb from Morgan Stanley.
George Webb, Analyst
I have got a couple of questions, please. Firstly, big picture one, it's hard to miss the kind of broad concern or fear that's happening across a lot of stocks today. If we pick up on your Legal segment, I guess the latest one of those worries is a concern that you might face incremental competition around AI-enabled workflow tools from other large software companies. Maybe if we take one step back, for the last couple of years in Legal, we've seen you talk about product launches which use Gen AI, more product adoption by customers and therefore, underlying acceleration in the Legal business. I guess the question is, do you or have you seen anything in your business in terms of lead indicators or numbers on product adoption, conversations you're having that calls into question your ability to continue to participate in that tech adoption cycle, and that means we should be thinking about potential deceleration in legal before any potential further acceleration? That's the first question. Secondly, just on STM, given the slight bump in the outlook there. On one hand, you talked to kind of the strong submissions growth and maybe the early ramp of new products such as LeapSpace, but then I guess the full open access growth might moderate in the mix this year, the U.S. funding environment is still a little bit tough. Could you maybe just outline some of those growth considerations in the mix for 2026?
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Okay. Thank you. I'll ask Nick to comment on the specifics regarding growth, adoption, penetration, and usage in Legal. Then I'll add my thoughts and move on to the next point.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
George, I mean I think the opposite. I mean, we see these tools as adding value, enabling us to build the functionality into our products. And you're seeing that come through in the adoption, the usage. And if you look specifically at the Legal business and Lexis+ AI, the enterprise-wide subscription customer base has more than doubled in the past year. And the usage is going up faster than that. We have users in the multiple hundreds of thousands now across the globe on Lexis+ AI. We're seeing strong demand for what we do with the product built on that trusted curated content set, it remains very important to the customers, and these tools are enabling us to add value and grow faster.
Erik Engstrom, CEO
If you take a step back to consider the broader question about workflow software, it's essential to highlight that our strategy starts with our distinct and comprehensive content, which includes a collection of trusted, verified, and continually updated data. We utilize our deep expertise to merge these content assets with advanced, evolving technologies and AI tools to enhance the value we provide to our customers. Our strategy in Risk has developed alongside AI tools for over 15 years, driving our Risk business to now account for 40% of our profits, with revenue growing by 8% annually and profits increasing by 10% this year. We have maintained a technology-agnostic and multi-model architecture approach throughout the Gen AI trends for over three years. We have also been closely collaborating with major language model providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. As they develop their models and tools, we consistently evaluate new releases and often test them through direct customer engagement to see if they can improve the value for our customers when integrated into our tools. Any new tool you may hear about, we are likely already testing and incorporating into our platform to enhance customer value. There are various companies developing workflow tools that aim to address similar use cases served by other software providers. In the legal sector, large law firms typically utilize over 100 software solutions for different workflow tools and administrative procedures. If the tools that are integrated into our content platform help our customers derive more value, we will incorporate the best of those tools and serve as an integrator. If they are not relevant to content-related workflows, we do not directly integrate them but seek alternative ways to ensure compatibility. This approach allows our differentiated content set to be accessible in various workflows, thereby enhancing our platform's utility and value. Historically, we have not generated revenue in any of our divisions from what could be classified as workflow software services.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
Regarding your question about submissions and publication volumes, science remains a truly global industry. The number of scientific researchers worldwide continues to rise, and the information intensity of science is increasing. The demand for fast publication is also growing. Last year, we experienced robust growth in submissions, exceeding 20%, with published articles increasing by over 10%. This trend has not slowed down and is continuing this year. We are seeing strong momentum in primary research, and while there can be individual country-specific events, overall, we observe consistent demand for publishing primary research.
Operator, Operator
We take the next question from the line of Nick Dempsey from Barclays.
Nick Dempsey, Analyst
I've got 3. So first of all, for the Protege AI workflows, which you are now starting to roll out, can you please talk through what differentiates those offerings from the competition in that broad AI workflow market in a bit more detail, please? Second question, there have been some concerns knocking around about autonomous driving and the auto insurance market. Can you talk about your exposure, the impact as the auto market shifts gradually towards autonomous driving and give us a sense of whether you see any long-term risks around that? And number three, when you refer to strong new sales in 2025 for the group and then in Legal, you'd say renewals and new sales are strong across all 3 segments, am I right in thinking that those new sales will have only a very modest effect on '26 growth, but you're signaling that they should be supporting growth through '27, '28 and beyond?
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Yes. So I'll let Nick to start with the first one.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
Yes. So I mean, the big difference between what Erik was touching on earlier, all the things we're offering to do is the content that's behind them. We would describe what the workflow tools that we're introducing as being content-enabled, and that's a key differentiator. It's not that other tools can't be useful to people. And as Erik touched on, many tools are used by lawyers and other professionals. But the ones we have, if you're actually doing anything that relies on trusted curated content, then that's where the differentiation comes in. We also, of course, have the advantage of the customer understanding and the sheer scale at which we already operate. As I touched on earlier, we have hundreds of thousands of users of Lexis+ AI. And so we can see how it's used, and we can see what's useful and constantly be updating the quality of the answers that we're able to provide, and that's a key differentiator as well.
Erik Engstrom, CEO
I want to emphasize that the workflows we're developing are significant. When we first launched Protege, we mentioned having around 50 workflows, which were released in phases and continue to be upgraded. Currently, we are approaching 300 distinct workflow tools. We can develop these on our platform and launch approximately 2 or 3 new ones each day. These are content-related workflows integrated into our platforms that add value for our customers in their operations with us, distinct from the broader legal tech software industry where software and workflow solutions are typically aimed at administrative tasks. We focus on being embedded in the first category while remaining interoperable with the second. As you know, we have been fully integrated with Microsoft for several years, allowing our customers to seamlessly use our tools alongside Microsoft’s. This collaboration does not mean we are competing with Microsoft or providing general administrative workflows; rather, it enhances the value of our content and platform utility. The alignment of our content-specific workflows with our resources increases overall value, particularly when combined with our LexisNexis AI-related platform. Currently, we have about 25 partnerships in the legal sector, and I anticipate many more in the future.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
So Nick, regarding the autonomous driving question, there are numerous trends that constantly influence the auto insurance industry. Enhanced safety features, automatic braking, telematics, and some autonomous driving elements are all part of this. We view this as the industry progressing towards safer driving, generating more data, and becoming increasingly complex as these advancements occur. In this context, our ability to conduct sophisticated risk analysis—integrating data about the driver, the vehicle, and driving behaviors, as well as the interactions between differently driven cars—creates opportunities for us. The value at stake is increasing; for many years, we've seen fewer accidents, but their severity and costs have risen. Thus, the overall value at stake is becoming higher. Given this environment, we are well-positioned to add more value through the additional data and analytics we can offer. Regarding your last question about strong new sales, you're completely right. New sales are indeed strong. Although in our heavily subscription-based business, they represent a small part of our current year revenues, they indicate the momentum within the business and are crucial for our long-term growth trajectory, which is why we highlighted this today.
Operator, Operator
The next question comes from the line of Christophe Cherblanc from Bernstein.
Christophe Cherblanc, Analyst
I have 2 questions. The first one is on STM. I guess, we have a sense of the lawyer population, but it's harder to understand the addressable population for tools like LeapSpace. So I was curious whether you had any number in mind or any number of institutions and how long it would take to ramp up penetration? And the second question was about pricing. I think you've been insisting that especially in Legal, you are no longer pricing per seat, but I was curious as to what was the extent to which you've been changing pricing contract over the last 12, 24 months and whether you intend to further adjust pricing going forward?
Erik Engstrom, CEO
On the STM side, we are introducing several new tools into the market, which we have been working on for up to two years. We continue to assess the value, usage growth, and user growth associated with these tools, and we can see the benefits for our customers. The recently launched LeapSpace tool has shown significant value for users, with many reporting considerable time savings and productivity improvements in specific applications. We estimate the potential market includes all institutions currently using our platforms, numbering between 10,000 and 15,000 possible institutional customers. For individual users, the total number of researchers globally is slightly over 10 million, which represents the scale we are addressing. Our pricing approach is based on the size and research intensity of the institution, and we are considering offering a subscription option for individual researchers who wish to access our tools in their daily work. While we are in the early stages of commercialization and our pricing is separate from our other content tools, customer feedback about the value and excitement around this offering has been very encouraging. It's important to note that advancements in the STM industry tend to progress more slowly due to funding and budget considerations, as well as the lengthier decision-making processes at academic institutions. Nonetheless, we remain optimistic about the platform's potential to deliver value to our customers and positively influence our long-term growth in this segment, although this will happen gradually.
Operator, Operator
We take the next question from the line of Thymen Rundberg with ING.
Thymen Rundberg, Analyst
I have two questions. First, regarding operating leverage and margins, you've successfully managed to keep cost growth below revenue growth in recent years, and profit margins are expanding nicely for 2025. As we shift towards more compute-intensive AI and agentic workflows that demand deeper reasoning, how are you using your scale and your model-agnostic approach to maintain margin expansion while providing these advanced capabilities? My second question relates to the rapid innovation in AI across all your divisions. Could you explain how you're evaluating the balance between returning capital through increased buybacks and potentially larger strategic acquisitions? Given that your leverage is at the lower end of the 2 to 2.5 range and organic investments remain your focus, when does it make sense to more actively utilize your balance sheet, especially considering the competitive landscape?
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Thank you for that. I'm actually going to ask Nick to tell us about both of those.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
Yes, the new technologies that are emerging present us with excellent opportunities to enhance our products and improve our internal processes, making them more efficient. We're leveraging these advancements internally, which helps us accelerate our time to market and maintain cost growth below revenue growth. While we are investing more in areas such as large language models due to increased customer usage, we are also finding efficiencies in other areas. Overall, we don't foresee any challenges that would prevent us from keeping cost growth below revenue growth, and as we mentioned in our outlook, the difference between profit growth and revenue growth could potentially increase due to cost control and the advantages these new tools provide. Regarding acquisitions and our balance sheet, our main focus is on organic development. We have the necessary skills, opportunities, and assets to innovate and deliver new products and value to our customers. We will consider acquisitions if they align with our strategy and can enhance what we are already doing, but such opportunities are rare. We’ve experienced a few years of low M&A spending, which isn’t intentional but simply reflects available opportunities. It's possible that we may pursue a couple of larger acquisitions in the near future if they arise, but our primary strategy remains focused on organic growth. Additionally, due to our lower M&A spending recently, we are positioned at the lower end of our leverage range. This consideration was factored into our decision to announce a GBP 2.25 billion buyback today, which is a 50% increase from last year’s buyback. Given our average M&A spending over the last few years has been around GBP 250 million, this buyback places us roughly in the middle of our leverage range of 2 to 2.5 times. That's the rationale behind this decision.
Operator, Operator
We take the next question from the line of Ciaran Donnelly from Citi.
Ciaran Donnelly, Analyst
Firstly, just in terms of Legal, can you help us understand the mix between publicly available data and proprietary created curative data that underpins those products? And perhaps just comment on how difficult it will be to replicate those data sets, just looking to get a sense of how deep that competitive moat is? In addition, can you just clarify with regards to your comments on interoperability, would you be open to licensing use of your proprietary data to be integrated into, I don't know, API plug-in such as Claude Cowork? And then lastly, just in risk, it looks like the base market growth contribution was a smaller contribution in 2025 versus '24. So can you just help us understand the dynamics there? And looking forward to 2026, what the mix of growth from base and product innovation is likely to be?
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Yes. Let me begin with the question about our content sets. We view RELX as a global provider of information-driven analytics and decision tools. Our work is fundamentally based on a unique and comprehensive base of information and data across all our divisions. Our assets are historically extensive and are continually updated across various sectors on a large scale. Each of our divisions contains public records that have been accumulated over decades; some are not publicly available, while others are theoretically public but challenging to access due to their format, print status, or geographic distribution. Additionally, we have licensed data from over 10,000 different sources, with some of these sources having regulated usage that limits how we can incorporate them into our tools. We also possess unique contributory data sets, including several related to Legal, and we maintain dozens of these databases company-wide. Furthermore, we have proprietary data and content we've generated ourselves, either through our internal staff or external contractors over many years. We integrate these data sets with our deep understanding of customers to create proprietary algorithms, insights, and interpretations that, developed over decades, offer significant value to our customers. This level of value would be extremely challenging, if not impossible, to replicate. This encapsulates our content advantage, which we believe is sustainable, robust, and highly valuable to our customers across all divisions, including Legal. If we consider licensing our content sets, the answer is no; this is central to our strategy. We are fundamentally an information-based and content-driven organization, and all our efforts are centered on that unique foundation. While it's conceivable that a small portion in noncore areas could be licensed, historically, we have engaged in occasional copyright sales, but these are insignificant in relation to our overall strategy. Our primary focus is to leverage our deeply integrated content and data to enhance the value of our platforms for customers. The confirmation we receive from our customers indicates they recognize this value, leading to increased spending on these platforms. We observe more active users engaging with our new, higher value-add offerings, and they are using them more frequently.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
And I think your last question was about the split of the risk growth, the 8%. As you rightly pointed out, the contribution from new products has gone up. This year, the split was 6% from new products, 2% from older products compared to 5%, 3% the previous couple of years. I wouldn't read too much into that. It's only a small shift. If anything, it just demonstrates that the pace of innovation has increased. The older products perhaps are being replaced slightly quicker with new products, new functionality. And therefore, the split has shifted a little bit, but I wouldn't read too much into it.
Operator, Operator
We take the next question from the line of Steve Liechti from Deutsche Numis.
Steven Craig Liechti, Analyst
I'll take three questions, please. First, if I'm a lawyer who has integrated Harvey or Legora into my workflow, why would I also consider purchasing Protege as a workflow tool? It would be helpful to put this in the context of both a large law firm and a small one. The second question is regarding STM. You've upgraded your guidance from good to strong like-for-like growth. Does this indicate that you expect like-for-like growth to increase from 5% this year to around 6% next year? Lastly, regarding Risk, we've been discussing the disruptive changes occurring in the market. Can you clarify why you believe that an LLM or other disruptor would struggle to enter the risk market, whether in business services or insurance?
Nicholas Luff, CFO
Yes. There are various tools available, and as mentioned before, lawyers have traditionally utilized different tools for various functions. The type of work being done influences this choice. However, for legal research, especially when it involves content and the latest information or laws, we hold a significant competitive advantage due to our established data set and the content we've outlined during this call. This doesn't mean that lawyers won't use other tools, and if those tools are effective, we will explore how to incorporate their functionalities or make our products compatible with them. We have a large customer base already using our Lexis+ AI with Protege tool, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of users and tens of thousands of customers, which places us at a scale that surpasses many other alternatives available. Therefore, our advantage with this content is very beneficial for us.
Erik Engstrom, CEO
It's important to differentiate between content providers and those competing in content, which is what we focus on with our additional features that enhance the value of content. Many companies are creating workflow tools, but they often don't operate at the same scale or have the historical trust and comprehensive verified content that we possess. There are several hundred software and workflow companies, from major players like Microsoft to specialized tools used by lawyers. Many large law firms utilize around 100 different tools. The two companies you mentioned are targeting the broader software and services market within the legal tech sector. They have indicated that their primary concern, as stated publicly, is the LLM tools and LLM-based workflow tools. We view these as potential partners and are already collaborating with 25 such companies in that area. There's potential for more partnerships in the future, and we see them more as complements than competitors.
Nicholas Luff, CFO
Steve, your second question was about the guidance around STM. As we mentioned in our statement this morning, we are experiencing improving momentum in STM. The introduction and rollout of new products is accelerating, which is reflected in our strong new sales. The business is in solid condition. It is primarily a subscription-based model, so changes occur relatively slowly. However, without delving into specific numbers, our outlook statement is more positive than we have previously shared, indicating an upgrade in our outlook. Regarding your last question about the Risk business and LLMs, it's crucial to note that 90% of its revenue stems from machine-to-machine interactions. This involves massive data sets that we collect from numerous sources, including public records and customer-provided contributory data, which creates a beneficial network effect. Our algorithms process this data, and replicating our approach is quite challenging. The area is heavily regulated concerning what data can be collected and how it can be utilized. Given that most interactions are machine-to-machine, we see plenty of opportunities to harness new data sources and leverage technology, positioning us well to benefit from these developments.
Operator, Operator
We take the next question from Henry Hayden from Rothschild & Company Redburn.
Henry Hayden, Analyst
I have 3 from my end. The first one on STM, how do you think about the corporate opportunity? So it's one you discussed in the past as a large addressable market with attractive structural growth profile. We were hoping for any incremental color you could give around end client preferences. And if there's a different approach that needs to be taken in going after that opportunity in terms of product functionality? And is there an appetite to grow corporate within the mix? And if so, what unlocks better exposure to that underlying growth? Secondly, within Legal, we're seeing this structural uplift in tech investment from law firms, which adds support to your growth, but also can drive some degree of experimentation for new solutions around legal research and workflows. At what point would you expect firms to kind of consolidate how many products they're taking? And how do you think about your positioning against that consolidation? And then finally, on Risk, you called out strong new sales and insurance again now. Is there a specific product or line item driving this? And are those competitive displacements? Or is there something else at play here?
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Well, I can address first the STM market. The corporate market is, we believe, an important future growth opportunity for us. It is a relatively small segment of our revenue today. And we believe that it is more commercially oriented, and as these tools that we build become higher value, more usable with new tools on top of our content that we see an opportunity to continue to sell and package those in a way that is more appropriate for the corporate market. We believe that we're going to continue to see that growth rate there pick up as well over time as those tools are developed, integrated to add more value. But it's a relatively small segment today. It's likely to be gradual, even though on some of the tools we've rolled out today, we've actually slightly faster uptake on the sales cycle than we do in the academic markets as early signs. So we're positive, but it's small and it's still going to be gradual. On the Legal tech?
Nicholas Luff, CFO
So, Henry, regarding legal technology, I believe that law firms will keep assessing and adopting new technologies and tools. The legal research market is already quite consolidated with two major players, one of which is us. However, if you consider the broader technology landscape for law firms, it represents a significant market that many analysts expect to grow considerably. Individual law firms may adopt various strategies, but I am confident that they will continue to explore new options. We believe we have a strong product that can penetrate this expanding market while adding value within the more consolidated legal research sector where we operate. As for your question about insurance and new sales, that aspect of our business is performing well. We are continuously innovating and discovering new data sources, as we discussed earlier concerning data from vehicles. For instance, we are incorporating new identity data. We are utilizing innovative data sources across different insurance lines, like employing electronic health records in the life insurance sector or using aerial imagery and AI-analyzed video within homes to enhance property assessments. These additions complement existing offerings rather than replace them; they are not mutually exclusive products. Our new functionalities and analytics, which were not previously available, are becoming part of the marketplace, helping insurance companies operate more efficiently, price risks more accurately, and demonstrating value that drives increased adoption.
Operator, Operator
As there are no further questions from the participants, I would like to turn the conference back over to Erik Engstrom, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Erik Engstrom, CEO
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us this morning. I appreciate you listening to us and asking us questions. And I look forward to talking to you again soon.