By Paul Sandle
LONDON (Reuters) – Information and analytics firm Relx said it was using generative AI to supercharge its legal, health and science products as it forecast another year of strong growth in 2023, sending its shares to an all-time high.
Chief Financial Officer Nick Luff said all four of its divisions – legal, risk, science and exhibitions – grew strongly in 2022, with underlying profits growing faster than revenue.
“Momentum remains strong across the group and we expect underlying growth rates and revenue and adjusted operating profit to remain above historical trends,” he told reporters.
Relx reported a 9% rise in revenue growth to 8.55 billion pounds ($10.31 billion), a 15% rise in adjusted operating profit to 2.68 billion pounds, and a better-than-expected 10% increase in adjusted earnings per share to 102.2 pence.
Shares in Relx, which have risen 8% in the last 12 months, hit a record 2,551 pence on Thursday.
Luff said generative AI was an opportunity rather than a threat, and Relx was already building it into products.
There has been a huge excitement around the potential of the technology to disrupt information search and analysis since the chatbot ChatGPT was launched in November.
“The technologies themselves are very interesting,” Luff said. “But you need to make sure you’re applying them to the right content, in the right use case, in the right workflow, so that the professional user can trust the output and utilize the output in a confident way.”
($1 = 0.8290 pounds)
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by Jason Neely and William James)
