Artificial intelligence and face-to-face events helped the UK’s largest media company RELX deliver record financial results in 2014.
RELX group, formerly known as Reed Elsevier, grew revenue by 7% year on year in 2024 to £9.4bn and grew adjusted operating profit by 10% to £3.2bn.
RELX makes most of its money by selling businesses information and tools.
The threat posed to business information providers by artificial intelligence providers was underlined when Thomson Reuters won a major copyright victory this month after an AI company was found to have copied legal summaries it had collated.
According to RELX chief executive Erik Engstrong, AI is currently a net benefit for his business.
He said: “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 across market segments.
“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.”
In October 2023 RELX launched Lexis+ AI, its own generative AI solution designed to provide “hallucination-free” answers grounded in “the world’s largest repository of accurate and exclusive legal content”.
In January this year RELX launched Protege, an AI assistant that can draft documents for lawyers and automate tasks.
Exhibitions was the fastest growing RELX sector in terms of profit growth and revenue, with operating profit up 31% year on year to £398m. The increased events profitability "reflects the structurally lower cost base of the streamlined event portfolio" the company said. The company ran 286 face-to-face events in 25 countries covering 42 industry sectors in 2024.
The Risk division includes widely used technology which helps prevent fraud and financial crime relating to digital payments.
The Scientific, Technical and Medical division includes 2,900 journals which together publish more than 600,00 articles per year. It includes Science Direct, the world's largest platform for primary scientific research which hosts 21 million pieces of content.
The legal division includes the Lexis Nexis database of 138 billion legal and news documents and records. It also includes Nexism, a database of news and business content from 39,000 sources.
RELX employed 36,400 people at the end of 2024, down by 100 year on year, with most of its revenue in the US.
RELX full-year results for 2024 - full press release.
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