Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the RELX Nine Months Trading Update Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference to your speaker today, Nicholas. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. As you may have seen from our press release, in the first nine months of 2021, RELX delivered underlying revenue growth of 6%. Based on the improved performance across the company, we now expect full year underlying growth rates in revenue and an adjusted operating profit, as well as constant currency growth and adjusted earnings per share to be above historical trends. In terms of the performance of each business area, in Risk underlying revenue growth was 10%. In business services, which represents nearly 45% of the divisional total, double-digit revenue growth was driven by strong demand across all market segments. In fraud and identity, our leading digital identity solutions performed particularly well with both ThreatMetrix and Emailage continuing to see growth of around 30%.
In insurance, representing nearly 40% of the divisional total, we have seen strong growth in new sales for the last few months. In data services, which represents just over 10% of divisional revenue, we have recently seen a return to strong growth overall. In government, representing just over 5% of the divisional total, revenue continued to grow strongly. For the full year, we expect underlying revenue growth slightly above historical trends, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth broadly matching underlying revenue growth. In STM, we saw underlying revenue growth of 4%, driven by continued good growth in electronic revenue, which represented 87% of the total. Print revenue, representing 13% of the total, was broadly stable for the period as a whole, but as expected has returned to historical patterns of decline in recent weeks.
In primary research, strong growth in the number of articles published continued to drive market share gains in both the subscription and open access payment models. Databases and tools and electronic reference, which represent over one-third of the divisional revenue, continued to see strong growth driven by medical education, technical solutions, and eReference. For the full year for STM, we expect underlying revenue growth slightly above historical trends, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In legal, underlying revenue growth was 3%. Electronic revenue representing 88% of the divisional total continued to grow well, and print revenue declined broadly in line with historical trends. Growth across all key market segments was driven by the further development and rollout of our industry leading legal analytics and new integrated functionality, generating good renewal rates and strong new sales.
For the full year, we expect underlying revenue growth slightly above historical trends, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions underlying revenue growth was 9%, driven by a gradual reopening of exhibition venues across geographies. For the full year, we expect strong underlying revenue growth with total costs broadly matching total revenue. With that, we are ready for questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Should you wish to cancel your request, please press the hash key. That's star and one to ask a question. Your first question comes from the line of Sami Kassab of Exane BNP Paribas. Please ask your question.
Thank you.
Good morning.
Good morning, Nick. Good morning, everyone. I have three questions, please, Nick. The first one, can you elaborate on the average revenue attrition per show for shows held in Q3 versus the 2019 performance? Whether you are seeing any improvement on that metric for show held in October? Secondly, given the comment on strong new sales in insurance, is it fair to expect this segment to see an acceleration in its underlying revenue growth trends in coming quarters? Lastly, in STM, you reported stable print revenues in H1 and Q3, so can you come back on why we should expect print revenues to decline in Q4? Is there a phasing effect, a particularly strong Q4 2020 comp base? Any more color on the print performance expected in Q4 in STM, please? Thank you, Nick.
Okay. Starting with the first one on exhibitions. There's a very wide range actually of how the individual shows are doing compared to their previous editions pre-pandemic. Some are up, some are well down, but we've run quite different, much smaller events. Generally speaking, they are down, but I'm not sure you can read a whole amount into it given they're often being held at the wrong time of year for that particular industry unit different to normal. With little international participation, of course, and the lead time can be quite short. I wouldn't read too much into it, but I think what's good to see is that we are able to run these events and are running them in almost all the major geographies where we've got activity now. Your second question on insurance. Yes, we are seeing good sales and good product development.
Lots of things going on, developing new data sources, new products, connected car data, bringing that into the infrastructure, using that in different ways. That's good to see. What that means in terms of revenue growth for the business. Obviously, having strong sales is an important component of that. It is a transactional business, of course, and you do get the normal ups and downs in the insurance market and activity levels going through the existing products. We'll have to see how that all nets out as we go through the next few quarters. Clearly, it's good to have strong sales. Your final question about STM and the print revenue. Yes, including in the first three quarters of the year, print's been stable, as we said in the announcement. That, of course, is against a disruptive comparative.
As you get into the fourth quarter, that disruption wasn't there last year. We are already seeing, in fact, as we said in my opening remarks, already seeing a return to more normal decline rates, which we would expect. Obviously, the focus over time is about how do we develop the analytic products on the databases and tools and eReference products. They get bigger, and print continues to get smaller.
Thank you, Nick.
Thanks, Sami.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Nick Dempsey of Barclays. Please ask your question.
Yeah, good morning, Nick.
Good morning.
Just on exhibition, can you give us any indication on what you're seeing from forward bookings from the shows that you've run into next year? Whether there's any patterns there that are different to what you might have expected when we were talking about this back in July. Second question. Any commentary you can provide regarding the kind of early start of negotiations for journal renewals into 2022? We always ask that at this point, but U.K. seems to be the largest one up for renewal. Anything you can say about that? The third question. Just wonder whether Risk, given the strong growth in identity, et cetera, whether the momentum coming out of 2021 into 2022 can mean that you can achieve a growth rate that's a bit higher than what you've done in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. That sort of 8% you did through there.
Okay. First question about exhibitions and forward bookings. We are seeing a good appetite for people to come to face-to-face events when we're able to hold them. It's sometimes difficult to interpret exactly what's going on. As I said earlier, international participation is not what it was. Sometimes the lead times are quite short as to when people are confident that events are going to go ahead. It's sort of as we expected and nothing different from what we were commenting back in July. Again, I think it's very early to comment on what that means for the business in 2022. We've got a reasonably full program and obviously, through the second half of this year, things have picked up very significantly. We'll look to see whether that can continue. On STM renewals, well, I think you entered straight into the answer.
It's just too early to comment. We're just at the start of the negotiations. As you know, every year we've got different customers on different contracts that come up, and we'll see what happens. Clearly, this time a year ago was a very tough environment with the budgetary pressures that many customers were seeing. That's obviously reflected in this year's numbers. The fact we've been able to drive good growth mainly coming from the databases and tools and eReference, I think is an overall good sign. Too early to comment on renewals for next year at this stage. Your third question on risk and the growth rate there. Yeah, look, I think the key point about risk is that the value creation is from sustaining the high growth rate we've had.
Our objective is to sustain that high single-digit growth rate for many years to come. We think we have the opportunities and the waterfront, I guess, we're operating and the market environment. The things we can do that give us the ability to do that, recognizing it's a transactional business, or at least sort of 60% of the revenue. It can vary from year to year. That's the objective there, in contrast to STM and legal, where we are looking to accelerate growth over time. In Risk, it's about sustaining the growth.
Thanks, Nick. That's great.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mandeep Singh of Redburn. Please ask your question.
Thank you for taking the question.
Hi, Mandeep.
Thank you. Hi. I just want to sort of step back and look at the group as a whole. You're growing at six. We kind of remove the, let's say, short-term boost from the print comp being better and, l apping effects and so on and so forth. Is it fair to say that the three main divisions in aggregate are growing around 5%? Is there any reason to think that isn't a sustainable level of growth rate for the group, ignoring exhibitions for the minute?
Well, you can do the weighted average of the growth rates of those three businesses, and as you say, you might take out a little bit from Risk and STM in terms of the comp, and how that's affected this year's growth rate. We are seeing a return to the improved growth conditions in STM and Legal that we were seeing in the early part of 2020, pre-pandemic. Clearly, that is what we're looking to do strategically. It is about sustaining the high growth that we have in Risk and about looking to drive faster growth in STM and Legal. Clearly, if we can do that, then the overall group growth rate will pick up.
Okay. Can I just follow up? Why would it be unreasonable to think that the like for like for the group, ignoring exhibitions, is from being a 4% grower is now a 5% grower?
You can do the math on the weighted average of the growth rate. Yeah, it's clear if the growth rate for STM and Legal is higher, then the group growth rate will be higher. We'll see how we progress from here.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Adam Berlin of UBS. Please ask your question.
Hi. Good morning, Nick. Three questions, if I can. First thing, you made a comment in the release about market share gains in subscriptions and open access within STM. Can you just talk a little bit about what data you're tracking and what you're seeing around those market share gains, and how you know that's happening? Second question is on ThreatMetrix. I think in the past you talked about the fact that ThreatMetrix is growing 30%, but realistically, it would probably slow down as the base got bigger. That doesn't seem.
to have happened this year. Can you talk a little bit about what do you think is driving the sustaining of that 30%? Is it the more digital transactions because of COVID? Is it better product sales to more customers? Can you just talk about what's helping that business sustain that really good growth rate? The third question, just to help with the modeling on exhibitions, just an absolute revenue GBP million. Do you think Q4 will have more revenue than Q3?
Yeah, the first question on market share gains. Yeah, in STM, we're tracking article volumes, and this is being very transparent. We have lots of analytics, of course, that enable other people. We let the users have products that are based around article tracking and knowing what's being published by whom, where. We can see the volume of articles that we're publishing, both author pays and in subscription journals. If that's faster than the overall market, then that's how we can calculate we're gaining market share.
Right. Just market share volume rather than revenue, sorry.
Yeah. It's volume. Yeah. ThreatMetrix, as you say, it's continued to grow well, and it's pleased to see that. What's driving it, the power of the dataset and the associated analytics, the value that can add to customers, as you say, the increasing e-commerce online, everything else that people do online, where you need to be confident that the person you're dealing with is who they say they are, that you're not dealing with a potential fraud situation. That's expanding all the time. As we integrate the ThreatMetrix product capability with our physical identity datasets and the like, that's able to add more value and get faster adoption amongst the customers. We're seeing wider and wider applications for the ThreatMetrix product, and that's what's enabling us to keep the growth going. Your question on exhibitions. Yeah, October's a very busy month.
We have a lot of events that are normally scheduled this time of year, and other events that have normally take place earlier in the year have been pushed back to this time. We are very busy right now. If you take consensus revenue, which is a bit over GBP 500 million, then that does imply quite a busy fourth quarter.
Thanks very much, Nick.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Walker of Credit Suisse. Please ask your question.
Thanks a lot. Hi. Hey, how's it going? Yeah, just three, please. The first one is on exhibition. For 2022, can you tell us what percentage of revenue of 2019 are you running in 2022, in terms of the actual events that you're planning to run?
That's the first question. Second question is on analytics. Obviously, you've been saying now for a while that analytics is doing better. The underlying growth is helping the underlying growth rates of the division improving. To illustrate this point, can you just pick a couple of products and give us the total addressable market for those products and where they are on the customer adoption curve to sort of help us judge how early in this journey you are? Where the opportunities lie. It was obvious from the risk day that the growth rates were improving, but they didn't provide that kind of TAM analysis or indeed the sort of competitive analysis, in terms of who's competing with you in different pieces of the analytics pie. That would be super helpful. Not necessarily now on this call, but at some point.
Finally, can you give us an update on net debt and acquisition and disposals for where you are at the nine months?
Yeah. Exhibitions 2022, obviously we're finalizing program at the moment. We'll see exactly how it all lands. If you weight it by size of show, we have in the calendar at the moment, perhaps 90% of the events that we're running in 2019 in order of magnitude. Obviously, it's lower than that if you took it by number, but when we rationalize the portfolio, we obviously focus more on removing some of the smaller, more marginal shows. On analytics, it's difficult to give a total addressable market and market shares and comparing to other companies, because the market opportunity is expanding all the time. On Adam's question about ThreatMetrix, the applications of ThreatMetrix just keep expanding. Initially it was sophisticated financial institutions primarily using the product, but now it's a whole range of different financial institutions. It's in e-commerce situations, it's government agencies, et cetera.
Those market opportunities are always expanding. I'm not sure where it's helpful to give an addressable market. I think it's better to look at the growth rates. Even your question about penetration, again, the products are evolving all the time, the data set's expanding, the analytics evolving. You never really reach the point where you're 100% penetrated because you've gone on to the next opportunity and then the next development in the product. I hear you. We'll see what we can hear in future presentations, see what we can do to help you get a sense of the overall opportunity. Your last question about net debt, et cetera. Yeah, so far this year, we're just under GBP 200 million in terms of acquisition spend. I think we've done about eight acquisitions now.
We'll see what happens in the remainder of the year, but obviously that's a bit lower than our average has been for the last few years. You saw the leverage had come down from 3.3 at the end of last year to 2.8 at the half year. Depending on where net debt is, that reduction in leverage, you'd expect to continue, albeit that's mostly coming, of course, from the EBITDA recovery and eliminating the loss in Exhibitions.
Okay. All great. Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Matti Littunen of Bernstein. Please ask your question.
Hello. Good morning.
Hi, Matti.
A couple of questions, one on Exhibitions. You mentioned the sort of scheduling for next year. Where events have been pushed back from this year, are they now scheduled to happen at least initially, around the same time as they normally would pre-COVID, or is it perhaps a bit back loaded towards the end of next year? Related to that, if you had biennial events which were supposed to take place in 2020 or 2021, which didn't take place, are those being pushed back to next year or perhaps 2023? Is there a kind of clear pattern there? The second question on the customer billing trends in the U.S. legal software market.
I was wondering if you have any visibility on currently what sort of proportion of research software costs the law firms that you serve are able to recover from their own clients, and how that's been trending over the past couple of years. Thank you.
Okay. On the Exhibitions scheduling, broadly speaking, the schedule for next year, the annual events are scheduled back in their normal slots, generally speaking. There's a few exceptions, but generally speaking. The same is true of biennials actually. There's one or two that have switched from odd to even, where that has made sense given the pattern of that industry. Mostly it's, at this stage, back to normal scheduling, but we'll have to see how things evolve from here.
Your question on customer billings in legal, I think in most instances now, the costs of legal research are built into the overall cost of the law firm, rather than necessarily billed on. Of course, that's what using our tools and the fact that you can find things more readily, you can make yourself more efficient as a lawyer in finding what you need to know, honing your arguments, the workflow tools that help you become more efficient, quicker in drafting, more effective in drafting, and that's obviously helping to make law firms more efficient. They're obviously all looking to do that, and that's the value that these product developments can bring.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Thomas Singlehurst of Citi. Please ask your question.
Hi, Tom.
Morning. Thank you very much for taking the question. one question, if you please know, on STM. Obviously it's encouraging that you're looking for underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding revenue growth. I'm just wondering whether, if you were to lean into OA more and sacrifice margin, whether you might be able to sustain the growth, because I suppose in terms of the overall investment case, you're going to get a lot more on the multiple if you can keep the growth at 4% or 5% in STM than by delivering an extra 10, 30, 40 basis points of margin.
Yeah. To be clear that our primary objective is to drive revenue growth across all of our businesses as fast as we can in a sustainable way. Clearly in STM and legal, as we've been discussing, our objective is to accelerate the growth compared to where they've been historically. That does mean putting the resource behind those growth opportunities, and open access is part of that, as you say. I think we have historically been able to, as we've done in risk and as we've done in legal, historically, been able to manage the cost base in a way that ensures cost growth is certainly no more than revenue growth, and therefore profit growth in line with or above revenue growth.
That's a model we've been able to pursue and notwithstanding the fact that number one priority is to drive the revenue as fast as we sensibly can.
Is there anything you can point out as specific investment items, whether it's technology or individual products that can demonstrate that you are putting your shoulder to the wheel on trying to drive that incremental growth whilst also expanding the margin? Or is it just we've got to just sit tight and wait for open access volumes to just slowly ramp up by themselves, or not slowly ramp up, but ramp up by themselves?
Look at the number of open access delegated evidence journals that we've launched. That requires some resource and these aren't investments in a capital expenditure sense. This is a capital-like business, but in terms of putting resource and incurring costs and OpEx rather than CapEx mostly, it costs money to launch new journals. It costs a lot of money to launch new products. You can see the pace at which we're doing that is stepping up all the time. That's where you can see how we're looking to drive the growth in the revenue over the coming years. Clearly you are incurring cost today that is going to immediately, in the very short term, doesn't drive much revenue, but over the year or two, it does. You have to be willing to do that, and that is what we're doing.
Okay. Thanks very much, Nick.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Rajesh Kumar of HSBC. Please ask your question.
Hi, Rajesh.
Hi, good morning. First question is on the total addressable market point you made earlier. Totally agree that if you give us analysts a big number, we will spend hours trying to prove that it's wrong or that it's too low. Like the idea of giving us more granularity on how growth is coming. In that context, can you talk to us about how much of your growth is coming from existing clients versus new clients, or how much of the growth is coming because you're selling more of the existing products versus OpEx expenses or CapEx expenses in new products? That would be super helpful. Second question is on the exhibitions business. I appreciate you've answered a lot of questions around it. Could you give us some geographical or end market differences in terms of where you're seeing recovery and where you're not?
That could be helpful to understand. Finally on the differences in revenue recognition timing on open access versus the print business. Would you expect the revenue to be a bit smoother through the year as the proportion of open access becomes larger in the STM business? Or is it such a small proportion still that it wouldn't matter in the next two or three years?
Yeah. Okay. Yep. See what I can do with those.
Thank you.
Total addressable market and new clients. The new versus existing client very much varies between sectors. If you focus on risks, first of all, in insurance, of course, almost all major insurance companies are customers of something. There's opportunities clearly. We historically have been very strong in auto insurance, of course, but now have a growing presence in life insurance, household insurance, commercial insurance, and so it's the same insurance companies, but expanding the offering to them. In contrast, business services is a much broader customer set. If you saw the seminar we did on business services a few weeks ago, it's still up on the website if you want to go back and look at it, then you saw just how broad the customer set is and how it's expanding.
Because the need to know who you're dealing with in an online situation, it used to be just about banks really, but now applies to any company engaged in e-commerce. It applies to government agencies, it applies to medical care providers, and so on. So there's an ever-expanding set of clients there. The other thing that might help you, of course, is the distinction between the growth that's coming from new products versus existing products. And that's something we do regularly give a table on. And the proportion of growth in risk that's been coming from new products has stepped up over the last, if you go back five or six years, it's stepped up and has been representing half or more of the growth in recent times. Obviously, 2020 was a bit distorted.
Generally speaking, the new product introduction is a bigger or more important component of growth than it was historically. Your second question on exhibitions and geography. Yeah, we've seen different timing in terms of when markets have been able to operate. China's been operating pretty normally actually for all of 2020, as has Japan, although we did have the Olympics there, of course, which did disrupt things in the middle of the year. The U.S. reopened in March time, I think was our first significant event. Europe's been taking longer, and we only held our first big events in France and the U.K. in September. Different geographies have reopened at different times. I think the positive thing at the moment is we're operating pretty much in all the significant markets that we've got a presence in. Your third question on revenue recognition. Yeah.
The transactional volumes in STM, including open access, are not particularly seasonal, so they're typically reasonably smooth through the year. Obviously, the subscription side, you tend to be recognizing revenue every month as you go along. It's very stable. I'm not sure you'll notice any significant change, even if there's been some change in overall mix. I'm not sure you'll see that in the pattern of revenue recognition.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Okay.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, it's star and one on your telephone. That's star and one to ask a question.
Okay, operator, if there are no. Sorry, go on.
There are no further questions coming through on the line, sir.
Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to seeing you again for the full year results in February.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.