Earnings Call Transcript - RELX Q2 2024

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 the first half, and we made further operational and strategic progress. Underlying revenue growth was 7%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 10%. Adjusted earnings per share growth was 10% at constant currency, and we have announced a 7% increase in the pound sterling interim dividend. All four business areas continue to perform well. And on this chart, you can also see the relative sizes of the segments within each business area. In Risk, underlying revenue growth was 8% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 9%. Strong growth continues to be driven across segments by our deeply embedded AI-enabled analytics and decision tools, with 90% of divisional revenues now coming from machine to machine interactions. In Business Services, which represents around 45% of divisional revenue, growth continued to be driven by Financial Crime Compliance and digital Fraud & Identity solutions, with new sales strengthening further. In Insurance, which represents just under 40% of divisional revenue, growth was driven by further expansion of solution sets across markets, continued positive market factors and new sales. In Specialized Industry Data Services, which represents just over 10% of divisional revenue, growth was led by Commodity Intelligence and Aviation. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In STM, underlying revenue growth was 4%. Development of analytics continue to drive the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth segments. This business mix shift accelerated in the first half. A further improvement in the electronic revenue growth rate was offset by the remaining Print revenue shrinking roughly twice as fast as usual. In Databases, Tools & Electronic Reference and Corporate Primary Research, which together represents around 45% of divisional revenue, growth was driven by further development and rollout of higher value add analytics and decision tools. Primary Research, Academic & Government segments, which also represents around 45% of divisional revenue, continue to be driven by volume growth. The number of articles submitted grew very strongly by over 20% across the portfolio so far this year and the number of articles published grew by 15%. Going forward, we expect continued good underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In Legal, underlying revenue growth improved further to 7%, up from 6% last year, driven by the continued shift in business mix towards higher-value legal analytics. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was ahead of underlying revenue growth at 9%, as we continue to manage cost growth below revenue growth. In Law Firms & Corporate markets, which account for over 60% of divisional revenue, Lexis+, our integrated analytics offering, leveraging extractive AI, continues to perform well. The rollout of Lexis+ AI, our new platform leveraging generative AI, is making good progress. During the first half, we've continued to update and extend this functionality in the U.S. and launched in international markets. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered underlying revenue growth of 16%, reflecting the improved growth profile of our event portfolio and the favorable comparison with the early part of the prior year. We have continued to make good progress with our growing range of value-enhancing digital tools and the improvement in profitability reflects the structurally lower cost base. Going forward, we expect 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 that deliver enhanced value to our customers. We develop and deploy these tools across the company by leveraging deep customer understanding to combine leading content and data sets with powerful artificial intelligence and other technologies. This has been a key driver of the evolution of our business for well over a decade, and will remain a key driver of customer value and growth in our business for many years to come. Our growth objectives are: for Risk, to sustain strong long-term growth in current range; for both STM and Legal, to continue on the improving growth trajectory; and for Exhibitions, to continue on the improved long-term growth profile. When combined with our strategy of driving continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, the result is continued strong earnings growth with improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I will be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and Q&A.

Nick 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 10%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved by just over 1 percentage point to 34.1%. The improved operating result flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which at constant currency, also increased by 10%. Cash conversion was again strong at 95%, and leverage was 2.0x, unchanged from the year-end. Given the strong overall performance, we have been able to increase the interim dividend by 7% to 18.2p per share. We spent GBP 61 million on two acquisitions in the first half, and we deployed GBP 700 million out of the planned GBP 1 billion for the share buyback this year. Looking at revenue, you can see here the drivers of the overall 7% underlying growth, continued strong growth in Risk, sustained growth in STM, another pickup in growth in Legal and strong growth in Exhibitions. Electronic revenue, representing 84% of the group total, saw 7% underlying growth, with a strong growth in face-to-face activity offsetting the higher-than-usual Print decline. Total revenue growth at constant currencies for the group was also 7% after some portfolio effects in Risk, STM and Legal, and after cycling and timing as well as portfolio effects in Exhibitions. In sterling, total revenue growth was 3%, impacted by the comparative strength of sterling relative to H1 last year. Here, you can see the 10% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. We continue to manage cost to keep cost growth below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, Risk, STM and Legal each delivered underlying growth in AOP ahead of underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions underlying AOP growth was more than double its revenue growth. Overall, portfolio effects were net neutral, leaving total AOP growth in constant currency, also at 10%. There was a similar currency effect on profit as there was on revenue, giving AOP growth in sterling of 7%. With profit growth ahead of revenue growth, margins improved across the board, driving the overall improvement of 1.1% to 34.1%. Margins were up by 30 and 40 basis points, respectively, in STM and Legal, and up by 60 basis points in Risk, where there was some additional help from portfolio changes. Exhibitions margin is now well ahead of the levels from 2018 and 2019, was at 37.1% for this period, reflecting the normal historical bias to higher margins in the first half of the year. Turning to the group adjusted income statement, you can see the underlying growth of 7% in revenue and 10% in operating profit. The interest expense was largely unchanged, with higher average debt offset by a fractionally lower effective interest rate. Profit before tax up 11% at constant currency and up 7% in sterling. The effective tax rate in the first half was 23%, up from the prior year, which had the benefit of some nonrecurring tax credits. Net profit was up 8% at constant currency and up 4% in sterling to just over GBP 1.1 billion. With the lower share count as a result of the share buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 10% at constant currency and up 6% in sterling to 59.5p. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion was 95%, in line with the same period last year. EBITDA was over GBP 1.8 billion, and CapEx was GBP 233 million, equating to 5% of revenue. After interest and tax, total free cash flow for the first half was just over GBP 1 billion. And here's how we deployed that free cash flow. In the first half, we completed two small acquisitions for a total consideration of GBP 61 million, with three small disposals for a similar aggregate amount. Last week, meaning it was in the second half, of course, we completed the acquisition of Henchman. Henchman is a legal technology business which will give us a leading capability to integrate our generative AI solutions with law firms' internal document management systems. Dividend payments in the first half were GBP 782 million being last year's final dividend. As I said earlier, we completed GBP 700 million of the 2024 share buyback program in the first half. We have deployed a further GBP 50 million on the buyback already in July with at least GBP 250 million of the program to be completed in the remainder of the year. Net debt at 30th of June 2024 was just under GBP 7 billion. Including pensions, the ratio of net debt to EBITDA calculated in U.S. dollars, was 2.0x, the same as last year-end, and down from 2.2x 12 months before. 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 the first half of 2024, we delivered strong financial results and we made further operational and strategic progress. The improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in our business mix towards higher growth, higher value analytics and decision tools. Going forward, we continue to see positive momentum across the group, and we expect another year of strong underlying revenue 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

Your first question comes from George Webb with Morgan Stanley.

George Webb, Analyst

I'd like to start with a few questions. First, there continues to be significant investor interest in the Legal segment. Regarding the rollout of Lexis+ AI, can you share the proportion of customers in the U.S. market who have adopted it so far? If you're currently at 7% penetration, do you believe this positions you to potentially accelerate growth as the rollout progresses throughout this year and into next? Secondly, related to that, can you provide insight into the legal firms' budgets for technology? Are these AI tools taking away from budget allocations that would have gone to areas like legal analytics, or are firms expanding their tech budgets in a more substantial way? Finally, about the STM business, you mentioned strong growth in article submissions and commissions. Given the developments we've seen with pure open access publishers over the last couple of years, do you think that is influencing more submission share in your favor?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

Okay. Let me cover those in order here. On Lexis+ AI, as you know, we started to launch this commercially late last year and it is starting to have a bit of an impact during this year. But as you know, the main driver of the improvement in the growth rate in Legal over the last few years has been the rollout of Lexis+ leveraging extractive AI as that has been the integrated platform that integrates the leading analytics, that has enhanced the value to customers. They use those tools more, they see more value, they buy more of them and their total spend has gone up. And that increased penetration of Lexis+ has been the main driver. In the last 9 months now, that has also been now supported by the rollout of Lexis+ AI. And we have now gradually gotten to a point where, on new sales, the majority of our new sales revenue is coming from Lexis+ AI sales. And we’ve also gotten to a point where our renewal revenues, in our renewal revenues, the majority of renewal revenue is now also coming from Lexis+ AI sales. On the legal firm budget, I think this is a very important evolution for the legal industry and for law firms. And I think many of them are looking at how they’re going to grapple with the technology evolution, what tools are available and how they can improve the value they get from the tools. It’s too early for us to reach any conclusion about how they will behave going forward. But we get a lot of attention on our new tools. We have a lot of conversation and it's clear that this is something that is important to them, not just to us. On the STM article side, you asked specifically about what I think the industry research integrity issues that came up during last year, during 2023, this got more attention than it had for a while. And in particular, some of the companies that are primarily focused on the pay-to-publish model instead of the pay-to-read model. This is an issue for the whole industry, and it’s an issue for us, and it’s one that we’re working on. We’re working on trying to tackle both by ourselves and with others. But it has been a much smaller issue for us than for many of the other players that you mentioned. And I think the reason for that is, of course, that we’ve been in this business for a very long time. We have a very high-quality portfolio of journal brands. We have a rigorous review process to identify fraudulent articles, and have a lot of manual as well as technology tools to check that. I mean no process is perfect, but we have had a smaller exposure to this than many others. And therefore, I’m not actually surprised that we have probably seen a higher increase in article submissions to us than perhaps the others have seen over the last 6 to 12 months.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Samik Majumdar with UBS.

Adam Berlin, Analyst

Sorry, it's Adam Berlin from UBS. Can you hear me okay?

Nick Luff, CFO

Yes, we can hear you fine. Go ahead.

Adam Berlin, Analyst

Okay. Yes, a couple of questions. In STM, you talked about the Print impact being twice as fast as usual. Do you expect that to continue in the second half? And if that were to normalize in the second half, could we see an acceleration in STM organic growth given that you said there was an acceleration in the other parts of the electronic revenues within that business? That's the first question. Second question is, can you give us some indication about the tax rate for the full year? I know it's 23% in the first half. Is that what we should be thinking about for the full year? Is there any reason the second half would be different? And then maybe on the Risk side, can you just give us a bit more detail on what were kind of the better-performing and worst-performing businesses within Risk? You've talked about Risk being in the 7% to 9% range. Is there any particular reason that we're at the top of that range, given kind of very positive KPIs we're seeing in the market overall?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

I'm going to ask Nick to answer the second question, but let me start with the first. In terms of STM Print, we have generally observed Print declines over the past few years that average in the mid- to high single digits for the Print sector, which last year constituted about 10% of the division. This percentage is decreasing annually. Typically, the decline has been in the mid- to high single digits, but so far this year, we're experiencing a rate that is essentially double that, affecting various areas of Print. Overall, we see this as a positive development. This reflects the business mix shift we aim to achieve, but it does increase the Print drag during this transition. Historically, predicting this has been challenging, and we haven't frequently experienced total reversals within a year. Therefore, I would say a complete reversal this year is probably unlikely. However, it's difficult to forecast precisely what will happen at any given time. In the medium to long term, we are aware that this trend will persist, with the Print component becoming an increasingly smaller segment of this division, leading to a reduction in the Print drag. That said, it's unlikely to change this year.

Nick Luff, CFO

Adam, on the tax rate, the tax rate the 23% you see in the first half is a very good starting point for the full year. You can always get some noise, of course, some credits and debits and things, but that's a very good starting point if you think about the full year numbers.

Erik Engstrom, CEO

And then to the different segments of Risk. As you might recall, we had a period of time where – we had a period of time during the pandemic when the Business Services segment was growing very, very rapidly for lots of different reasons. And the Insurance slowed a little bit based on people driving less and lack of availability of new cars and other things. Then we went through a period when the economy sort of reversed a little bit, as the services slowed down a little bit and insurance started to pick up, and Insurance, I think, grew very strongly last year. Now we’re getting to a point where the new sales and business services have continued to strengthen and moving up. So Business Services are coming back up. And the Insurance has continued to run strongly, both in terms of our product rollouts and uptake as well as the marketplace. But there, we start to lap a very strong year. So that’s going to gradually come down to historical averages again. So I think we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect to see at this point in the cycle, and they’re normalizing towards their averages at the point that we’re seeing now.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Sami Kassab with BNP Paribas.

Sami Kassab, Analyst

In Exhibitions, H1 margins expanded by over 5 percentage points. Shall we think that full year margin can expand by as much? Secondly, historically in STM, the Print revenues were sensitive to timing factors of big orders coming in June rather than July, or July rather than June. Was part of the accelerated decline in STM Print driven by the timing of large orders moving from H1 into H2? And lastly, given average article turnaround times in the journal publishing business, is it fair to expect Primary Research revenue growth to accelerate in H2 given the acceleration in submission growth in H1?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

I'll ask Nick to cover the first one and then I'll take the next two. Nick Luff: Yes. Sami, obviously, the margin improvement was very strong in Exhibitions in the first half. That reflects that strong underlying revenue growth that you saw of 16% which is partly helped by the favorable comparison with the early part of last year, which still had a bit of disruption in it. And obviously, that has flowed through to the very strong profit growth in the first half and therefore, the margin step-up. So as we say in the outlook, we are expecting an improvement in the margin for the year over last year's prior year. But obviously, you won't necessarily have that benefit of the comparison against the disruptive period. On the Print revenues, as this business has continued to evolve, the importance of the bigger orders in certain types of book segment has gradually been reducing as you probably know. And therefore, the relative timing of specific orders have become of a factor and it was not a material factor this year. So we have seen Print declines a little higher in most pockets this year, again, as we shift the business mix in the direction we would like to go strategically. So I don’t think it’s a material issue in terms of first half, second half Print declines this year. The STM article submissions, these started to pick up – the submission rates started to pick up materially actually in the second half of last year when many of these research integrity issues start to have a real impact on the market. And the submission growth of over 20% has now almost been running for a year. So I think that already has started to have an impact coming through, and I don’t see it picking up further in the second half and we started to lap that. But it’s also important to remember that we have a mixture of payment models in these article submissions than what we publish. Some are under pay-to-read traditional publishing payment models, where the actual article volume doesn’t have a direct impact on the revenue at that time. Some are paid to publish where it does have impact directly when you publish the article, but some of those are now also under a subscription model where you have agreed the payment model and the total amount for the year. So the impact is less on any one time period than the actual volume growth would indicate in that time period. But over time, the main driver of revenue growth in the Primary Research business, over time is the volume growth of number of articles submitted to us and published – and that we publish. And the direction of travel here is very positive for us as a publisher and for us as our position in the market.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Nick Dempsey with Barclays.

Nick Dempsey, Analyst

I've got two questions left. First of all, just maybe to ask the article submissions question the other way around. If we're seeing historically high article volume submissions now, more than I remember ever in the past, and we aren't really seeing that much of a change in organic growth on the positive side, is there a risk that as that starts to normalize a little bit over 18 months to slightly lower levels, do we have to worry about that as a bit of a drag on future STM organic growth? Second question, for many, many years now, there's been almost no change in share, I think, between Lexis and Westlaw in legal in the U.S. Do you think that the AI products could change that, could break that pattern, could change the stickiness of the two with lawyers, and therefore, you have some potential options to gain share versus the much larger Westlaw?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

On STM and article submissions, in the long run, we have seen article submission growth to us in the high single digits on average now for the last couple of decades, probably. And if you look at industry trends, we would expect that we’ll continue to see our growth on an annual basis in the high single digits for many years to come. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen a higher rate of increase to us based on, I think, many different factors, including the quality of our journals, the technology platform we have and the longer focus we have had on research integrity issues. Just like I said before, that the growth in article submissions does not have a material short-term impact on our revenue growth in this year, the normalization of that growth rate, if that is what we believe will happen or you believe will happen over the next few years, therefore, should not have a material impact in the other direction. In the long term, the main driver is the long-term average growth rate in the high single digits, which I still believe in. On Lexis versus our competitors in the U.S., as you know, we always say that we have respect for our competitors. There are competitors in our marketplaces that have been around for a very long time and have large positions. I am sure that they will come up with ways to serve their customers well. We remain focused 100% on improving our own value proposition to our customers. And we believe that if we can increase the value that our tools can provide, we can increase the number of our tools that our customers want to use, we can increase the usage of those tools if they see value in it, and therefore, they will spend more value with us. They spend more money and they’ll see more – spend more money with us and they see more value from us. How their spend evolves with others is not clear, but we are focused on our value equation.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Tom Singlehurst with Citi.

Tom Singlehurst, Analyst

Yes, this is Tom from Citi. I have three questions, if that’s alright. First, regarding Slide 11, I see that your growth objectives indicate an improved trajectory. Are you suggesting that growth could accelerate beyond the current 7%, which is already a significant improvement compared to the past? It would be interesting to know if you think growth could reach 8% or 9%. Second, I'd like to connect that to the legal sector. Historically, this area has experienced slow growth with low margins compared to competitors, which may have deterred substantial investment. However, given the rise of law tech and your strong growth with improving margins, are you noticing a shift in the competitive landscape with more start-ups? How do you plan to navigate this without losing market share to similar companies? Lastly, I have a question for Nick about Exhibitions. Your growth and margin performance have been impressive. Before COVID, RELX seemed to accept lower margins for the sake of better growth and was more willing to invest. Now, with the significant increase in margins and plans to eliminate structural costs, should we expect revenue growth to slow post-recovery, or do you believe we have entered a new phase where higher margins and faster growth can coexist?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

In Legal, our goal is to keep enhancing the growth trend of this division. We've been stating this for several years, and our division head continues to echo this sentiment. It's important to recognize that this is an 80% subscription-based business, and the average contract subscription length is 3 years. Therefore, any improvement in the long-term growth rate is likely to occur gradually. However, we have slightly exceeded that expectation over the past 2 to 3 years by increasing the growth rate a bit more quickly than one might expect in an 80% subscription environment with a 3-year average contract length. While we aim to continue improving, achieving that rate of growth, as we have over the last 2 to 3 years, is becoming more challenging. Our goal remains to nudge it up further if possible. Regarding our investment in legal technology, this has been an active area for many years, and we have been significantly involved. We have spent much time engaging with start-ups in legal analytics for over a decade, focusing on building higher value-added legal analytics tools organically. We have also created small partnerships, licensing agreements, and acquired a few small legal analytics firms that stand to gain from being part of a large global platform like LexisNexis. We have been working on this for quite some time, and now, with the growing attention on this sector and the introduction of generative AI, we’re seeing more discussions around it. Nonetheless, our commitment to engaging with the start-up ecosystem and enhancing our offerings remains strong. Our strategy is to leverage our extensive customer insights in the legal marketplace by combining exceptional content and data sets with advanced technologies, whether that involves previous forms of AI or the latest generative AI tools. I believe our position is unique because we have a combination of deep customer understanding, established customer relationships, comprehensive content, and the financial capability to invest and evolve our technology toward these new advancements. The competitive landscape has indeed shifted over the last 10 to 20 years, and it will continue to evolve. However, I don't believe these changes will significantly impact our strategy, as we have been focused on AI-supported legal analytics for over a decade, now utilizing a different toolkit that includes generative AI. On the Exhibitions front, we are entirely focused on leveraging growth opportunities and the added value we can achieve by operating this business differently, particularly through the introduction of data-driven digital tools. We see that this business is on track to become a higher value-added, higher growth, and higher margin operation compared to pre-pandemic levels. We do not believe there is inherently a trade-off between higher margins and lower growth; instead, we believe we can enhance value through these new digital tools and innovation in the business, leading to higher growth while maintaining higher margins due to a structurally lower cost base.

Tom Singlehurst, Analyst

That's great to hear. One final question on that. As a group, would you consider allocating more capital towards Exhibitions? Or are you content to pursue that organically?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

Across the business, our primary focus is on organic development, organic development and deployment of higher value-add tools. That’s what we do in all our divisions, and that’s what we will do in Exhibitions. That’s what we will continue to do. That can be supported by small additional tuck-in adjacent acquisitions when we’re the natural owner and we can see that we can help that small business grow faster, or that it can support an existing organic growth strategy, but I do not believe it’s going to be a material part of our growth strategy.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Steve Liechti with Deutsche Bank.

Steve Liechti, Analyst

I have three questions. First, can you provide details on the submission growth of 20% for OA and other categories? I'm curious if OA and hybrid can be grouped together to better understand OA submissions in relation to others. My second question is about the growth of Events in the second half of the year. Considering the strong performance in the first half, can we expect significant momentum to continue in the second half? Lastly, regarding new client acquisitions and contract renewals for Lexis Legal, can you give us an idea of your ability to charge extra when transitioning someone from the Lexis+ platform to the Lexis AI+ platform?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

I'm going to ask Nick to discuss the second point, but I'll address the first one. Regarding submission growth, we have observed significant increases in submissions over the past six to twelve months across our entire journal portfolio, including pay-to-publish, open access, and traditional or hybrid journals. The submission process for hybrid journals allows authors to choose their payment model later, making it a bit complex to categorize. However, we are consistently witnessing strong submission growth across all types. The trends for both categories are similar, but our growth rate for pure pay-to-publish and open access journals has consistently been higher than the overall average for several years and remains slightly above that average. Overall, submission growth is exceeding 20%. Now, over to Nick for Exhibitions.

Nick Luff, CFO

So obviously, as Erik was saying, we believe we have a higher growth profile business than we had historically. And you can see that in our outlook, and clearly, the second half won't have the benefit of the first half, that is comparing to slightly disruptive period in the early part of 2023. But nonetheless, we are looking for strong growth in that business through the year.

Erik Engstrom, CEO

On the last question here about the spend uplift when people switch. When people were switching from the old Lexis Advance platform, as it used to be called, to Lexis+, we saw an increase in spend because they were moving to an integrated legal analytics platform, which enable them to buy analytical tools and broader content sets that were then easier to use, so they could use more of them, and therefore, they wanted to own more of them, they used them more and they spent more with us. There was a meaningful spend uplift when you switch from Lexis Advance to Lexis+. We continue to see a meaningful spend uplift when people switch from Lexis+ to Lexis+ AI. And it’s slightly different because this is here a platform functionality set that’s offered as sort of a premium tier to the existing Lexis+ offering, reflecting that it has a higher value-add functionality that we’ve seen with our customers, being confirmed with our customers, across the usage base and across the different functionality sets. But the actual spend uplift from a customer that switches actually depends quite a bit on which content sets and which tools the customers have got to before the upgrade and which they’re adding or switching to after the upgrade. So there is quite a bit between different customers, customer types and different types of subscriptions, but it’s another meaningful increase in the total spend that we’re seeing so far from our customers. So it’s another step up in spend from those who are converting.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Erik for any closing remarks.

Erik Engstrom, CEO

I just want to say thank you all for joining us on our call today, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.