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Sometimes it is not the newest companies that move fastest when it comes to reinventing themselves.
Relx, which can trace its history back almost 150 years, has managed to fundamentally shift from a stalwart of the printed-media sector a few decades ago to emerge at the vanguard of the UK’s corporate AI hopes.
Once the publisher of titles such as Farmers Weekly and New Scientist, the company has become a data and analytics powerhouse with businesses such as its LexisNexis service for lawyers.
“There was an understanding that you had to take reference material from print to digital,” says Nick Luff, chief financial officer of Relx, who like most of the senior management has been at the group through its decade-long transformation.
“It is understanding the value and the importance [of data] for specific audiences, being open to new technology and having a culture of adopting and seeing new things and wanting to see how they can be applied in our world.”
The transformation has been wildly successful, making the company one of the best investments in the FTSE in the past few decades. In the past 20 years, the share price has risen about 380 per cent, even if it has slipped 17 per cent in the past year. Since the company’s inception with the 1993 merger of the UK’s Reed and Elsevier of the Netherlands, total shareholder returns — when reinvesting dividends — have been just under 2,200 per cent.
Its market capitalisation of £56bn makes it the 10th largest FTSE 100 company, just ahead of Barclays, and the largest media and technology company.
The transformation of Relx has been stark in the past decade, overseen by elusive chief executive Erik Engstrom, who has only been interviewed once since becoming boss in 2009. Luff handles most public-facing communication.
Its last print title, Estates Gazette, was sold at the start of this year, completing a plan to replace its publishing business with information and analytics services.
The company went from making more than a third of its revenues from advertising — a market under pressure — to less than 1 per cent today. In 2000, about a fifth of revenue was digital; now it is more than four-fifths.
But the company did not simply cut its losses as it shifted from print to digital, instead retaining the increasingly important and valuable data amassed by its various magazines.
Flight International magazine became the basis of the group’s aviation division that provides real time flight schedules. Proagrica, the agricultural analytics business, was spun out of data aggregated by Farmers Weekly.
“We were classified as a media company until about two years ago. We would compare ourselves to Pearson,” says Luff, referring to the education company. He says that the shift to mainly digital revenues was “the combination of being open to the new technologies and utilising new technologies — the algorithms, analytics, adopting Gen AI and using machine learning — and the content and the data that we have.”
Engstrom’s mantra is “faster, better, cheaper, forever”, with an internal goal to ensure that costs are always growing slower than revenues. But despite the rapid changes in business, the corporate strategy has almost always stayed the same, according to Luff, focused on organic investment in its products alongside targeted acquisitions.
“There’s almost been a deliberate ‘don’t create big moments and big judgments where you can get it wrong’. It’s not built on M&A or big, hairy decisions,” says Luff. “These poor investment banks come and see me, and one of the first things I say to them is: ‘you do realise we haven’t paid a fee to an investment bank for an acquisition since 2008?’”
Likewise, Relx works with a slim, long-term management team based in an office that staff admit needs a bit of freshening-up.
“We don’t spend a lot on the decoration,” agrees Luff. “Is retro chic a description? We don’t do restructurings. We’re constantly working on improving the organisation and being more efficient — it’s not a big staff and consultants running around everywhere.”
This means decisions get made fast, Luff says. There is not even a group chief technology officer. “You haven’t got groups of committees and meetings trying to decide what to do. You haven’t been slowed down by bureaucracy.”
This meant that when AI emerged as an increasingly important tool, Relx made its bets fast. Luff says that Relx has been using AI “in a broad sense” for a decade or more “looking at huge data sets and learning machine learning and extracting information and anomalies and exceptions or whatever in the risk division”.
But generative AI has become important to its legal and science divisions, he says. “It was only when ChatGPT launched that it was evident that there was something here we could use.”
Within six months, Relx had generative AI products it was testing in its legal divisions. It became the first major company to introduce a generative AI platform for legal professionals, and the first to commercialise a large-scale agentic AI platform. Relx now has more than 15 generative AI products in the market.
“We were way ahead of others,” Luff says.
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