Earnings Call Transcript - RELX Q4 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 2024 to make further operational and strategic progress. Underlying revenue growth was 7%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 10%. Adjusted earnings per share growth was 9% at constant currency. And we are proposing a 7% increase in the pound sterling full year 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 over 90% of divisional revenue coming from machine-to-machine interactions. Business Services continue to be driven by Financial Crime Compliance and Digital Fraud & Identity Solutions with strong new sales. Insurance was driven by further extension of solution sets across markets, continued positive market factors and new sales. Specialized Industry Data Services was led by Commodity Intelligence, and Government continues to be driven by analytics and decision tools. 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% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 5%. Growth continued to be driven by the development of analytics and further evolution of the business mix, with higher growth segments representing an increasing proportion of divisional revenue and remaining print shrinking at a faster pace than historical averages. Databases, Tools & Electronic Reference was driven by further development and rollout of higher value-add analytics and decision tools. Primary Research was driven by volume growth. The number of articles submitted continued to grow very strongly across the portfolio by over 20%, 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. Lexis+, our integrated platform, leveraging extractive AI, continued to perform well. And Lexis+ AI, leveraging generative, made good progress in the U.S. and in international markets. Protégé, our recently launched next-generation generative AI legal assistant, which we demonstrated in our legal seminar last October, has been positively received by our customers. 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 11%, reflecting the improved growth profile of our event portfolio and the favorable first half comparison to the prior year. We continue 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. Our growth objectives remain, for Risk, to sustain strong long-term growth in the 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 a higher growth profile with 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.

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 under 1 percentage point to 33.9%. The improved operating result flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which at constant currency increased by 9%. Cash conversion was again strong at 97%, contributing to a reduction in leverage to 1.8x, slightly below our typical range. Given the strong overall performance, we are proposing an increase in the full year dividend of 7% to 63p per share. Our acquisition spend was slightly below our normal range with £195 million on five acquisitions, and we made seven disposals with aggregate consideration of £95 million, and we deployed £1 billion on share buybacks. Looking at revenue, you can see here the drivers of the overall 7% underlying growth. Continued strong growth in Risk, good growth in STM, strong growth with a further pickup in Legal and strong growth in Exhibitions. Electronic revenue, representing 83% of the total, saw 7% underlying growth with the strong growth in face-to-face activity offsetting the effects of the print decline. Total revenue growth at constant currency for the group was 6%, with the impact of disposals more than offsetting acquisitions and the benefit from 2024 being a cycling-in year for Exhibitions. In sterling, total revenue growth was 3%, impacted by the relative strength of sterling against the dollar and the euro in particular. Here you can see the 10% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. We continue to manage cost growth below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, Risk, STM, and Legal each delivered underlying profit growth 1 or 2 percentage points ahead of underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered very strong underlying profit growth, reflecting the increase in activity levels in the first half as well as the structurally lower cost base. Portfolio effects were a slight drag, leaving total growth in constant currency at 9%. There was a similar currency effect on profit as there was on revenue giving adjusted operating profit growth in sterling at 6%. With profit growth ahead of revenue growth, margins improved across all four business areas, driving the overall improvement of 80 basis points to 33.9%. Margins were up by 60 basis points in Risk, 40 in STM, and 50 in Legal. Exhibitions margins saw a further significant improvement by 250 basis points and are now well ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Turning to the group adjusted income statement. You can see here the underlying growth of 7% in revenue and 10% in operating profit. The interest expense was slightly lower with a slightly lower effective interest rate and some currency benefit. That left profit before tax up 11% at constant currency and up 7% in sterling. The effective tax rate was 22.5%, 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 £2.2 billion. With a lower share count as a result of the share buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 9% at constant currency and up 5% in sterling to 120.1p. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion was 97%, similar to last year. EBITDA was over £3.7 billion, and CapEx was £484 million, equating to 5% of revenue. After interest and tax, total free cash flow was over £2.1 billion. And here's how we deployed that free cash flow. We completed five small acquisitions for a total consideration of £195 million, the most significant of which was the Henchman technology business in Legal, which brings enhanced functionality to the Protégé offering. In December, we announced the acquisition of IDVerse, an ID document verification platform for Business Services and Risk. Completion is expected in the first quarter of this year. We also made seven small disposals in 2024 for aggregate consideration of £95 million. Dividend payments were £1.1 billion. And as I mentioned earlier, we completed £1 billion of share buybacks. Overall, year-end net debt increased slightly to just under £6.6 billion. However, with the increased EBITDA, leverage fell to 1.8x. Our priorities for 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 the level of spend typically being the most significant variable in our uses of cash, depending on the opportunities that arise. Average acquisition spend over both the last 5 and 10 years has been around £400 million, with 2024 being a below-average year. We pay out around half of our adjusted earnings in dividends and have increased the dividend every year for well over a decade. Leverage defined as net debt to EBITDA, has typically been in the 2.0 to 2.5x range. Strong cash generation, improving EBITDA and modest acquisition spend in the year, and the leverage at the end of 2024 was below that typical range at 1.8x. We continue to return our surplus capital through the share buyback with £1.5 billion of spend announced today for 2025, of which £150 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 2024, 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

The first question comes from George Webb with Morgan Stanley.

George Webb, Analyst

I'll kick off with a couple of financial questions, if I can. Firstly, just on the buyback that you mentioned, given the bump curve, £1.5 billion in 2025 seems somewhat noticeable maybe from a messaging perspective, and I appreciate you've laid out the cash priorities. It seems like this year, the dividend plus the buyback could exceed kind of free cash flow generation. So if you could just talk a little bit about, is there a message behind that? Is this a new platform £1.5 billion that maybe you can run at an increase from going forward? Secondly, just on the working capital of the business, kind of curious where you're seeing the working capital builds over the last couple of years? I think it's about £150 million out in 2024, £115 million out in 2023. So whether that's segments or more broadly, where is that being driven from?

Nick Luff, CFO

Yes, George, I'll address those points. Regarding the buyback, with our increasing EBITDA, it's important to remember that to maintain leverage, shareholder returns need to surpass the free cash flow after acquisitions. Our lower acquisition spending allows us to have more surplus capital, which supports the buyback. Last year, we only spent a net of £100 million because it was a below-average year for acquisitions and we focused more on disposals. This organic shift towards higher-value analytics is crucial, and our proactive approach to disposals is evident in the group's overall growth profile, cash flows, and the resulting buyback. As for working capital, there haven't been significant swings. We typically operate with a net negative working capital position, with around £3 or £4 billion in assets and the same in liabilities. Although we have seen some fluctuations due to the ramp-up of Exhibitions back to full activity, there's no systematic issue, and cash conversion remains in the high 90s.

Operator, Operator

The next question comes from Adam Berlin with UBS.

Adam Berlin, Analyst

I would like to ask a few questions about STM. First, you mentioned last year that print declines in STM were above normal levels. What is the trend in the first six weeks of 2025? Is there any improvement, or will it continue to be a significant drag in 2025? My second question concerns the recent discussions in the White House about Trump potentially defunding various federal agencies, including those that support research. Can you clarify the timelines for that? How long does it typically take for such changes to affect the funding and production of research in the U.S.? Are you concerned about this? Lastly, Erik mentioned in his presentation that article submissions have grown over 20% and published articles over 15%. It's impressive that these trends have continued since COVID. Can you explain what you think is driving this? Are you capturing share from lower quality journals, or is it due to an increase in overall research funding? It is surprising to see this level of growth four years after COVID.

Erik Engstrom, CEO

I'll do my best to address your questions. Firstly, regarding the decline in print, our top priority is to enhance the long-term growth of the Company by focusing on higher value analytics and decision tools, and to transition our business mix towards these higher growth areas. This is particularly evident in STM, where we concentrate on improvements at the upper end while also being proactive at the lower end, which includes expediting our exit from the print segment and divesting non-core portfolios as Nick mentioned. This strategic shift may result in a short-term increase in print decline above historical averages. We've experienced print drag for the last couple of years, which has been higher than normal historically. It's challenging to predict what will happen in the year ahead since the beginning of the year isn't the main driver; rather, trends develop throughout the year, with peak print periods during the summer and late in the year. While I can't forecast 2025, I am confident that the print segment will ultimately diminish significantly, and print drag will cease as we move forward strategically. On research funding, it's worth noting that we've been in the scientific research publishing field for over 200 years, serving customers in 180 countries. We've witnessed many economic changes, elections, and funding fluctuations. Our goal remains to support the industry through these shifts regardless of external factors. The primary growth driver in research publishing is volume, propelled by the number of researchers and global research expenditure, which spans various timeframes and regions. While it's difficult to predict the funding trends of specific U.S. research agencies, U.S. government funding for our research articles constitutes a small percentage, so we don't prioritize that timeline closely, as these cycles have persisted for many years. Regarding article growth, this is a key long-term growth driver for our STM division, and it continues to be robust. After COVID, there was a shift in volume, as you've pointed out, but last year saw a notable flow toward higher quality journals. With around 3,000 journals, most in the top quartile of quality, any uncertainty regarding scientific integrity causes researchers to gravitate toward reputable providers. We strive to maintain superior quality and technology compared to our competitors while ensuring that we offer comparable or better value to customers. If we succeed in this regard, we aim to progressively enhance our share in the higher tiers. Personally, I anticipate that our submission growth rates will stabilize soon, and over the next 5 to 10 years, we might see average submission growth return to the high single digits in a typical year. However, this is a personal perspective, and while submissions continue to grow robustly at present, I expect that growth to moderate with time.

Operator, Operator

The next question comes from Nick Dempsey with Barclays.

Nick Dempsey, Analyst

I've got three left, please. So first of all, just sticking with STM, we've seen a few U.K. universities that have chosen to drop the big deal as they are struggling financially. As to Adam's question, we know a few universities in the U.S. are likely to be seeing some financial hardship if some of these cuts to the funding go through. So I'm wondering whether there are financial difficulties at the universities in other countries? And whether you are seeing an uptick in universities looking to drop the big deal? I know if it's a few of them, it won't make a difference, but I'm wondering if it's a trend. The second question. You've talked about Exhibitions being able to achieve better organic revenue growth than in the past on a permanent basis. And it sounds like you'll remain confident on that. Do you think that Exhibitions can also deliver more margin improvement than in the past on the back of that higher growth as a permanent effect? Third question, just on Protégé. Can you talk about how the take-up of this product should logically flow into numbers and you encourage lots of customers to start taking this up even if their subscription is not up for renewal, but jump in mid-subscription? And will you get firms taking it up for the whole firm? Or are you seeing kind of early adopter department, therefore, it flows in a bit more gradually?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

Yes. On your first question, the STM side, every year, there are some customers somewhere in the world that are going through financial difficulties. And as I said before, we've been in this business for over 200 years. We always try to work directly with any one institution to figure out what's the best way for us to serve them and help them reach their objectives. We have not seen a specific trend break or any change in the overall numbers, given that we serve, order of magnitude, 15,000 institutions around the world. There are always some every year that are going through difficulties. We will work with those, but we have not seen a trend change, and we have not seen any volume of people going in one direction or the other. The long-term trends are very clear that our customers tend to be taking larger and larger shares of what we serve them, and they also tend to have more and complex combinations of services in their agreements with us, whether that involves portions of pay-to-read and pay-to-publish and other types of things that we can offer them. So the bottom line on it is there's no trend break. We're continuing to see strong growth. Number two, on Exhibitions. Yes, everything we have seen so far indicates that the exhibition business, the way we now operate it and the way we're now building organic growth initiatives into it, that this should be a higher value add and higher organic growth business going forward than it was pre-COVID. And as you said, yes, it is also definitely a much higher margin business than it was before COVID. We're already at significantly higher margins than we were before. And because the way we have now structured the business, the way we run the business, there should be a larger gap between the organic revenue growth, the underlying revenue growth and the underlying cost growth, there should be a wider gap between that than we had before, and therefore, that on a two-year basis because we have cycling, the margin should continue to increase every year, but over time, also increase at a faster pace than it did before COVID. On the last point on Protégé. This was launched commercially now a couple of weeks ago. And we're literally in the early days of this. We have had several customers sign up already and opt in, but it's very early in that process. We get very positive feedback. We get very positive user feedback. A lot of customers are very interested, but it's too early to tell how the actual adoption curve will develop. I mean, as I've said before, the Lexis+ and Lexis+ AI curve have gone very well, and we updated you on that at our seminar in October, but it's really still too early to talk about Protégé other than it's been a very positive launch.

Operator, Operator

The next question comes from Sami Kassab with BNP Paribas.

Sami Kassab, Analyst

Three questions as well, please. The first one is on Legal. How much of the acceleration in Legal from 6% to 7% was driven by GenAI products versus older legal analytics products that are still ramping up and driving growth? In other words, is the GenAI-driven acceleration still ahead of us? Secondly, on STM, in November '22 at the STM Investor Day, the message was growth will accelerate. It has not accelerated in '23. It has not accelerated in '24. Share price has gone up. PE has gone up. Given the mix shift, given India, given the article volume growth you're talking about, do you think STM organic revenue growth can accelerate to 5% in '25? And lastly, on Exhibitions. You sold out of Austria last December. Have you identified other markets or other verticals you would consider exiting from?

Nick Luff, CFO

I will ask Nick to address the first question regarding the legal growth rate impact and the exhibitions segment. However, let me first highlight STM. It is clear to us, and likely to you as well, that our goal for STM is to enhance the underlying growth rate. We believe our strategy of shifting the business mix will facilitate this. First, the faster growth segments with higher value add are becoming a larger part of the division. Second, by incorporating higher value tools and analytics on top of our existing databases, customers find more value, which encourages them to spend more. Consequently, we expect that the absolute growth rate in this segment will gradually improve over time. Additionally, part of this acceleration involves reducing the print drag at the lower end. As we strive to transition towards a significantly higher growth business, we aim to expedite this process. This entails that during the transition, the print drag may increase, which explains why there hasn't been a noticeable acceleration in the divisional growth rate over the past two years. Whether we will see improvement in 2025 or afterward largely depends on the trajectory of the unpredictable print tail that we are working to exit more swiftly, which may continue to be a drag. Nevertheless, we remain confident that this business is heading toward a stronger long-term growth trajectory, similar to our other divisions. Sami, regarding your question about the growth in Legal, it's clear that each year's growth in our businesses, including Legal, is primarily driven by new product introductions and increased customer adoption of those products. In the case of Legal, we saw significant adoption of legal analytics. In 2024, Lexis+ AI played a crucial role in the introduction of new products, and while Lexis+ was still being rolled out, the adoption of Lexis+ AI was key. We are committed to ongoing innovation, and as we've mentioned, Protégé represents our next-generation product, which you can expect to see more of moving forward. As for your question about Exhibitions, we have indeed sold out our Austrian business, which operates somewhat differently due to its sand building and venue management aspects. While there might be other small elements that don't provide the same growth potential or fit within the portfolio, the sales from last year, in addition to these transactions, accounted for about 5% of our revenue base, with only about 1% impacting 2024. More changes will be evident in 2025, and while we anticipate additional developments in the future, they may not be as significant as these events concentrated in one year, which is somewhat unusual.

Operator, Operator

The next question comes from Henry Hayden with Redburn Atlantic.

Henry Hayden, Analyst

Three questions, if I may. Just first on risk. It was nice to see kind of an uptick in margin expansion for 2024. I was curious as to how we should think about the balance between margin expansion in that division and organic growth going forward? And where should we expect the contribution from new products to go from the current levels? The second one is on costs. So other data and analytics companies that we cover have been talking about rising cloud costs impacting their margin outlook. And I was just wondering what this means for RELX, how much of cloud costs as a percentage of your total operating expense and will this be a headwind to margins as you continue this mix shift towards analytics tools? And then finally, just on STM. I was wondering if we could get an update on kind of the state of adoption for analytics tools in that division, both with and without AI overlays, how you see the growth profile of those products going forward? And should we, alongside that, expect more investment in that division?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

Well, I'll take the first and the third now, and I'll let Nick cover the second question. So in Risk, the contribution from new product first, as you've probably seen on the 24 slides, we have those at the back in the appendix, I think, on the presentation, what many people refer to as the green-orange slide. Well, you can see that the contribution from new product launches and the rollout of recently introduced products continued to be the main driver of growth in Risk, and it continues to stay at the strong levels it has been now for many years. And in addition, of course, the markets are growing, and we are seeing increased adoption and growth rate in our mature products as well, which is the other segment on that. But I expect that to continue. We're very focused here on maintaining a very strong pipeline of new developments of higher value-add tools that are then being introduced and rolled out, and we're seeing strong new sales of those tools across Risk. So I think that's an organic innovation machine that's continuing to run very well. On the second question on that or the first part of your risk question, how do we look at the margin versus growth? We don't see it as a trade-off. Our number one priority in Risk is the organic development of the new high value-add tools, and the people working on building and launching and rolling out those tools are 100% focused on that. And they do as much of that as they can handle and as our customers can introduce and adopt and rollout. Separately, we run our cost base. And the people running our cost base do as much as they can to manage process innovation and leveraging new technologies to do everything they can to manage their cost growth below revenue growth. So everything we do all the time in the Risk division should be better, faster and cheaper every single year all the time forever. And that's really a separate initiative, but equally important to our business. So we don't see there's a real trade-off of margin versus growth, but we have guided again to the fact that our cost growth, we are going to continue to manage our cost growth in Risk to be slightly below our revenue growth. So all else being equal, on the portfolio side, you're likely to continue to see a slight increase in margins on a like-for-like basis each year over time.

Nick Luff, CFO

And Henry, your question on cloud costs. I mean they're relatively small both to our overall cost base actually. And clearly, we have been increasing our spend with the cloud providers over the last two years, but that has been as we shifted out of our own data centers. So net-net, that's clearly been a significant cost saving and an efficiency. And now as we go forward, we're continually finding ways of making our use of cloud more efficient, our use of the large language models more efficient. And we're clearly putting more volume through as we introduce new products and so on, but we're finding efficiency savings as we do that. And clearly also, we're using the things that we're developing in the cloud, not just in our products, but also internally. We're using AI, generative AI and AI more broadly internally to help make ourselves more efficient, so those cost initiatives that Erik referred to. So notwithstanding the fact that spend in cloud has increased, I think overall, we continue to be confident that we can keep managing cost growth below revenue growth as we continue to invest in the new product introduction soon.

Erik Engstrom, CEO

So on the third question, STM analytics decision tools, we have this segment in there that we refer to as databases and tools, which is, as we've said, becoming a larger and larger portion of it because our customers see the value, we get increased adoption across the global customer base, and they tend to inherently grow faster. That is before we have done any significant step-up on what we consider the newer generative AI-based tools, many of the analytics and decision tools that we have been selling for several years have components of what we call extractive AI machine learning contributions to the algorithms and that's been well received and growing well and continuing to grow well from our customers. During 2024, we also saw the commercial launch of three different generative AI-based tools during the year, but they've only been out a few months, and there is not a lot of history of using these kind of tools in those subsegments. And therefore, as it's relatively early days, our customer base in STM are historically customers that take slightly longer to work themselves through the sales cycle and also have different regulatory and other scientific and compliance constraints on how they need to verify and test new tools before they install them and roll them out. So we're seeing slightly longer sales cycles there than we've seen on the generative AI tools in Legal. But we have launched three what I consider main GenAI-based commercial introductions during 2024. There will be more to come in 2025.

Operator, Operator

The next question comes from Steve Liechti with Deutsche Numis.

Steven Liechti, Analyst

Just a few questions. Just on STM. Would you mind giving us the hard revenue breakdown numbers that you've given previously at these results figures? You mentioned a couple of times, for instance, database and tools. What kind of percentage is that now in fiscal '24? And secondly, I just wanted to just clarify your low single-digit figure that you said for U.S. government. Can you just clarify exactly what that figure is in terms of direct spend? And then give us any kind of clues in terms of U.S. spend of total global research budgets? And if you have a government figure within that, and Google tells me the overall U.S. is about 30%. Just some clarification there. And then finally, on Events, the second half like-for-like revenue, if my calculation is correct, is about 6%, just double-checking that number? And also just trying to work out whether that's a sort of a reasonable number to extrapolate the growth into fiscal '25 and '26 on a normalized basis?

Erik Engstrom, CEO

Let me examine those. I’ll start with the RX. There’s seasonality and various factors like timing and different industries that influence these figures throughout the year, including various exhibitions. Thus, calculating exact numbers can be tricky. Before COVID, Exhibitions experienced a steady underlying growth rate of 5% to 6%. Our goal is to exceed that with slightly higher revenue growth on an annual basis moving forward. This should provide a sense of our current annualized run rate. Now, addressing the first question regarding the detailed breakdown of the numbers. In STM, the estimates we provided earlier for 2024 suggest they can change only slightly each year. Essentially, database tools and electronic reference account for about 40% of the division, while corporate primary research is at approximately 45%. Print and face-to-face elements make up around 9%. These figures are relatively stable within half a point. Regarding U.S. spending, the figures I shared represent direct spending with us, which generally reflects their share of the articles we publish. That’s the range I referenced. There are numerous methods to assess global research spending and its implications, so I won’t delve into definitions. We are a highly international company, historically operating across nations and working with multi-country funding. Typically, an average article published through us features five to six authors from various countries, and we tend to have a larger market share in emerging economies compared to established ones in Europe and the U.S. Therefore, I prefer not to delve into the allocation of global research spending by country.

Operator, Operator

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

Erik Engstrom, CEO

Thank you very much for joining us on the call this morning. I very much look forward to talking to you again soon.