RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 5 of 10

Erik Engstrom: Okay. I will cover the first one. And then I’ll hand the rest over to Nick to cover those. So, if I understand you correctly, you’re talking about the growth rate of Risk, the current run rate and the near-term outlook for it. As you’ve heard, our long-term view on Risk is that the opportunity set in this segment is such that our objective there is to continue to grow in this range for many years to come. And the range we’ve been in the last few years, of course, fluctuated a little bit, sometimes up a point, sometimes down depending on some of the transactional revenue streams during that year. And while we can see what’s going on now and what has happened recently, it’s always very hard for us at this time of the year to try to predict exactly how those revenues €“ transactional revenues will behave in especially in the second half of the year because it’s so many months out.

But I can tell you what you would expect in this kind of economic environment, which is that some streams would possibly slow down their growth rate a little bit. I mean, at this moment, as you might guess, over the last few months, at the end of last year and currently, we’ve seen some pockets in our Business Services side of Risk where the growth rate has slowed a bit relating to personal financial transactions and others, right? On the other hand, we have seen a pickup in growth rate in several other segments, including some financial compliance, and most importantly, in the Insurance segment where both insurance shopping and switching has picked up, which it typically does when the economic environment slows down a little bit the way it has.

So, we’re seeing the kinds of patterns that we have historically. And at the moment, in the last few months and currently, the slight slowdown in some subsegment is offset by the slight pickup in the other segments. And if anything, you net it up, the slight positive segments are probably marginally outweighing the former negative outlook, and they are the negative transaction on the growth rate. But it’s very hard to say, of course, where exactly that will be later in the year. But again, I think you have to look at this division as being in a range of growth over a long period to come. And there will always be a little uncertainty about what the growth rate will look like 6 months to 12 months out. Now, I’m going to hand that over to Nick to cover the others.

Nick Luff: So Exhibitions, you asked about the like-for-like. Obviously, that improved as we went through 2022. In the second half, we rounded about 90% for those shows that had a comparable event prior to COVID. Looking to 2023, I think we’ll have to see how that evolves. We’ll have some events that are still coming back for the first time, China cycling events that are happening for the first time since COVID. So, we’ll see. You asked about China joint venture profit. Yes, that was not as strong because of the difficulty operating in China. That did have some impact on the margins. And although the revenue line was strong, I think, relative to the expectations, the lack of JV profit held back the bottom line a bit. You asked about launches, and we have it.

Page 5 of 10