Steve Liechti: Great. Can I just come back on Nick’s answer on the just under 40% in database and tools. Was that in the current year? Could you give me an equivalent again for — sorry, I want to say currently, I mean, 2023. Can you give an equivalent figure for 2022 just because I would expect that business to be growing faster, therefore, the proportion to be increasing.
Nicholas Luff: It doesn’t change that much year-to-year. I mean as you say, it is growing faster. But as a proportion, it doesn’t make that much difference in a single year.
Operator: The next question comes from the line of Konrad Zomer with ABN AMRO ODDO.
Konrad Zomer: I’ve got two. The first one is on your net working capital requirements. One of the beauties of your business model is that because of the subscription-based part of your revenues, net working capital tends to be negative, if you like. Is the structurally higher growth rate of your revenues going to have an impact on your net working capital requirements longer term? And my second question is on Exhibitions. You already explained the reason why you think margins could structurally improve because it’s the digital tools, et cetera. But can you share with us what you think the split might be between higher growth and the scalability and higher margins or just higher margins because of the GBP 100 million of costs you took out during the pandemic.
Erik Engstrom: I’ll ask Nick to cover the first one.
Nicholas Luff: Yes. Konrad, the work goes as you said that we have a good working [indiscernible] with payments upfront for many of our products on a subscription basis. So operating with negative working capital. As the business grows, I don’t anticipate any significant shift in that. It can clearly in any one year, just vary a little bit depending on exactly what happens around year-end in payments and things. But structurally, I don’t see anything that’s shifting it in any material way going forward.
Erik Engstrom: And then when it comes to Exhibitions, there are really two sides to this. One is that as you can see for the actual 2023 results that you now have seen, Exhibitions now come back with a structurally lower cost base. So that’s the starting point. That’s now a historical fact the way we look at it. But then going forward from here, our strategy will be in Exhibitions as for the rest of the company to manage cost growth below revenue growth on the cost side. Number 1 priority is always to drive higher value add to our customers, to drive higher revenue growth. The second priority is always to manage our cost growth to go below revenue growth. So from here going forward, you will continue to see that differentiation on an ongoing basis. The structural change has taken place and the difference between organic cost growth and organic revenue growth is what you’ll see going forward.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Sami Kassab with BNP.
Sami Kassab: I have three questions, please. The first one is on STM. And given that France, Canada, Switzerland, Finland have yet to renew their long-term journal contract, can you please comment on the renewal campaign, is it going a little bit better than last year because of Germany? Is it going a little bit less well because of other countries? Can you comment on the Journal renewal contract, please? The second question is on the Legal division. Given the duopolistic nature of the U.S. legal information market and given the sizes of Thompson and your business, historically, organic revenue growth rate for both companies have been quite similar. And Thompson is now talking about 9% organic revenue growth for their legal division, is that a target you think achievable for RELX Legal division as well?
Or is Lexis losing market share? And lastly, in the midst of COVID in ‘21, Erik, you were asked whether Exhibition had a long-term future within RELX. And if my memory serves me well, you then answered that before deciding on the face of the division, you had two key objectives or conditions, which were to normalize post COVID and to add more technology to the division to improve the value add. Both conditions have been met. Can you update us on the long-term future of Rx within the group?
Erik Engstrom: Okay. Well, on STM. As I said before, the main driver of primary research is the volume growth and the trajectory of that is going – which we talked about the numbers earlier. When it comes specifically to renewal cycle this year, it is going well. It’s a good year. It is probably going slightly faster than the average over the last few years. So it’s a good year. But again, as I said before, it’s becoming less and less important exactly how people buy and the payment model because it’s – the main driver is that continuous volume growth. When you say Legal, we find it very difficult to try to interpret exactly how other companies report their growth rate and the different segments as those segments don’t seem to match ours specifically.
So I don’t want to comment on what they are or what they have forecasted. I mean, when we look at what we have seen from last year, from 2023 actual, we don’t see much of a difference in growth rate. I mean, you can look at what we report with 6% organic revenue growth for Legal for the last year, including 10% of print and including our news service in that very good growth for us, and we have been on a very good improving direction for us, and we know that we’re delivering very high value tools to our customers and that the new tools are developing well and delivering very good value. That’s what we stay focused on. We have respect for our competitor or peer and I think it’s good that they are also doing well. But we don’t see any reason to believe that any of those numbers would indicate the loss of [indiscernible] in any way or a loss of value share, and I believe that we were probably slightly [indiscernible] earlier in the past year with the new AI tools.
But that’s our view, of course, and I think you should ask them about how they feel [indiscernible]. When you get to Exhibitions. Yes, as I said a few minutes ago, is that we have been focused, as you said, on the recovery from COVID and capturing value uplift from the data-driven digital tools that we’re introducing. And it is – as we’re doing that, it’s becoming very clear to us that this is on track to become higher value add, higher growth and higher margin business than it was before COVID. And we can see the more valuable business going forward. I mean it’s already a more valuable business today than it was before COVID. And from what we see, it’s very clear that’s going to be a more valuable business in a few years than it is today.
The question is just how big is that value up. And I think it’s too early as we’re in this improving trajectory to estimate the scale of that value up to the pace of the value uplift, I think that will take us a few more years, but it’s really on a good track right now.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I’d like to turn the call over to Erik Engstrom for any closing remarks.
Erik Engstrom : Well, thank you for joining us today, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
