RELX: Structurally advantaged AI growth story
How the transformation from Print to Digital to AI places RELX in pole position
DISCLAIMER & DISCLOSURE: The author holds no investment in RELX at the date of publication but that may change. The views expressed are those of the author and may change without notice. The author has no duty or obligation to update this information. Some content is sourced from third parties believed to be reliable, but accuracy is not guaranteed. Forward-looking statements involve assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, meaning actual outcomes may differ from those envisaged in this analysis. Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investments carry risk, including financial loss. This analysis is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or recommendations of any kind. Conduct your own research and seek professional advice before investing.
Why Should I Be Interested In RELX?
Share price: £23.33 GBP
Market Cap: £41.3bn GBP
EV: £48.5bn GBP
Float: 99.2%
ROIC: 29%
Dividend yield: 3.1%
NTM P/E: 16.5x (historically closer to 30x)
Share count reducing ~1.5% annually
Potentially a major beneficiary of AI
RELX operates in markets where scale, data, and workflow integration matter. Across most of its divisions, it holds leading market positions built over decades. Its products are embedded into customer workflows and often support decisions tied to compliance, risk, research, and professional productivity.
That makes the spending highly resilient. For many customers, RELX is not discretionary. Its services are mission critical. Once integrated into daily workflows, switching costs become meaningful.
The result is a business with durable recurring revenue, strong pricing power, and highly predictable earnings.
While growth is strong:
The share price has weakened:
So, what’s happening here?
The Company
RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers and is headquartered in London. The company is now listed in London, having consolidated its dual Dutch listing back in 2018.
RELX began as a publishing business, but today it operates as a technology-enabled analytics company across four core segments: ‘Scientific, Technical & Medical’ (STM), Risk, Legal, and Exhibitions.
Its roots trace back to the formation of Reed Elsevier, created through the merger of a British publisher and a Dutch printing business. That publishing heritage still shapes parts of the culture, but the business itself has changed materially over the past decade.
Management has steadily repositioned RELX away from print and toward higher-margin electronic analytics and workflow tools, increasingly enhanced by AI and proprietary data. Print and print-related activities now account for less than 3% of revenue and continue to decline structurally. The transformation of the business mix has been significant.
The economic model has improved alongside that transition. Digital analytics products carry materially higher incremental margins than legacy print operations. As the revenue mix has shifted toward recurring decision tools and embedded workflow software, profitability has expanded. Adjusted operating margins increased from 30.5% in 2015 to 34.8% in 2025.
What stands out in RELX’s history is the consistency of its capital allocation and the patience behind its strategy. Management spent years investing in proprietary data assets, workflow integration, and technology infrastructure before the acceleration in organic growth became fully visible. The company did not optimize for short-term earnings at the expense of long-term positioning.
That matters because the key question for investors today is whether RELX is still early in monetising those investments, particularly through AI-enabled analytics and decision tools, or whether much of that value creation is already reflected in the current business and valuation.
The Business Model
RELX makes money by selling proprietary data, analytics, and decision tools to professional customers who embed these products into their daily workflows. While the economics differ across segments, the common thread is the same: high switching costs, recurring usage, and products that customers rely on to perform core functions.
The business operates across five segments (four core in growth mode, and one legacy in decline):
Risk, the largest segment at roughly 37% of group revenue, sells fraud detection, identity verification, insurance underwriting analytics, financial crime (KYC and AML) and other compliance tools.
Customers include banks, insurers, government agencies, and corporations. Approximately 61% of Risk revenue is transactional, linked to volumes such as insurance quotes or fraud checks, while the remainder is subscription-based. The segment operates at a 37.8% adjusted operating margin, the highest in the company. The key assumption that must remain true for the business model to work is that regulatory requirements around fraud prevention and identity verification continue to intensify, driving sustained demand.
STM - Scientific, Technical & Medical (roughly 29% of revenue) helps advance science and healthcare by combining high-quality, trusted scientific and medical information and data sets with innovative technologies to deliver critical insights that support better outcomes.
It derives its income from journal subscriptions, open access article processing charges, and clinical decision support tools like ClinicalKey and ScienceDirect. Institutional customers pay for access to RELX’s proprietary content libraries and citation databases.
The segment operates at a 37.1% margin. The critical assumption is that research institutions continue to value bundled access to RELX’s journals over alternative models such as open access or AI-powered research tools.
Legal, about 18% of revenue, sells legal research platforms led by Lexis+ in the United States, along with regulatory compliance tools and practice management software.
This is predominantly subscription revenue. The segment carries the lowest margin at roughly 21%, reflecting its competitive position and historical underinvestment. The assumption here is that AI-enhanced products can drive continued share gains and margin expansion.
The legal product, ‘Lexis’ is constantly evolving as the graphic below demonstrates:
Exhibitions, roughly 13% of revenue, earns money from exhibitor fees, sponsorships, and attendee registrations at trade shows.
This is a transactional and exposed to economic cycles.
Print and print-related activities, now reported separately, is in structural decline. It contributed 1.8% of revenue in FY2025, down from 2.2% in FY2024.
In an April 2026 presentation, RELX outlined a strategy centred on sustaining strong growth in its Risk and Exhibitions divisions while improving the growth trajectory of STM and Legal.
The direction of travel is clear. RELX continues to shift the business mix toward faster-growing analytics, workflow, and decision tools, while legacy print operations become increasingly irrelevant. Print now represents only a small portion of the business and is being marginalized.
That transition matters because the higher-growth segments also tend to carry better economics. Risk benefits from proprietary data and embedded decision workflows. Exhibitions has recovered strongly with pricing power and attractive operating leverage. STM and Legal remain large recurring revenue businesses with scope for further digital monetisation and AI-driven product enhancement.
The broader theme is that RELX is steadily concentrating capital and management attention on businesses with stronger recurring revenue, higher switching costs, and better long-term margin potential.
The following charts show adjusted revenue growth (explained in the ‘Numbers’ section below), first by segment and then over time:
People
RELX is led by a management team that has remained notably stable throughout the company’s transformation from a publishing conglomerate into a data and analytics business.
CEO Erik Engstrom, formerly of McKinsey & Company, has led RELX since 2012. That kind of tenure is increasingly rare in large public companies. With the average CEO lasting only a little over four years, RELX stands out for having leadership willing to allocate capital and build strategy over multi-decade periods rather than quarter-to-quarter cycles.
That stability matters because RELX’s transformation required patience. The company spent years repositioning the portfolio, investing in proprietary datasets, digitising workflows, and building analytics capabilities before the financial benefits became fully visible. A shorter-term management team may not have maintained that level of strategic consistency.
The result has been a gradual but meaningful shift in both the quality of the business and its economic profile.
“The continued evolution of artificial intelligence is enabling us to add more value to our customers, as we embed additional functionality in our products, and to develop and launch products at a faster pace, while continuing to manage cost growth below revenue growth. This evolution has been a key driver 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.”
Erik Engstrom, CEO, RELX
The cultural traits that matter are disciplined cost control, long-term investment horizons, and customer-centric product development.
RELX employs over 12,000 technologists and spends approximately £1.9 billion annually on technology, yet has still expanded margins. That combination is rare and suggests genuine operating leverage rather than simple cost-cutting.
The company’s incentive structure is reasonably aligned with shareholders. Management compensation is linked to adjusted earnings per share growth, cash flow conversion, and relative total shareholder return. Those are practical operating and capital allocation metrics rather than vanity targets.
Management explicitly states its objective of “managing cost growth below revenue growth” and has delivered on this consistently. This translates into improving operating leverage.
Another characteristic that stands out is the tone of management communication. RELX leadership has generally avoided promotional behaviour. Guidance has historically been conservative, with management tending to under-promise and over-deliver.
Management at RELX has demonstrated consistent capital allocation discipline and strategic patience over a long period of time:
Capital allocation priorities are sensible.
Organic investment and bolt-on acquisitions sit at the top of the list, which reflects the reality that RELX’s competitive advantage is built through data assets, workflow integration, and product enhancement over time. Management has consistently reinvested into the business rather than maximising short-term distributions.
Buybacks appear disciplined rather than mechanical. Repurchases have generally been tied to valuation and cash generation. The decision to increase buybacks to £2.25 billion for 2026, up 50% versus the prior year, is notable. It suggests management believes the current valuation remains attractive relative to the company’s long-term cash generation potential.
Leverage has also been managed conservatively. Outside of the temporary disruption during Covid-19, net debt has typically remained within a 2.0-2.5x range. Taken together, the framework reflects a management team focused on long-term compounding rather than financial engineering.
The one less attractive element, at least from my perspective, is the traditionally British and European preference for a rigid progressive dividend policy. Roughly 50% of adjusted earnings are distributed through dividends each year, regardless of capital allocation opportunities elsewhere in the business. It just makes no sense. (If you’re not familiar with my thoughts on dividends, please see this link.)
RELX and AI
Rather than framing AI as a revolutionary narrative, management presents it as an extension of existing analytics and workflow capabilities that improves customer outcomes.
That distinction matters. RELX’s moat is not built on AI hype. It is built on proprietary data, embedded workflows, customer trust, and integration into mission-critical decision making
The company is focusing on using AI to extract and process data, before delivering it in a clean, standardized coherent format as required by its customers:
It is also leaning into generative AI to deliver workflow tools, tailored analysis, drafted documents and compliance with global regulations.
RELX is increasingly selling decision tools rather than raw information. Customers are paying for outcomes: lower fraud losses, faster legal workflows, better underwriting, improved clinical decisions, and higher productivity.
That distinction explains why RELX has been able to expand margins even while investing heavily in technology infrastructure and AI capabilities. The business is no longer monetising access to information alone. It is monetising improved decision-making embedded directly into customer workflows.
Competition and the Moat
RELX has real competitive advantages, but the strength of the moat varies materially across its segments. The common thread is not content ownership alone. It is workflow integration, proprietary data, and the cost of disruption once customers embed RELX products into day-to-day operations.
Risk has the strongest moat in the portfolio. Customers use RELX’s analytics for fraud detection, identity verification, underwriting, and compliance. These tools are deeply integrated into operational systems at banks, insurers, and government agencies. Replacing them is not a simple vendor switch. It often requires rebuilding workflows, retraining teams, and revalidating compliance processes.
Regulation strengthens the moat further. Compliance departments need reliable and auditable data sources, and RELX has built trust over decades. Competitors such as Verisk, TransUnion, and Equifax remain credible players, alongside newer fintech entrants, but few combine RELX’s data breadth, regulatory relationships, and workflow integration at scale.
STM is more complicated. Historically, the moat came from ownership of prestigious journals and control of the academic publishing ecosystem through peer review and distribution. That advantage is gradually weakening as open-access publishing expands and AI-native research tools reduce the importance of accessing individual journal articles directly.
RELX’s response has been to move higher up the value chain. Through Elsevier, the company has focused increasingly on analytics, workflow, and discovery tools such as Scopus and ClinicalKey AI. The strategic objective is clear: become more valuable for research synthesis and clinical decision-making rather than simply monetising content access.
Competition here is intensifying. Traditional rivals such as Springer Nature now compete alongside AI-native research platforms like Semantic Scholar and Elicit.
In May 2026, Elsevier acquired Mytonomy, a provider of video-based patient engagement software used across hospitals and clinics. The deal expands Elsevier’s clinical workflow ecosystem by integrating patient education, surveys, and communication tools directly into electronic health record systems. Strategically, this matters because it pushes RELX deeper into workflow integration while offering clinically validated alternatives to unreliable internet and AI-generated medical information.
Legal sits somewhere in the middle. The US legal research market remains effectively a duopoly between RELX’s LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters through Westlaw. Both benefit from entrenched customer relationships, trusted legal databases, and integration into professional workflows.
At the same time, legal technology is becoming increasingly fragmented and competitive. AI-native firms such as Harvey, Legora, Everlaw, Luminance, and CoCounsel are growing quickly and targeting adjacent workflow opportunities.
It is probably more useful to think about RELX Legal as two separate businesses. The first is the legacy legal information business, where Lexis holds roughly one-third market share and continues to grow at high single digits. The second is the broader legal workflow and AI software market, which has a much larger theoretical TAM but lower barriers to entry and more fragmented competition from AI-native start-ups.
The benefit of competing with start-ups is that founders often have one eye on a relatively short-term exit. External venture capital funds research and development, many will fail, but of the few that succeed, RELX is well placed to swoop in and acquire them. It’s one way to de-risk the evolution of one’s business.
A recent example involved the April 2026 agreement to acquire Doctrine is strategically important because it expands LexisNexis deeper into continental European civil-law markets such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Historically, LexisNexis has been strongest in common-law jurisdictions like the US and UK.
RELX has also pursued partnerships rather than trying to build every workflow internally. Its April 2026 partnership with Luminance extends its reach into contract drafting and legal workflow automation .This is part of RELX's strategy to expand its distribution footprint while keeping full content value within its core ecosystem.
Then came the May 2026 collaboration with OpenAI which aims to integrate generative AI more deeply across the LexisNexis ecosystem to support more sophisticated, personalized legal workflows and generative-AI tasks. This is part of RELX’s broader push to embed AI into its information product where text-heavy workflows are a natural fit for large language models.
Ultimately, combining OpenAI’s model capability with RELX’s proprietary legal content and workflow products, make tools like LexisNexis even more useful and more difficult to replicate. It is all about improving user adoption, pricing power, and retention rates.
Exhibitions has the weakest moat in the group. The business competes against players such as Informa in what is ultimately a relationship-driven and cyclical industry. Trade shows benefit from scale and brand reputation, but the pandemic demonstrated that these advantages are not impregnable. The segment remains valuable, but it is unlikely to be the primary long-term driver of RELX’s intrinsic value.
Numbers
Before diving into the numbers, it is worth addressing how RELX reports its financials.
The company emphasises “underlying” revenue and operating profit rather than strictly reported IFRS figures. These are adjusted, non-IFRS metrics.
In many businesses that would immediately raise concerns. Here, it is actually central to understanding the thesis.
At first glance, the reported numbers appear uninpressive. IFRS revenue growth was only 2.98% in 2024 and 1.65% in 2025. On the surface, that hardly looks like a high-quality compounder. But the reported figures contain several distortions that obscure the economics of the core business.
RELX makes adjustments to the audited numbers which strip out ‘noise’:
Legacy print operations continue to decline structurally, falling roughly 21% in 2025. Since this part of the business is intentionally shrinking, management excludes it from underlying growth metrics so the performance of the digital analytics and workflow businesses is not masked by a runoff segment.
Currency is another major factor. A significant portion of RELX revenue is generated in US dollars, while reporting is done in pounds sterling. Constant-currency adjustments therefore remove FX translation noise that has little to do with operational performance.
Exhibitions adds another complication. The industry has a natural odd-even year cycle because certain large events occur biennially. That creates timing distortions in reported growth rates that do not necessarily reflect underlying demand.
Then there are acquisitions and disposals, which can further distort year-over-year comparisons.
Once those factors are adjusted for, the picture changes materially. Starting with reported 2025 revenue of £9,590m and add back the revenue lost due to the Print decline (£109m), the stronger currency (£196m), and adjust for disposals (£91m), the “real” top line growth performance of the underlying business was roughly 7%.
That is a very different business from the one suggested by the headline IFRS figures. It better describes the performance of the four pillars in which an investor today pins his expectations for the future.
Underlying performance in 2025 was strong across the board. Revenue grew 7%, adjusted operating profit increased 9%, and adjusted EPS reached 128.5p, up 10% on a constant-currency basis.
More importantly, this does not appear to be a one-off. RELX has gradually accelerated organic growth over the past decade. Underlying revenue growth averaged roughly 3-4% between 2015 and 2019, but stepped up to a 7% average after 2021, as the business mix shifted further toward analytics, workflow software, and AI-enabled decision tools.
This is where the investment case becomes more interesting than the headline numbers initially suggest. Beneath the accounting noise is a business with improving growth, expanding margins, strong recurring revenues, and increasing exposure to higher-value decision tools embedded deeply into customer workflows.
The segment-level numbers show clearly where growth inside RELX is coming from and why the overall quality of the business continues to improve.
Risk remains the standout division. Underlying revenue grew 8% in FY2025, broadly consistent with its multi-year growth profile. The segment is now operating at an annualised revenue run-rate of roughly £3.5 billion.
Legal also continued to perform well. Underlying growth accelerated to 8.5% in the FY2025 versus 7% in 2024, helped by continued adoption of Lexis+ AI and broader legal workflow tools. This is viewed by management as key driver of fuutre growth.
STM improved to 5% underlying growth, which is encouraging given the structural concerns surrounding traditional academic publishing. The segment continues to transition away from content monetisation toward analytics, workflow software, and clinical decision tools. The growth rate remains lower than Risk and Legal, but the direction of travel is positive.
Exhibitions remains the smallest and most cyclical of the major divisions, yet still delivered 8% revenue growth. The segment benefits from strong event franchises and pricing power during healthy demand periods, although its economics and moat are materially weaker than the analytics businesses elsewhere in the portfolio.
Taken together, the mix shift is important. Growth is increasingly being driven by the higher-quality segments of the business: Risk, Legal, and analytics-driven STM. These are the divisions with stronger recurring revenue, embedded workflows, higher switching costs, and deep integration into customer operations. This translates into better pricing power and greater long-term margin potential.
The margin profile at RELX continues to support the argument that this is becoming a higher-quality analytics and workflow software business rather than a legacy publishing company.
Group adjusted operating margin expanded to 34.8% in FY2025, up from 30.5% a decade earlier.
Importantly, this margin expansion has not come at the expense of cash generation or capital efficiency. Cash conversion improved to 99% from 97%, while return on invested capital increased to 15.4% from 14.8%.
Those are strong indicators that RELX is scaling efficiently. As the revenue mix shifts toward digital analytics and embedded workflow products, incremental revenues carry materially higher margins and require relatively modest incremental capital investment.
The balance sheet also remains conservative. Net debt to EBITDA ended FY2025 at 1.93x, comfortably below management’s stated operating range of 2.0-2.5x. Despite the increased focus on acquisitions and AI investment, leverage remains controlled.
Mr. Market
The market currently views RELX with deep scepticism. Shares now trade around 43% below their 52-week high and approximately 41% below the 200-day moving average.
The broad weakness suggests investors are treating RELX as a victim of AI-disruption rather than differentiating between the more vulnerable parts of the portfolio and the segments with genuinely durable competitive advantages.
The business today is objectively growing faster, generating higher margins, and producing better returns on capital than it was several years ago. Yet the valuation multiple has compressed materially.
RELX trades on roughly 17.5x forward earnings based on FY2026 estimated EPS of 127.5p, a significant discount to its two-year historical average multiple of roughly 30x.
Against a projected EPS CAGR of approximately 11.8% between FY2026 and FY2028, the implied PEG ratio is around 1.5x. That does not immediately screen as deeply undervalued, but it also doesn’t look demanding for a business with RELX’s quality profile, recurring revenue base, and improving margin characteristics.
Reverse engineering the earnings multiple on a sum-of-the-parts basis helps frame the valuation differently. On implied segment multiples, the picture appears more balanced:
Risk at roughly 24x earnings arguably deserves a premium given its stronger growth, superior economics, and diversified analytics exposure relative to peers such as Verisk.
Legal at around 17-18x appears broadly in line with comparable legal information and workflow businesses.
STM at roughly 13x likely reflects both its leadership position and ongoing uncertainty around academic publishing and AI disruption.
Exhibitions at around 12x is broadly consistent with businesses such as Informa.
Print deserves the lowest multiple given its structural decline.
I generally dislike peer comparisons because they assume a level of homogeneity that rarely exists. Differences in competitive positioning, switching costs, scale advantages, and capital intensity matter enormously. But for a business as diversified as RELX, a sum-of-the-parts framework at least provides another way to think about valuation.
Viewed through that lens, RELX does not appear obviously cheap, but it also does not appear excessively expensive for a business with improving economics and accelerating organic growth.
Relative to peers, RELX still commands a premium on EV/EBITDA and EV/Sales. That premium appears justified given the company’s superior profitability profile, with EBIT margins around 35% versus a peer median closer to 27%. Meanwhile, the free cash flow yield of roughly 6.4% is broadly in line with peers.
The market appears to be pricing RELX as though the recent acceleration in growth will fade and the business will revert toward its older, slower-growth profile, rather than its present reality as an embedded analytics and decision-tools platform..
What stands out more is the growing divergence between market pricing and sell-side expectations. Despite the weakness in the share price, analyst sentiment remains overwhelmingly positive. Sixteen analysts still maintain broadly constructive ratings. Morgan Stanley recently downgraded the stock to equal weight, but not even that was bearish; it reduced its price target from £33.20 to £29.70, which still remains above the current share price of £24.50.
In fact, consensus targets remain materially higher. The average analyst target of roughly £36.39 (down from £44 six months ago) still implies upside of around 47% from current levels.
At today’s valuation, expectations embedded in the stock are not particularly demanding. A forward P/E of roughly 17.5x for a business generating ~7% organic growth, 35% operating margins, and nearly 100% cash conversion would normally imply a premium multiple rather than a discounted one.
The interesting part is how sensitive long-term shareholder returns become if the current growth profile proves sustainable.
If RELX can maintain roughly 7% annual revenue growth over the next five years, pushing sales toward approximately £13.5 billion by FY2031, while margins expand modestly toward 36-37%, the earnings profile changes materially. Add in continued share repurchases reducing the share count by around 1.5% annually and the current valuation begins to look far less demanding.
Under those assumptions, even if the earnings multiple remains broadly unchanged around current levels, total shareholder returns could exceed 70% over five years (11-12% CAGR) with dividends included.
If the market eventually re-rates RELX closer to its longer-term historical multiple in the high 20s, the upside becomes significantly larger. In that scenario, total shareholder returns could exceed 150% over five years (21% CAGR).
Those are clearly optimistic outcomes, but they illustrate the asymmetry in the thesis. A business with durable recurring revenues, expanding margins, disciplined capital allocation, and embedded workflow products does not need extraordinary assumptions to generate attractive returns if the market eventually regains confidence in the durability of growth.
The bear case is the opposite. Revenue growth slows materially. Margins compress as AI competition intensifies and investment requirements increase. Free cash flow weakens, limiting the pace of buybacks and reducing balance sheet flexibility. In that environment, valuation multiples could compress further and shareholder returns may ultimately disappoint despite the current drawdown in the share price.
That is ultimately the core debate surrounding RELX.
If the recent acceleration in underlying growth reflects a cyclical peak driven by temporary AI enthusiasm and post-pandemic normalisation, then the market’s scepticism is justified.
But if RELX has genuinely improved its structural growth profile through workflow integration, analytics monetisation, and AI-enhanced decision tools, then the current valuation may still be underestimating the quality and durability of the business.
That is why the distinction between cyclical acceleration and structural improvement matters so much here.
So with that framework in place, it becomes easier to examine both the bear and bull cases in greater detail and understand the logic underpinning each side of the debate.
Bear Thesis
A sophisticated bear case against RELX is not that the company is low quality. It’s that the market is mistaking a cyclical growth acceleration and AI enthusiasm for a durable structural improvement.
The first concern is Risk. At a roughly £3.5 billion revenue run-rate, sustaining 8% growth requires adding close to £280 million of incremental annual revenue. The larger the segment becomes, the harder that task gets. Around 61% of Risk revenue is transactional, leaving the business exposed to slower insurance activity, weaker lending volumes, or softer financial markets. A cyclical downturn could therefore produce a sharper slowdown than investors currently expect. Competition is also intensifying in areas such as digital identity, fraud prevention, and compliance technology, where fintech challengers are often more agile than large incumbents.
The second concern is STM and the long-term impact of AI on academic publishing. Open access continues to gain traction, while AI research tools increasingly allow users to synthesise information without directly accessing journal content. If researchers can obtain reliable summaries through large language models trained on scientific literature, the perceived value of journal subscriptions could gradually weaken.
RELX’s own disclosures acknowledge risks around changing payment models and research integrity. Bears would argue that STM’s recent 5% growth represents a temporary stabilisation rather than a durable recovery.
The third concern is Legal. Growth accelerated to 8.5% in FY2025, but sceptics argue this may reflect a catch-up period after years of underinvestment rather than a permanently higher growth profile. Industry data already suggests legal technology spending growth may be slowing in 2026. If the legal market normalises, the longstanding duopoly between LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters may simply revert to slower mid-single-digit growth. The segment’s relatively modest 21% margin could also imply that competition is stronger and pricing power weaker than many bulls assume.
The fourth concern is margins. RELX has benefited from years of operating leverage, but AI may alter the economics of the industry. Large cloud providers and AI infrastructure companies possess deeper technical resources and substantially larger balance sheets. If RELX is forced to accelerate investment merely to defend its position, the historical pattern of steady margin expansion could reverse.
The fifth concern is cybersecurity and reputational risk. The March 2026 LexisNexis data breach exposed approximately 2GB of data, including more than 21,000 customer accounts and hundreds of thousands of user profiles, including government-related users. For a business built around trust, proprietary data, and professional workflows, reputational damage matters.
To add balance, the company stated that the compromised information largely involved legacy and deprecated data from before 2020, with no active passwords or social security numbers exposed. That distinction is important when assessing the true severity of the breach. Still, the incident may increase cybersecurity spending, invite regulatory scrutiny, and create some pressure on customer retention within Legal.
Finally, there’s valuation. A forward P/E of 17.5x is not obviously cheap if group growth ultimately slows toward 4-5%. The £2.25 billion buyback programme also assumes continued strong cash generation. If growth disappoints, buybacks may need to slow or leverage could drift above the company’s preferred range, weakening the investment case further.
The bear thesis is therefore relatively straightforward. Risk slows toward 5-6% growth. Legal normalises toward similar levels. STM drifts back toward 3-4%. Margins stop expanding or begin compressing. In that scenario, RELX starts to resemble a slower-growing information services company rather than a premium analytics compounder.
Bull Thesis
The bull case is that the market is fundamentally misreading what RELX actually is.
RELX is not simply a publisher or software interface layer. It owns and curates proprietary professional datasets that are deeply embedded in regulated industries. In an AI-driven world, that data becomes more valuable, not less.
Large language models are only as useful as the quality of the information they can access. RELX controls significant volumes of structured legal, scientific, medical, and risk-related data that are difficult to replicate. More importantly, the company does not merely aggregate information. It organises, verifies, structures, and continuously refines it using domain expertise built over decades.
In scientific publishing, Elsevier manages the peer review process behind prestigious journals such as The Lancet. In legal services, LexisNexis controls extensive archives of case law, statutes, and commentary integrated directly into professional workflows.
That creates leverage within the AI ecosystem. AI providers either need licensed access to trusted professional datasets or risk operating with lower-quality information. RELX therefore remains in control of assets that AI systems increasingly depend upon.
Workflow integration strengthens the moat further. Lawyers use LexisNexis for legal drafting and research. Banks rely on RELX Risk products for fraud detection and compliance screening. Researchers depend on Elsevier’s databases and workflow tools. Once embedded, switching becomes expensive, disruptive, and operationally risky.
Customers are not paying purely for raw data. They are paying for trust, compliance, reliability, customer support, workflow integration, and validated outcomes. Even if AI lowers software development costs, building enterprise-grade alternatives for regulated industries remains difficult.
RELX is also embracing AI rather than resisting it. The company already spends heavily on technology and has integrated machine learning and natural language processing into products for years. Tools such as Lexis+ AI and Nexis+ AI build on that foundation using RELX’s proprietary closed datasets rather than generic internet-trained models.
This is important because running AI systems on proprietary workflow and usage data can create reinforcing advantages over time. As customers interact with the platform, RELX accumulates additional behavioural and workflow intelligence, strengthening switching costs further.
The bull case ultimately rests on the idea that growth has structurally improved rather than temporarily accelerated.
Risk has consistently delivered 7-9% underlying growth for years since the pandemic period. The drivers are secular: fraud prevention, anti-money laundering requirements, digital identity verification, and regulatory complexity. Those trends are unlikely to disappear in weaker economic conditions.
STM may also be adapting faster than sceptics assume. The business is shifting steadily toward analytics, workflow software, and AI-enabled research tools. Management commentary increasingly suggests generative AI functionality is being embedded across much of the revenue base rather than treated as a standalone product initiative.
Legal may represent the largest opportunity. Lexis+ AI appears to be gaining traction, while management has expanded workflow functionality materially since launch. The segment’s relatively low operating margin of around 21% also implies substantial operating leverage potential if adoption continues to scale.
Importantly, Legal does not need to dominate the entire legal AI ecosystem to create value. It simply needs to deepen workflow integration and monetise its existing customer base more effectively.
Margins also support the bull case. RELX has already expanded operating margins by more than 400 basis points over the past decade while simultaneously increasing technology investment.
Capital expenditure remains disciplined relative to revenue, suggesting the company is not entering an uncontrolled AI spending race.
Valuation ties the thesis together. If RELX can sustain roughly 7% organic growth while continuing to expand margins modestly, earnings growth could remain comfortably in the low-to-mid teens. Businesses with that combination of recurring revenue, pricing power, workflow integration, and cash generation typically trade at premium multiples rather than discounted ones.
The key question is therefore whether RELX is still being valued as a legacy publisher with cyclical growth, or whether it is actually evolving into a higher-quality analytics and workflow platform whose best years may still be ahead of it.
What to Watch For
The H1 2026 results, expected in July 2026, will likely be the most important near-term test for RELX. They should provide the first real indication of whether the stronger 2025 growth profile represents a structural improvement or a cyclical peak.
The most important metrics will be segment growth rates.
Risk needs to sustain growth near 8%. A slowdown toward 5-6% would materially weaken the broader investment case because Risk is now the primary driver of both group growth and cash generation.
Legal needs to hold in the 8-9% range rather than reverting toward historical mid-single-digit growth rates. If Lexis+ AI and workflow tools continue gaining traction, it would support the argument that Legal has entered a structurally stronger growth phase.
STM is arguably the most strategically important swing factor. Growth moving above 5% toward 6-7% would suggest the transition toward analytics and AI-enabled workflow tools is working. A slowdown toward 3-4% would reinforce concerns around open access and AI commoditisation.
Margins matter just as much as growth. Any expansion above 35% would indicate that RELX continues to generate operating leverage despite rising AI and technology investment. A plateau or decline in margins, even modest, would suggest the economics of the business are becoming more competitive and investment-intensive.
Acquisitions also remain an important part of the story. RELX completed five acquisitions totalling roughly £270 million in 2025 and has remained active in 2026. Historically, management has integrated acquisitions well and used bolt-on deals to deepen datasets, expand workflows, and strengthen customer relationships. Done properly, acquisitive growth can reinforce both top line growth and competitive positioning.
The £2.25 billion buyback programme is another important signal. Completion of the programme while maintaining leverage within the company’s preferred 2.0-2.5x range would confirm confidence in the durability of cash flows. Any reduction, delay, or material increase in leverage would likely signal that management sees a softer outlook developing.
Competitive dynamics should also be monitored closely. Product developments from Thomson Reuters, adoption trends among AI-native legal software firms, and the pace of open-access adoption in STM all have implications for RELX’s moat and long-term pricing power.
The March 2026 LexisNexis data breach also remains worth monitoring. Even if the exposed information largely involved legacy data, any evidence of customer churn, reputational damage, or regulatory escalation would matter given how central trust and data integrity are to the investment case.
Foreign exchange exposure is another variable investors should not ignore. RELX reports in pounds sterling but operates globally, with significant revenue exposure to North America and operations spanning more than 180 countries. Currency fluctuations can therefore materially affect reported numbers even when underlying operating performance remains strong.
Regulatory developments may also become relevant. Proposed FCC rules targeting offshore call centres could create some operational pressure within parts of Risk, although the ultimate impact remains uncertain.
Summing It All Up: Is RELX A Good Investment?
The central tension in RELX is the gap between what the business has achieved over the past several years and what the market believes is sustainable.
Ultimately, the investment case rests heavily on the Risk segment. If Risk can continue growing near 8%, the broader economic model likely remains intact. The cash generation from that division gives management room to continue investing in Legal and STM while maintaining shareholder returns. If the Risk segment slows materially, the entire thesis weakens.
The broader theme underlying RELX is also important.
The company increasingly monetises decisions rather than information. Businesses that help professionals make better decisions faster tend to develop stronger pricing power, higher switching costs, and deeper workflow integration. Businesses that merely distribute information are becoming commoditised.
RELX appears to understand that distinction and has spent years repositioning itself accordingly.
The market, however, still seems uncertain whether to value RELX as a legacy publisher facing disruption or as a higher-quality analytics and workflow platform with durable competitive advantages in the AI era.
The next two to four quarters will likely determine which interpretation proves correct.
very insightful piece
thanks for sharing..
any comment for $VEEV
IMO
AI cannot kill the dog that armed with special domain knowledge..