RELX PLC Profile
RELX PLC (RELX) operates as a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.
RELX serves customers in more than 180 countries and has offices in about 40 countries. RELX’s products are generally sold through dedicated sales forces direct to customers.
Segments
The company operates in four major market segments: Risk; Scientific, Technical & Medical; Legal; and Exhibitions.
Risk segment
Risk segment provides customers with information-based analytics and decision tools that combine public and industry-specific content with advanced technology and algorithms to assist them in evaluating and predicting risk and enhancing operational efficiency.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, has principal operations in California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Ohio in North America, as well as London and Paris in Europe, São Paulo in Latin America and Beijing and Singapore in the Asia Pacific. It serves customers in more than 180 countries.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions comprises the following market-facing industry/sector verticals: Business Services, Insurance, Specialised Industry Data Services, and Government Solutions.
Business Services
Business Services, representing around 45% of revenue, enables global financial transparency and inclusion by providing holistic and actionable insights for all risk and compliance segments. The companys help customers address some of today’s greatest societal challenges, including identifying fraud, cybercrime, bribery, corruption, human trafficking, economic sanctions, global terrorism and abusive practices. The combination of the company’s proprietary insights and advanced analytics powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) delivers actionable intelligence to customers to help improve decisions and operational efficiency.
The cornerstone of the company’s growth strategy in Business Services is maximizing penetration in the company’s current markets across the company’s customers’ workflows and through international expansion.
In 2023, Business Services further established itself as a platform provider with industry analyst recognition for both its Dynamic Decision Platform and RiskNarrative platform. Across solutions the company was recognised as leaders in 16 industry analyst reports, including Forrester Research for both Identify Verification and Fraud Detection Management, Chartis Research for Payment Risk Solutions, KuppingerCole for Fraud Reduction Intelligence Platforms and Juniper Research for Financial Crime Prevention.
Business Services has introduced a number of product enhancements and launches, including a cloud-enabled version ofits Firco Continuity transaction screening solution and new behavioural biometrics functionality within its global fraud and identity portfolio following the completion of its BehavioSec integration. Business Services UK enhanced its FraudPoint solution to provide more robust protection from increasingly prevalent risks, such as synthetic identity fraud. It also enhanced its IDU identity verification product with Remote Check to enable seamless digital onboarding across industries.
Insurance
Insurance, representing just under 40% of revenue, provides comprehensive data, analytics and decision tools for personal auto and home, commercial and life insurance carriers to improve critical aspects of their business. Information solutions help insurers assess risks, improve customer experience, increase efficiency in pricing and underwriting insurance policies, and settle claims in the U.S. and other key markets. Industry-leading products provide real-time information on policy holders, identify insurance coverage details and lapses in coverage, and give insurers access to vehicle and behaviour-centric data, standardised across automakers for the underwriting and claims processes. Innovative decision tools seamlessly integrate into an insurer’s workflow and are delivered through a single point of access within an insurer’s infrastructure.
Insurance solutions drive more consistency and efficiency in claims, providing data and decisions for challenging total losses at first notice of loss and throughout the claim life cycle. Insurance solutions provide comprehensive interior, exterior and aerial data for home insurers and offers AI-enabled insights to fast-track decision making for new business or renewal underwriting and claims processes. Life insurers use predictive models, public and motor vehicle records to better understand mortality risk and make life insurance more accessible. In 2023, the company acquired Human API, a provider of consumer-driven health data via a proprietary platform, enabling more efficient underwriting processes for life insurers.
Specialised Industry Data Services
Specialised Industry Data Services, representing just over 10% of revenue, provides critical business intelligence, data, software and analytics solutions to professionals in many of the world’s largest industries. These solutions include ICIS, an independent source of data and intelligence for the global commodities and chemicals markets; Cirium, the aviation analytics company; XpertHR, a compliance, benchmarking and pay-equity data and analytics business driving global HR topics; and Nextens, a provider of workflow solutions, content and analytics for tax professionals.
Government
Government, representing just over 5% of revenue, has helped the U.S. agencies shift from identity verification to authentication to confront fraud, waste, and abuse. Front-end identity authentication is central to how the government dispenses hundreds of billions of dollars in entitlements, stimulus, benefits and contracts to people and businesses.
The company’s solution synthesises thousands of data sources and billions of relationships into modernised interfaces, providing agencies immediate access to identity and authentication analytics. It allows recipients fast and secure access to critical government benefit programmes through near-frictionless identity verification and authentication for everything from unemployment insurance claims and remote government workforce access to matching of patient data, providing a snapshot in time for public health researchers.
Business Model, Distribution Channels and Competition
The company sells its products direct-to-client, priced either on a subscription or transactional with volumetric element basis. The company also utilises a robust partner distribution channel. In Insurance, data and analytics competitors, such as Verisk sell solutions to insurance carriers but largely address different activities to the company. Specialised Industry Data Services competes with a number ofinformation providers on a service by service basis, including S&P Global Platts and Thomson Reuters.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions
LexisNexis Risk Solutions is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. It harnesses the power of data, sophisticated analytics platforms and technology solutions to provide insights that help businesses and governmental entities reduce risk and improve decisions to benefit people around the globe. Its LexisNexis RiskView Credit Solutions products enable more unbanked and underserved consumers to gain broader access to traditional credit and financial products.
Scientific, Technical & Medical segment
Scientific, Technical & Medical helps researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes by combining quality information and data sets with analytical tools to facilitate insights and critical decision-making.
Elsevier is headquartered in Amsterdam, with principal sites in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Berkeley in North America; London, Oxford, Frankfurt, Munich, Madrid and Paris in Europe; Beijing, Shanghai, Chennai, Delhi, Chatswood, Singapore and Tokyo in Asia Pacific, and Rio de Janeiro in South America. It serves customers in over 170 countries.
Elsevier’s customers are scientists, research leaders, librarians, medical researchers, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and students, as well as hospitals, academic and research institutions, health insurers, managed healthcare organisations, research-intensive corporations, funders, and governments.
Elsevier’s services across Academic & Government, Corporate and Health segments focus on: Databases, Tools and Electronic Reference; Primary Research; and Print products. Databases, Tools and Electronic Reference, together with Corporate Primary Research, accounts for around 45% of STM revenues, with Academic & Government Primary Research accounting for a similar amount, all in electronic format. The remaining 10% of revenues is derived from Print sales.
Databases, Tools & Electronic Reference
Elsevier offers tools for Academic & Government, Corporate and Health organisations helping them to solve complex problems and make critical decisions. Solutions include Scopus, SciVal, Pure, ClinicalKey, ClinicalPath, Embase, Engineering Village, Interfolio, Reaxys, SciBite, HESI, Sherpath, Shadow Health, Complete Anatomy, Osmosis and Gravitas.
Elsevier’s research intelligence portfolio of products combines quality, curated content with extensive data sets and responsible AI and large language model technology to help researchers, academic leaders, policy-makers, funders and R&D-led corporations to generate insights, set and implement research strategies, evaluate impact, drive innovation and make critical decisions with confidence.
This portfolio integrates with and enhances the systems institutions rely on, using curated and connected data, artificial intelligence technologies, and interoperability driven by Application Programming Interface technologies (APIs). In 2023Elsevier announced Scopus AI, a generative AI-enhanced research tool integrated into the Scopus platform to help early-career academics and researchers get deeper research insights faster, navigate and understand different disciplines more easily and support interdisciplinary collaboration.
For corporate R&D, SciBite tools and the data as a service proposition follow Elsevier’s ontology-led approach and support corporate R&D customers in extracting scientific insights from vast amounts of unstructured text and databases. In 2023, Elsevier launched EmBiology, a research tool that draws on more than 150,000 clinical trials and includes 1.49m biological entities and over 18.6m biological relationships extracted from literature to help researchers to gain a rapid understanding of disease biology and focus on critical evidence.
In health, Elsevier’s clinical solutions include digital solutions for doctors, nurses, care teams and patients. Its clinical reference platform, ClinicalKey, helps doctors, nurses and students find clinically relevant answers through a range of trusted content across specialties. This includes Elsevier’s collection of medical reference content, including over 1,700 clinical overviews, over 6mimages and over 99,000 medical videos in one integrated site. In 2023, the company announced ClinicalKey AI, a next-generation clinical decision support tool combining trusted, validated content with responsible AI. ClinicalKey AI supports clinical decision making at the point-of-care by providing quick access to the latest evidence-based medical knowledge through conversational search.
In 2023, the new product ClinicalPath Primary Care was approved as aClassA medical device in India – a firstforElsevier. ClinicalPath Primary Care is a point-of-care clinical decision support platform, which empowers Frontline Healthcare Workers, such as ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) to screen and identify patients so that treatment can be improved due to early intervention.
ClinicalPath Oncology presents evidence-based oncology pathways embedded in the clinical workflow, and the associated analytics, to help oncology care teams make consistent, well-informed decisions for high quality care. In 2023, Elsevier’s teaching platform Complete Anatomy introduced globally the world’s first 3Dhuman anatomy modelfeaturing different skin tones and facial features to tackle racial bias in healthcare, building on the firstfemale anatomy modelthat was released in 2022.
Elsevier also serves students of medicine, nursing, and allied health professions. Sherpath, an adaptive teaching and learning solution, provides personalised learning paths at over 600 institutions, supporting more than 250,000 course enrolments, while ClinicalKey Student is used in over 340 medical schools globally.
In commercial healthcare, identity, claims and provider data is combined with patient information to assist healthcare providers, pharmacies and insurers in delivering improved health outcomes, ensuring accurate and complete provider data and regulatory compliance.
In electronic reference, Elsevier provides authoritative reference content to scientific, technical and medical professionals. Flagship titles include Gray’s Anatomy, Nelson’s Pediatrics and Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy.
Primary Research
Elsevier helps researchers improve and disseminate their scientific findings through its more than 2,900 journals, enhancing the record of scientific knowledge by applying high standards of quality and ensuring trusted research can be accessed, shared and built upon. In collaboration with 33,000 editors and over 1.5m reviewers worldwide, many Elsevier journals are the foremost publications in their field, including flagship families of journals like CellPress and The Lancet, which celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2023. Research content is distributed and accessed via ScienceDirect, the world’s largest platform dedicated to peer-reviewed primary scientific and medical research.
In 2023, Elsevier received almost 3m article submissions, publishing over 630,000 new research articles following peer review, with the global scientific community accessing its articles over 2bn times across its journal platforms. Elsevier is a global leader in open access publishing. With nearly all the company’s journals offering open access options, in 2023 the company published over 190,000 open access articles, and launched 59 new fully open access journals, bringing that total to over 800.
Elsevier has invested in other research solutions, such as SSRN an open access online pre-print community where researchers post early-stage research, Scopus Author Profiles showing pre-prints to provide an early view into a researcher’s focus areas and Digital Commons helping academic libraries showcase and share their institutions’ research via institutional repositories for greatest impact.
Print includes primary research and reference content in print format and some print-based commercial marketing services in pharma & life science promotion.
Strategic Priorities
Elsevier’s strategic priorities are to help the company’s customers solve critical and complex problems, by expanding content quality, coverage and utility; combining content with analytics and technology to build integrated solutions and decision tools that utilise advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve productivity and outcomes, and enable insights underpinning critical decisions, benchmarking and evaluation.
In Databases, Tools and Electronic Reference, Elsevier is applying advanced linking capabilities to the company’s vast research information, patent, research grant, drug information and medical claims data sets to develop products that help the company’s Academic & Government, Corporate and Health customers make the right decisions based on their needs. For example, within health, Elsevier is developing clinical decision support applications using cognitive technologies and large image and text content repositories, leveraging its proprietary health graph. These applications will enhance delivery of content in care, helping health professionals make more accurate diagnoses, ensure appropriate care delivery and save lives.
In Primary Research, Elsevier’s priority is to support researchers by finding a home for every sound science article submitted, and providing choice in payment model, quality tier, and scientific discipline. The company intends to deliver above industry average journal and article quality, at below average article cost, leveraging the company’s scale and expertise. Elsevier works with customers to help them reach their research goals through excellence in content, service and value. Elsevier is building on its premium brands, enhancing quality through peer review, and increasing article volume through new journal launches, the expansion of open access journals and growth from emerging markets; and broadening the range and quality of insights across research solutions.
The company continues to improve customer experience while driving operational efficiency and effectiveness; and collaborate to advance open science, inclusive research and inclusive health and support the UN SDGs, through the company’s business and the Elsevier Foundation. In 2023 the homepage of ScienceDirect, the company’s flagship platform dedicated to peer-reviewed primary scientific and medical research was recognised as the most accessible homepage by WebAIM among 1m websites. The company also published the white paper ‘Demystifying Sustainability Assessment and Reporting Frameworks’ to help institutions plan and implement their societal impact initiatives.
Business Model, Distribution Channels and Competition
In Databases, Tools and Electronic Reference, solutions like Scopus, ClinicalKey and Reaxys, are generally sold direct to institutional, healthcare and corporate customers through a global sales force. Reference and educational content is sold directly to institutions and individuals and accessed on Elsevier platforms.
In Primary Research, science and medical research is distributed via the ScienceDirect platform, supported by two separate payment models to suit author preferences: pay-to-read articles funded by payments for reading made by individuals or institutions; and pay to publish (commonly known as open access) funded by payments for publishing, made by authors, their institution or funding bodies. Elsevier offers a range of pay to read and pay to publish options, both subscription-based and transactional, to fit the diverse needs of institutions, funders, and researchers worldwide. As of 2023, Elsevier serves over 2,600 institutions worldwide with transformative deals that support open access to research. Nearly all of Elsevier’s over 2,900 journals enable open access publishing, with more than 800 dedicated author pays journals, the largest portfolio of open access titles.
Elsevier is a founding and driving partner of Research4Life, a United Nations initiative, providing free or low-cost access to research for publicly funded institutions in the world’s least resourced countries. Over 11,000 institutions in 125 countries participate. Printed books are sold through retailers, wholesalers and directly to users. Competition within science and medical reference content is generally on a title-by-title and product-by-product basis, typically with learned society publishers and professional information providers, such as Springer Nature, Clarivate and Wolters Kluwer.
Legal segment
Legal provides legal, regulatory and business information and analytics that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision-making and achieve better outcomes.
LexisNexis Legal & Professional is headquartered in New York and has further principal operations in Dayton, Raleigh, and Toronto in North America; London and Paris in Europe; and cities in several other countries in Africa and the Asia Pacific. It serves customers in almost 150 countries and territories.
LexisNexis Legal & Professional is organised in market-facing groups, focused on Law Firms & Corporate Legal, Government & Academic, and News & Business markets. Services are delivered primarily in electronic format, with print formats available where there is customer demand. Content and tools are tailored to the specific geographic markets served, supported by global shared services organisations providing platform and product development, operational and distribution services, and other support functions.
Law Firms & Corporate Legal
Law Firms & Corporate Legal, representing over 60% of revenue, provides legal professionals across law firms and corporate legal departments with electronic reference, decision tools, and analytics to help make better informed decisions in the practice of law.
Standard products for legal research and analytics include Lexis, Lexis+, and Lexis+ AI which provide statutes and case law with analysis and expert commentaries from secondary sources, such as Matthew Bender. Lexis, Lexis+ and Lexis+ AI include the leading citation service, Shepard’s, which advises on the continuing relevance of case law precedents.
Lexis+ AI was introduced in the U.S. in 2023 and is a generative AI platform designed to transform legal work. It is built and trained on one of the world’s largest repositories of accurate and exclusive legal content, leveraging an extensive collection of documents and records to provide customers with trusted, comprehensive legal results with unmatched speed and precision and backed by verifiable, citable authority. The new Lexis+ AItechnology features conversational search, insightful summarisation, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities, all supported by state-of-the-art encryption and privacy technology to keep sensitive data secure. Conversational search simplifies the complex and time-consuming legal research journey, providing a search experience for diverse legal questions with citations, facilitating lawyers’ ability to complete research effectively and efficiently. Summarisation provides a custom summary of legal documents to provide quick and insightful analysis. Drafting guides customers throughout the legal drafting process, generating a first draft of a legal document and allowing users to change the language and tone from a simple prompt.
Lexis+ is the cornerstone of online research and is being rolled out in additional countries and enhanced in existing countries. Lexis+ Canada was enhanced in 2023 with the introduction of Legal News Hub which brings together legal news stories, case summaries, analysis, podcasts, and more. In 2023, LexisNexis launched Lexis+ in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa. The enhanced platform aims to deliver greater efficiency and better outcomes, with data-driven insights to generate precise recommendations and search suggestions. Lexis+ Australia enables customers to quickly identify the key cases in relation to a specific legislative provision.
In 2023, LexisNexis continued to broaden the reach of its decision tools and analytics. Lex Machina, incorporated in Lexis+, expanded its API to provide access to Legal Analytics for State and Federal Appellate cases. Intelligize launched Board Profiles & Compensation, which analyses datapoints from proxy statements across thousands of companies and enables benchmarking in areas such as pay versus performance and board diversity.
LexisNexis also continued to expand legal news coverage with Law360 in 2023, with deeper reporting across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., including the launch of Bankruptcy Authority, the U.K. Intellectual Property, and enhanced U.S. jurisdictional coverage.
LexisNexis continued to enrich core solutions across global segments in 2023. In France, it completed the acquisition of Case Law Analytics, a French legal technology company that specializes in modelling legal risk data using AI. In Malaysia, Case Target was launched – an innovative, AI tool that synthesizes a user’s search results, providing concise summary of the most authoritative cases within the practice area, complete with the most pertinent judicial reasonings.
In 2023, Practical Guidance released the Federal Government module, which provides practitioners with guidance on government contracting, agency law, administrative law, information law, and labour and employment law.
In the Intellectual Property (IP) analytics space, LexisNexis acquired Cipher, which utilises AI and supervised machine learning to classify patents using custom and industry standard taxonomies, helping customers uncover insights into complex patent landscapes and support strategic decisions.
LexisNexis Regulatory Compliance is positioned to support the company’s clients in key regions globally, including the U.S. and the U.K., assisting them in maintaining compliance registers across numerous topics, including Cybersecurity, Banking, Gambling, ESG and more. The continuously expanding content portfolio is focusing on key legal obligations content in highly regulated industries and areas of law.
LexisNexis also supplies Legal Business Solutions such as legal spend management, matter management, and client engagement software. It launched InterAction+, a new cloud-based legal customer relationship management solution that unites a feature rich business development tool with a modern user experience, cloud infrastructure, and exclusive content from LexisNexis to help lawyers manage relationships and identify opportunities and at-risk clients.
Supporting its Rule of Law mission, the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation today partners with organisations in over 35 countries with more than 160 projects and activities since inception. Supporting its Rule of Law mission, LexisNexis, in partnership with the African Ancestry Network, has provided scholarships to 45 students at the six Historically Black Colleges and Universities law schools to examine issues of systemic racism in the justice system. The programme is expanding to include fellows from South African universities. LexisNexis is also working with the Bangladesh Legal Aid Services Trust (BLAST) to enhance an app which allows workers to examine employment rights and laws on their phone and seek legal aid assistance if needed. The collaboration has enabled the app to address two new industries – construction and tannery – to those already covered.
Government & Academic
Government & Academic, representing around 20% of revenue, serves customers across government organisations and law schools.
LexisNexis legal research and analytics tools empower legal professionals across major U.S. federal agencies and state and local government in upholding the rule of law. Products, such as Lexis+ and Practical Guidance enable efficient research, while CaseMap helps manage and collaborate on legal cases. With the release of the Federal Government Practice Area, Practical Guidance usage in the Federal Government Segment grew over 20% in 2023 compared to 2022. LexisNexis Reed Tech also provides patent data and document management services to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, with over 50 years of partnership. LexisNexis actively engages with law school users, reaching faculty and students across over 200 law schools in 2023. Initiatives include product training, law course integrations, and support in legal employment preparation. Through these activities, LexisNexis helps students build search dexterity and use leading legal analytics tools to tackle complex research, deliver quality drafts, and track key issues in the practice of law.
News & Business
News & Business, representing just under 10% of revenue, provides customers across industries with news and business information and insights, including company information and U.S. Public Records. The flagship product is Nexis, which provides an easy way to search across a deep corpus of content of over 39,000 licensed sources, including a 45-year news archive across over 50 different languages. Other core products include Nexis Newsdesk, an analytics-driven solution for media monitoring, and Nexis Diligence, an all-in-one diligence solution for risk assessments across use cases. In 2023, Nexis Solutions launched Nexis Diligence+, a global due diligence solution with high-volume screening and advanced negative news analytics, delivering significant process efficiencies for risk professionals. It also launched Nexis Hub, a new workflow tool enabling users to gather information and organise and prioritise it in a single place, driving significant time savings and reduced risk of information loss.
Print, representing about 10% of revenue, provides traditional print materials, as well as e-books with case law, statutes, and other primary law sources that include leading brands, such as Matthew Bender, Mealey’s, Michie, LexisNexis A.S. Pratt and LexisNexis Sheshunoff.
Strategic Priorities
LexisNexis is focused on introducing next-generation products and solutions on the global New Lexis platform and infrastructure; incorporating advanced technologies, including generative AI; driving long-term international growth; and upgrading operational infrastructure, improving process efficiency, and gradually improving margins. Across segments, LexisNexis is focused on the ongoing development of advanced legal research and practice solutions that help lawyers make data-driven decisions with greater accuracy and efficiency. Global functions and presence enable LexisNexis to effectively launch and scale products, such as Lexis+ AI across segments, leveraging shared assets from product design to back-end functionality. LexisNexis is also continuing its mission to advance the Rule of Law around the world through the efforts of the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation, a non-profit entity that conducts projects globally to promote transparency of the law, access to legal remedy, equal treatment under the law, and independent judiciaries.
Business Model, Distribution Channels and Competition
LexisNexis Legal & Professional products and services are generally sold directly to law firms and to corporate, government and academic customers on a paid subscription basis, with subscriptions often under multi-year contracts. Principal competitors for LexisNexis in the U.S. legal markets are Westlaw (Thomson Reuters), CCH (Wolters Kluwer), and Bloomberg. In news and business information, key competitors are Bloomberg, Factiva (News Corporation) and Reuters News (Thomson Reuters). Significant international competitors include Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer and Factiva.
Exhibitions segment
Exhibitions (RX) combines industry expertise with data and digital tools to help customers connect face-to-face and digitally, learn about markets, source products and complete transactions.
RX has its headquarters in London and has further principal offices in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Norwalk (Connecticut), Mexico City, São Paulo, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney. RX’s portfolio of events serves 42 industry sectors.
In 2023, RX improved the range of digital products offered, increasing their sophistication and the value delivered to customers.
RX organises influential events in key markets focused on addressing the needs of each particular industry, where participants from around the world meet face-to-face to do business, to network and to learn. Its events encompass a wide range of sectors. They include construction, cosmetics, data analytics, electronics, energy and alternative energy, engineering, entertainment, gifts and jewellery, healthcare, hospitality, interior design, logistics, manufacturing, media, pharmaceuticals, real estate, recreation, security and safety, transport and travel.
In 2023, RX acquired Big Data & AI Paris expanding its access to the high growth market in data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Combined with Big Data London (acquired in 2021 and growing strongly) and the scheduled launch of Data Universe in New York in 2024, RX can now effectively and efficiently support this segment in three key geographies.
Similarly RX made selective launches to enter new attractive sectors (e.g. Renodays for green building renovation, Paris) or extend successful value propositions into new markets (e.g. Agri Week expanding into Kyushu, Japan; BCB for the drinks industry expanding into Singapore) or additional calendar slots (e.g. Content Tokyo into the winter).
Strategic Priorities
RX’s long-term strategic goal is to enable industry communities to conduct business, network and learn through a range of market-leading events and digital tools and platforms in all major geographic markets and higher growth sectors. This allows exhibitors to target and reach new customers quickly and cost-effectively, under one roof and with an integrated set of digital tools, resulting in measurably higher value and improved outcomes for both buyers and sellers. RX focuses on four main areas that position it for long-term success.
Value to customers: RX constantly looks for ways to increase the value generated for customers, by innovating the offering and format of its events, and by deploying digital tools and platforms to enhance the face-to-face experience.
Portfolio optimisation: RX actively continues to shape its portfolio through a combination of new launches, strategic partnerships and selective acquisitions in faster growing sectors and geographies.
Best practice innovation: RX continues to drive best practices in a number of activities which increase the value generated for customers and improve its business performance, including marketing excellence, sales techniques, and the use of analytics to generate insights both for RX and its customers.
Operational efficiency: a lean, nimble structure is in place, able to respond to changing circumstances and customer needs. RX’s global technology platforms and more specialist functions allow RX to accelerate revenue growth, while controlling costs and embedding sustainability throughout the organisation. It also enables a faster and more agile deployment of digital products, new events and process innovation.
RX is committed to continuously improving customer solutions and experience by developing global technology platforms based on industry databases, digital tools and data analytics. By providing a variety of services, including its integrated web platform, the company continues to increase customer value and satisfaction by proactively putting the right buyers and sellers together on the event floor. Increasingly, digital and multi-channel services, such as active matchmaking are becoming a normal part of the customer expectation and product offering, enhancing the value delivered through attendance at the event. Using customer insights, RX has developed an innovative product offering that underpins the value proposition for exhibitors by broadening their options in terms of the type and location of stand they take and the channels through which they can address potential buyers. RX’s digital tools and platforms are being enhanced by a data lake that integrates internal data with external sources to provide better insights for its customers.
Business Model, Distribution Channels and Competition
Over 70% of RX’s revenue is derived from exhibitor fees, with the balance primarily consisting of admission charges, conference fees, sponsorship fees and online and offline advertising. Exhibition space is sold directly or through local agents where applicable. RX often works in collaboration with trade associations, which use the events to promote access for members to domestic and export markets, and with governments, for which events can provide important support to stimulate foreign investment and promote regional and national economic activity. Increasingly, RX is offering visitors and exhibitors the opportunity to interact before and after the show using digital tools and platforms, such as online directories, matchmaking and mobile apps.
RX is one of the largest global event organisers in a fragmented industry, holding a global market share of less than 10%. Other international exhibition organisers include Informa, Clarion and some of the larger German Messen, including Messe Frankfurt, Messe Düsseldorf and Messe Munich.
Strategy
The company is systematically migrating all of its information solutions across RELX towards higher value-add decision tools, adding broader data sets, embedding more sophisticated analytics and leveraging more powerful technology, primarily through organic development.
The company is supplementing this organic development with selective acquisitions of targeted data sets and analytics, and assets in high-growth markets that support the company’s organic growth strategies and are natural additions to the company’s existing businesses. The company’s improving long-term growth trajectory is being driven by the ongoing shift in the company’s business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools.
The company’s strategies are to develop increasingly sophisticated information-based analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to professional and business customers across market segments; and primary focus on organic growth, supported by targeted acquisitions.
Research and Development
In 2023, the company spent £447 million in the respect of capitalized development costs.
History
The company was incorporated in 1903. It was formerly known as Reed Elsevier PLC and changed its name to RELX PLC in 2015.
