RELX (REL) Shares: Legal, Scientific and Risk Data Subscriptions

RELX PLC is one of the largest companies in the FTSE 100 and one of the least intuitive for everyday investors. It does not dig anything out of the ground, stock anything on a shelf, or take deposits. It sells information: legal research databases, scientific journals, fraud and identity scores, and the trade exhibitions where whole industries meet once a year. Most of that revenue arrives as annual subscriptions from professional customers who find the underlying data awkward to replace. Any useful RELX stock analysis therefore has to begin with the plumbing rather than the share price, because the plumbing is what makes the numbers behave the way they do. What follows is a look at how the group is organised, what its most recently reported figures actually say, and which pressures could change the shape of the business.

How RELX Makes Its Money: Four Businesses, One Model

RELX reports through four business areas, and they are more alike than their labels suggest. Each one gathers a proprietary body of content or data, wraps analytics and workflow software around it, and sells access on a recurring basis.

• Risk is the largest of the four by revenue and profit, trading chiefly as LexisNexis Risk Solutions. It sells identity verification, fraud detection, insurance underwriting data and compliance screening to insurers, banks, government agencies and healthcare payers. In February 2026 the division launched an AI-powered identity management platform aimed at healthcare providers, consolidating patient records and screening for synthetic identity fraud.
• Scientific, Technical & Medical operates as Elsevier. It publishes and hosts peer-reviewed research through platforms such as ScienceDirect, and sells clinical decision support to hospitals through ClinicalKey. University libraries and health systems are the paying customers, typically on multi-year agreements.
• Legal is the LexisNexis legal research business, selling case law, statutes and drafting tools to law firms and corporate legal departments. Its generative-AI product, Lexis+ AI, sits on top of that licensed content.
• Exhibitions trades as RX and runs face-to-face trade events across dozens of industries and geographies. It is the one part of the group that depends on people physically turning up.

The revenue mix tells you how far the organisation has moved from its publishing roots. In the 2025 financial year, electronic formats accounted for 84% of group revenue, or £8,070m, while face-to-face formats contributed 12%, or £1,121m. Print and print-related activity is what remains. That shift matters for a practical reason: electronic subscription revenue is renewed rather than re-won each year, which is why revenue growth at RELX tends to arrive in a narrow band rather than in cyclical swings.

RELX Stock Analysis: What the Latest Results Show

RELX reports on a half-year and full-year basis rather than quarterly, so the two reference points are the 2025 full-year results published on 12 February 2026 and the interim results for the six months to 30 June 2026, published on 23 July 2026. The group reports in pounds sterling.

For the year to 31 December 2025, revenue was £9,590m against £9,434m in 2024. That is only 2% higher as reported, but 7% on an underlying basis, the gap reflecting currency movements and portfolio changes. Adjusted operating profit rose 9% underlying to £3,342m, and the adjusted operating margin came in at 34.8%. Adjusted earnings per share reached 128.5p, up 10% at constant currency. All four divisions grew: underlying revenue was up 8% in Risk, 5% in Scientific, Technical & Medical, 9% in Legal and 8% in Exhibitions, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 10%, 7%, 12% and 9% respectively.

The first half of 2026 continued in the same register. Revenue of £4,871m represented 7% underlying growth, and adjusted operating profit rose 9% to £1,727m. The adjusted operating margin improved to 35.5% from 34.8% in the comparable half. Adjusted earnings per share were 68.6p against 63.5p, growth of 11% at constant currency. Underlying revenue growth by division ran at 8% in Risk, 6% in Scientific, Technical & Medical, 10% in Legal and 6% in Exhibitions.

One divisional detail is worth pausing on, because it illustrates how event businesses behave. Exhibitions reported first-half revenue of £575m against £581m a year earlier, and adjusted operating profit of £226m against £234m, even though underlying revenue grew 6% and underlying profit grew 2%. Trade shows are not evenly distributed through the calendar, and some run on two-year or three-year cycles, so reported half-year figures for this division can move in the opposite direction to the underlying trend. Alongside the interim figures, management reaffirmed its full-year outlook for strong underlying growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit, and strong growth in adjusted earnings per share at constant currency.

Margins, Cash Flow and Where the Cash Goes

Two characteristics separate an information business from an ordinary publisher, and both show up in the accounts. The first is operating leverage. Once a database exists, serving an additional subscriber costs comparatively little, so revenue growth of 7% translating into profit growth of 9% is arithmetic rather than luck. The group margin has moved up steadily and reached 35.5% in the first half of 2026.

The second is cash conversion. Subscriptions are frequently billed in advance, so cash tends to arrive before the service is delivered. RELX reported adjusted cash flow of £3,301m for 2025, up 6% on £3,101m, with adjusted cash flow conversion of 99% against 97% the prior year. Converting essentially all adjusted operating profit into cash is unusual for a company of this size and is a direct consequence of the billing model. Group EBITDA for 2025 was £3,846m, against £3,724m in 2024.

That cash is deployed in three visible directions: bolt-on acquisitions, dividends and buybacks. In 2025 the group completed five acquisitions for £270m and repurchased £1,500m of its own shares. On 12 February 2026 it announced a plan to deploy £2.25bn on buybacks during 2026, executed through a series of non-discretionary programmes across the year. The dividend has been raised in step with earnings: the full-year 2025 dividend was 67.5p per share, an increase of 7%, of which the final dividend was 48.0p. The 2026 interim dividend was set at 20.9p, up 7% from 19.5p.

Leverage is the counterweight. Net debt stood at £7,201m at 31 December 2025, against £6,563m a year earlier, equivalent to 2.0 times EBITDA compared with 1.8 times. By 30 June 2026 net debt had risen to £8,733m, or 2.3 times EBITDA, against £7,443m and 2.2 times at the same point in 2025. Debt is rising while the group buys back stock and funds acquisitions from cash flow, which is a deliberate trade rather than a surprise, but the direction of travel is worth tracking, because the buyback is funded from the same cash the balance sheet relies on.

Artificial Intelligence: Tailwind and Threat at Once

Generative AI is the single most argued-over variable in the RELX story, and the honest position is that it cuts both ways.

On the constructive side, RELX owns licensed, structured, citable content — case law, peer-reviewed papers, verified identity records — which is precisely what a professional-grade AI tool needs to produce answers a lawyer or clinician can rely on. Products such as Lexis+ AI and the AI-enabled identity platforms in Risk are attempts to convert that ownership into a higher-priced tier of the same subscription. If customers accept the upgrade, revenue per customer rises without a proportionate increase in cost.

On the other side sits a genuine question about whether general-purpose AI models erode the value of paid research databases. If a lawyer can get an adequate first draft of a legal question from a general model, the incremental value of a specialist subscription narrows. The counter-argument is that professional users need provenance, citation and indemnity rather than fluent prose, and that these are exactly the things a licensed corpus provides. Neither argument has been settled by the reported numbers so far: Legal delivered 10% underlying revenue growth in the first half of 2026, its strongest of the four divisions, which is not the pattern of a business being disintermediated, though a couple of reporting periods is a short window in which to judge a structural question.

Risks Worth Understanding

Several pressures sit outside management's direct control. Open-access publishing continues to reshape the economics of scientific journals, moving payment from library subscription towards author or funder charges; the transition has been gradual, but it changes who pays and how much. Regulatory attention to data brokerage and identity data is a live issue for the Risk division in both the United States and Europe, and rules on how personal data may be assembled and sold can move quickly. Exhibitions carries the operational risk of physical events — venue availability, travel disruption and regional demand — as the pandemic period demonstrated.

There is also translation risk. RELX reports in sterling but earns a large share of revenue in US dollars, which is why 2025 reported revenue growth of 2% sat so far below underlying growth of 7%. Currency does not change the operating performance, but it does change the sterling figures investors see, and it can flatter or flatten a year without anything happening inside the business.

Finally, competition is real even if it is concentrated. RELX faces Thomson Reuters (TRI) and Wolters Kluwer (WKL) across legal and regulatory information, overlaps with Experian (EXPN) in parts of data and analytics, and competes with Informa (INF) in exhibitions. Pearson (PSON) operates in adjacent education markets. These are largely rational competitors in consolidated niches rather than price-led challengers, which is part of why margins across the sector have held up.

What to Watch From Here

The case for studying RELX (REL) closely rests on a fairly narrow set of observable measures rather than on any single period's headline. Underlying revenue growth is the first: the group has been running at 7% across both the 2025 full year and the first half of 2026, and whether that band holds is the clearest read on demand. The second is the divisional spread — Legal accelerating to 10% underlying growth while Scientific, Technical & Medical sits at 6% tells you where pricing power currently lives.

Margin direction is the third. The move from 34.8% for the 2025 full year to 35.5% in the first half of 2026 is the operating leverage thesis working; a stall would suggest that AI development costs or content licensing are absorbing the benefit. Fourth is cash conversion, which at 99% in 2025 leaves little room to improve but a good deal to lose if billing patterns change. And fifth is leverage: net debt at 2.3 times EBITDA in June 2026 against 2.0 times in December 2025 shows the balance sheet absorbing the capital-returns programme, so the pace of buybacks relative to cash generation is worth keeping an eye on.

On valuation, the useful discipline is to understand what a multiple is measuring rather than what it reads on any given day. An earnings multiple applied to a company like this is largely a statement about how durable the market believes renewal-based revenue to be, and how much of the AI transition it expects the group to capture rather than concede. That belief can be tested against the evidence above — renewal patterns implied by underlying growth, margin trajectory, and the divisional spread — which is a more informative exercise than comparing a headline figure with a sector average. What would change the picture is straightforward to specify: a sustained slowdown in underlying growth in Risk or Legal, a visible margin reversal, a regulatory intervention in identity data, or evidence that customers are trading down from specialist databases to general-purpose tools. None of those is visible in the figures reported so far, which is a fact worth holding lightly rather than firmly.