RELX

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we delivered strong financial results in 2025. We made further operational and strategic progress, and we continue to see positive momentum across the group. Underlying revenue growth was 7%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 9%, and adjusted earnings per share growth was 10% at constant currency. All four business areas continue to perform well. On this chart, you can see the relative sizes of the business areas and their growth rates with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth in each business area. In Risk, underlying revenue growth was 8% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 10%. Strong growth continues to be driven across segments by the development and rollout of our deeply embedded AI-enabled analytics and decision tools with over 90% of divisional revenue coming from machine-to-machine interactions. In Business Services, which represents over 40% of divisional revenue, strong growth continues to be driven by financial crime compliance and digital fraud and identity solutions and strong new sales. We continue to expand our differentiated data set, build out our global fraud infrastructure and more deeply integrate advanced authentication and behavioral intelligence. In Insurance, which represents around 40% of divisional revenue, strong growth continues to be driven by innovation and adoption of contributory databases and market-specific solutions, supported by positive market factors and strong new sales. We continue to expand our products across the insurance continuum and across the insurance lines, while adding data sources and analytics to enhance value for our customers. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. In STM, underlying revenue growth was 5%, and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 7%. Improving momentum is being driven by the evolution of the business mix towards higher growth, higher value analytics and tools supported by the increasing pace of new product introductions and strong new sales. Databases, Tools & Electronic Reference, which represents around 40% of divisional revenue, delivered strong growth, driven by higher value-add analytics and decision tools and we continue to expand our solution set built on our industry-leading trusted content with an ongoing series of new releases. In Primary Research, which represents a little over half of divisional revenue, good growth continues to be driven by volume growth. The number of articles submitted continued to grow very strongly across the portfolio by over 20% in 2025, and the number of articles published grew 10%. Going forward, we expect good to strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. In Legal, underlying revenue growth improved to 9%, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 12%. Strong growth continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth, higher value legal analytics and tools. In Law Firms & Corporate Legal, which represents around 70% of divisional revenue, double-digit growth is being driven by continued adoption of our core AI-enabled legal platform and integrated Agentic assistant, Lexis+ AI and Protege. Ongoing releases of new functionality and deeper integration with our comprehensive, verified legal content is enabling us to increase our value add and serve an increasing number of use cases. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered strong underlying revenue growth of 8%, reflecting the improved growth profile of our event portfolio and good progress on our growing range of value-enhancing digital initiatives. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 9% was ahead of revenue growth with margins now significantly above historical levels. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with an improvement in adjusted operating margin over the prior full year. Our strategic direction is unchanged. Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools. This is being supported by the continued evolution of artificial intelligence, which is enabling us to add more value to our customers as we embed additional functionality in our product and to develop and launch products at a faster pace. Our revenue growth objectives for the business areas remain: For Risk, to sustain strong long-term growth; for both STM and Legal, to continue on their improving growth trajectories; and for Exhibitions, to sustain strong long-term growth. When combined with continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, the result is a higher growth profile with strong earnings growth and improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I'll be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and Q&A.

Thank you, Erik. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by providing more detail on the group financials. As Erik said, underlying revenue growth was 7%, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth ahead of that at 9%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved by just under 1 percentage point to 34.8%. The strong operating result flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which at constant currency increased by 10%. Cash conversion was again strong at 99%. After acquisition spend of GBP 270 million and the completion of the GBP 1.5 billion buyback, leverage ended the year at 2.0x at the lower end of our typical range. Given the strong overall performance, we are proposing an increase in the full year dividend of 7% to 67.5p per share. Looking at revenue, you can see how all 4 business areas contributed to the overall 7% underlying growth. As we discussed at the half year results, we have separated out the reporting of print and print-related revenues and profits, reflecting changes to how we manage the distribution of print versions of our content. The proactive steps to reduce our involvement in print-related activities continued in 2025, resulting in a reduction in associated revenue of over 20%. For the group as a whole, total revenue growth at constant currency was 4% after the portfolio effects in Risk, Legal and Exhibitions and after the step-down in print activities. In addition, there were cycling effects in Exhibitions with 2025 being a cycling out year. In sterling, total revenue growth was 2% impacted by the relative strength of the pound against the dollar compared to the prior year. Here, you can see the 9% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. As Erik mentioned, we continue to manage cost growth to be below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, Risk, STM and Legal each delivered underlying profit growth 2 or 3 percentage points ahead of underlying revenue growth, while Exhibitions was 1 point ahead, reflecting a better cycling in the year. The profit contribution from print and print-related activities declined but at a lower rate than revenue. As I said at the half year results, going forward, we expect profit from print and print-related activities to continue to decline in the high single digits each year in line with historical trends. Portfolio effects and the decline in print were a slight drag, leaving total adjusted operating profit growth in constant currency at 7%. There was a similar currency effect on profit as there was on revenue, giving adjusted operating profit growth in sterling of 4%. With profit growth ahead of revenue growth, margins improved across all 4 business areas, driving the overall improvement of 90 basis points to 34.8%. Margins were up by 40 basis points in Risk, 70 in STM and 80 in Legal. Exhibitions margin increased by 250 basis points, aided by prior year disposals and the effects of cycling. Turning to the group adjusted income statement. You can see here the underlying growth was 7% in revenue and 9% in operating profit. The interest expense was slightly lower, with the decrease reflecting lower average interest rates partly offset by higher average debt balances. The effective tax rate was 22.5%, in line with the prior year. Net profit was up 8% at constant currency and up 5% in sterling to over GBP 2.3 billion. With the lower share count as a result of the buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 10% at constant currency and up 7% in sterling to 128.5p. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion was strong at 99%. EBITDA was over GBP 3.8 billion and CapEx was GBP 525 million, equating to 5% of revenue. After interest and tax, total free cash flow was over GBP 2.3 billion. And here's how we deployed that free cash flow. We completed 5 small acquisitions with total consideration of GBP 270 million and made 2 small disposals. The most significant acquisition was IDVerse, an ID document verification platform for business services in Risk, which completed in the first quarter of the year. Dividend payments were GBP 1.2 billion, and as I mentioned earlier, we completed GBP 1.5 billion of share buybacks. Overall, year-end net debt was GBP 7.2 billion. Including pensions, the ratio of net debt to EBITDA calculated in U.S. dollars was 2.0x at the lower end of our typical range of 2 to 2.5x. Our priorities for the use of cash remain unchanged. Organic development is our #1 priority with CapEx consistently around 5% of revenues. We augment that organic development with selective acquisitions with this level of spend typically being the most significant variable in our uses of cash, depending on the opportunities that arise. Average acquisition spend over the last 10 years has been around GBP 400 million per annum with 2025 a little below that average. We pay out around half of our adjusted earnings in dividends and have increased the dividend every year for well over a decade. Leverage has typically been in the 2 to 2.5x range. Strong cash generation, improving EBITDA and modest acquisition spend in the year mean that leverage at the end of 2025 was at the lower end of that range. We continue to return our surplus capital through the share buyback with GBP 2.25 billion of spend announced today for 2026, of which GBP 250 million has already been deployed. With that, I will hand you back to Erik.

Thank you, Nick. Just to summarize what we have covered this morning. In 2025, we delivered strong financial results, and we made further operational and strategic progress. Going forward, we continue to see positive momentum across the group, and we expect another year of strong underlying growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit as well as strong growth in adjusted earnings per share on a constant currency basis. And with that, I think we're ready to go to questions.

[Operator Instructions] We take the first question from the line of George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

I have got a couple of questions, please. Firstly, big picture one, it's hard to miss the kind of broad concern or fear that's happening across a lot of stocks today. If we pick up on your Legal segment, I guess the latest one of those worries is a concern that you might face incremental competition around AI-enabled workflow tools from other large software companies. Maybe if we take one step back, for the last couple of years in Legal, we've seen you talk about product launches which use Gen AI, more product adoption by customers and therefore, underlying acceleration in the Legal business. I guess the question is, do you or have you seen anything in your business in terms of lead indicators or numbers on product adoption, conversations you're having that calls into question your ability to continue to participate in that tech adoption cycle, and that means we should be thinking about potential deceleration in legal before any potential further acceleration? That's the first question. Secondly, just on STM, given the slight bump in the outlook there. On one hand, you talked to kind of the strong submissions growth and maybe the early ramp of new products such as LeapSpace, but then I guess the full open access growth might moderate in the mix this year, the U.S. funding environment is still a little bit tough. Could you maybe just outline some of those growth considerations in the mix for 2026?

Okay. Well, maybe I'll have -- thank you. Maybe I'll ask Nick to comment on the specifics on growth, adoption, penetration, rollout usage on Legal. And then I'll comment on that a little bit and move on to the second.

George, I mean I think the opposite. I mean, we see these tools as adding value, enabling us to build the functionality into our products. And you're seeing that come through in the adoption, the usage. And if you look specifically at the Legal business and Lexis+ AI, the enterprise-wide subscription customer base has more than doubled in the past year. And the usage is going up faster than that. We have users in the multiple hundreds of thousands now across the globe on Lexis+ AI. We're seeing strong demand for what we do with the product built on that trusted curated content set, it remains very important to the customers, and these tools are enabling us to add value and grow faster.

I think just if you back up a little bit to your broader question about workflow software, I think it's important to remember that the core of our strategy always starts with our uniquely differentiated, comprehensive content, our collection of trusted, verified, continually updated content and data sets. And we then leverage our deep understanding to combine these content assets with sort of advanced evolving technologies and these evolving AI tools to deliver increased value to our customers. And I think it's important to understand that we have worked with this strategy inside Risk with the evolution of AI tools, extracting machine learning tools for over 15 years, and that's been the core driver of the whole evolution of the Risk business to now being 40% of our profits, growing 8% a year on revenue, and this year, 10% on profit. And we have had the same technology-agnostic philosophy and tool-agnostic, multi-model architecture from the beginning of the Gen AI trends for over 3 years. We've been partnering closely with all the large language models providers, including Anthropic and OpenAI for that time period. And as they continue to build out their models and tools, we continually evaluate all the new releases, including often through previews as a partner, and we often test them through ongoing interaction with our customers to determine if they can help us add more value to our customers if we embed them in our tools. So any new tool that you read about, hear about, we're probably already testing it, involving it in our platform and seeing if we can add more value on our platform to our customer value equation. And often, as you say, there are several companies out there that are developing workflow tools that effectively are today serving -- they're trying to serve or starting to serve some of the use cases that other software companies are serving today. In Legal, large law firms typically use over 100 of these software companies for different workflow tools, different admin procedures. And if those tools embedded in our core content platform help our customers add more value, we will embed the best of those new tools into our platform and act as an integrator of those and make them work with our customers. And if they're not relevant to the content-related use case, the content-related workflow and if it's just workflow that's today being served by software companies, then we don't integrate them directly. We often look at alternative ways to be interoperable and compatible with them so that our content sets, our deeply differentiated content set on our content platform can actually be accessed in the different workflows and we believe that, that way then we enhance the utility of, and therefore, the value of our platform if it can be accessed in workflows where people are more efficient and more productive and in the area where we don't want to be or operate ourselves. I mean today and historically, we have virtually no revenue in any of our divisions from what I would describe as workflow software-related services.

And sorry, to the STM question. I mean you asked about submissions and publication volumes, George. The fact is that science remains a totally global industry. The number of scientific researchers in the world continues to go up. The information intensity of science continues to increase. The desire and the speed at which people want to be published continues to increase. And so we -- as you saw in the -- we had strong growth in submissions last year, over 20%, the number of articles we published over 10%. And that has not slowed down. We're seeing that continue into this year. There's continued strong momentum in primary research. And there's always in any one country, there can always be things happening. But if you look at it in an overall sense, we continue to see strong demand for primary research publishing.

We take the next question from the line of Nick Dempsey from Barclays.

I've got 3. So first of all, for the Protege AI workflows, which you are now starting to roll out, can you please talk through what differentiates those offerings from the competition in that broad AI workflow market in a bit more detail, please? Second question, there have been some concerns knocking around about autonomous driving and the auto insurance market. Can you talk about your exposure, the impact as the auto market shifts gradually towards autonomous driving and give us a sense of whether you see any long-term risks around that? And number three, when you refer to strong new sales in 2025 for the group and then in Legal, you'd say renewals and new sales are strong across all 3 segments, am I right in thinking that those new sales will have only a very modest effect on '26 growth, but you're signaling that they should be supporting growth through '27, '28 and beyond?

Yes. So I'll let Nick to start with the first one.

Yes. So I mean, the big difference between what Erik was touching on earlier, all the things we're offering to do is the content that's behind them. We would describe what the workflow tools that we're introducing as being content-enabled, and that's a key differentiator. It's not that other tools can't be useful to people. And as Erik touched on, many tools are used by lawyers and other professionals. But the ones we have, if you're actually doing anything that relies on trusted curated content, then that's where the differentiation comes in. We also, of course, have the advantage of the customer understanding and the sheer scale at which we already operate. As I touched on earlier, we have hundreds of thousands of users of Lexis+ AI. And so we can see how it's used, and we can see what's useful and constantly be updating the quality of the answers that we're able to provide, and that's a key differentiator as well.

Yes. Yes, I mean I just want to add to that, but I think it's important to look at this is that the workflows we're developing, I think when we first released Protege, we were talking about order of magnitude sort of 50 workflows or so in earlier, and these have been released out in phases, continue to be released out in phases and upgraded as we go along. At the moment, we're probably nearing 300 different workflows -- specific workflow tools. And we can develop these on our content, on our platform and launch them to our customers at the rate of probably another 2 or 3 a day in this machinery that we have. But again, these are content-related workflows that are embedded in our platforms that help add value to our customers the way they operate with us and it's unrelated to the kind of industry that is the broader legal tech software industry where people are spending money on software or workflow solutions for operating an admin. And that's where we separate the two and try to be embedded with the first category and be interoperable with the second category. As you know, we're fully embedded in Microsoft since many years ago for our customers, they can fully operate and work between our tools and the Microsoft tools. That does not mean we're trying to compete with them or operate Microsoft general admin workflows in any way. But it enhances the value of our content and our utility of our platform when our content-specific workflows fit right on our content, but it also enhances the value when you can use our LexisNexis AI-related platform and workflow interoperably with Microsoft, for example. And we have about 25 of these different existing partnerships in Legal today, and I'm sure there'll be many more in the future, yes.

So Nick, on the autonomous driving question, obviously, there are lots of trends affecting the auto insurance industry all the time. Enhanced safety features is part of that, automatic braking, telematics, some autonomous driving. And I think we see that as the whole industry evolving to make driving safer, generate more data and everything becoming more complex as you do that. And in that environment, what we do where you get sophisticated risk analysis, combining the data from -- about the driver, about the vehicle, about how it's been driven, the interaction between cars being driven in different ways, that just creates opportunity for us. The value at stake actually goes up, and it's been a trend for many years that you get fewer accidents, but the severity of them and the cost of them goes up. So the value at stake actually is getting higher. And in that environment, I think we're extremely well placed to add more value because of the additional data and analytics that we can provide. And your last question, Nick, was on strong new sales. You're absolutely right. I mean obviously strong new sales. New sales are -- in a subscription -- heavily subscription based business as we are, they are only a small component of what's relevant to the current year revenues, but they are a good indication of the momentum there is in the business and ultimately, what drives the long-term growth trajectory, and that's why we're flagging this morning.

The next question comes from the line of Christophe Cherblanc from Bernstein.

I have 2 questions. The first one is on STM. I guess, we have a sense of the lawyer population, but it's harder to understand the addressable population for tools like LeapSpace. So I was curious whether you had any number in mind or any number of institutions and how long it would take to ramp up penetration? And the second question was about pricing. I think you've been insisting that especially in Legal, you are no longer pricing per seat, but I was curious as to what was the extent to which you've been changing pricing contract over the last 12, 24 months and whether you intend to further adjust pricing going forward?

Yes. So on the STM side, we are launching several different tools into that market, as we've told you. Several tools have been going for now up to -- well, 1 year or up to 2 years in some instances, and we continue to see what the value uplift is to the customer, what the usage growth is and what the user growth is and usage growth, and we can see the value they're getting. From the new forward-looking LeapSpace launch, which has just recently launched commercially, we can see that is a significant value uplift to the users, several of them report very significant time savings or productivity gains or improved results from specific use cases that are very material. And we look, therefore, at the potential addressable market as being basically all the institutions that today have any of our platforms in use, right, or any of the subscribers. And that order of magnitude is in the thousands. I mean, it's over 10,000, depending on when you want to define it, somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 institutions, right, as potential institutional customers. When it comes to individual users, which also in the end could be a customer for this, I would look at it as is typical that people refer to the total number of researchers in the world at somewhere a little bit above 10 million. That's the scale of this. And if you look at the question of how do we price them, our approach here is to price this platform based on scale of institution and research intensity of the institution. So therefore, there's a set of pricing metrics regarding what type of institution it is. We are also likely to, over time, come up with an individual researcher subscription option for those researchers who operate in a different way that they should -- that might want to access the capability of this in their daily research life. But we're very early stages on the commercial side of this, and it's sold and priced separately from our other content tools. But the indication we're getting from our customers, the feedback we're getting in terms of the value adds and the excitement is very strong. But as you said, everything in the STM industry goes a little more slowly than it does in other industries, partly because of how they think of funding and spending and budget and also because the purchase cycles, the decision cycles at academic institutions are typically slightly more involved and take longer. But we are very positive on the ability for this platform to continue to add value to our customers and meaningfully impact our long-term value-add and growth trajectory in this division, but it's going to come through very gradually.

We take the next question from the line of Thymen Rundberg with ING.

Two from my side. I have one on operating leverage and margins. So you've done a great job in managing cost growth below revenue growth in the last few years, also 2025, profit margins are expanding nicely. As we are now moving in more compute-intensive AI or agentic workflows that just basically require deeper reasoning, how are you leveraging your scale and your -- what you've just talked about as well, your model agnostic approach to ensure that you can still drive that margin expansion while delivering these more sophisticated capabilities? And then the second question is with the pace of this AI and agentic AI innovation across all your divisions, I was wondering if you could walk us through a bit how you're currently assessing the balance between returning capital via buybacks, what you've now increased, and more or perhaps larger strategic acquisitions. And so given that your leverage remains at the low end of your 2 to 2.5 range and organic investments are still your priority, I was wondering if you could highlight just when does it make sense to use the balance sheet a bit more actively, particularly in light of competitive dynamics?

Thank you for that. I'm actually going to ask Nick to tell us about both of those.

Yes. I mean obviously, the new technologies that are evolving are giving us great opportunity to build additional functionality in our products, but they're also giving us the opportunity to improve our own processes, make our own processes more efficient. So we're using those to -- internally, which enables us to get to market faster, but also ensure we can keep cost growth below revenue growth. And I don't think -- obviously, we're spending more on some things than what we're spending with large language model providers, et cetera, as our customers use our products more and as we use those technologies more. But equally, with other things that we can do more efficiently than we couldn't before. And there's nothing we see in the overall dynamic that means we can't keep cost growth below revenue growth. And if anything, as we touched on in the outlook statements, the gap between profit growth and revenue growth can be -- potentially be a little bit wider. And that's just through cost control and the opportunity that it's -- that these new tools are giving us. I think -- your second question, I think, was about acquisitions and balance sheet and how we might use it. The primary focus remains on organic development. We have the skills and the opportunity. We have all the assets we need to innovate and bring new products to market and value to customers using that. We will look at acquisitions where we see the opportunity -- where we see something that can enhance and accelerate what we're doing. But they have to fit, they have to fit with what we're doing. And obviously, with those specific criteria, there's only a few things that are available at any time that makes sense. We could -- and we've had a couple of -- a few years now of relatively low M&A spend. That's not deliberate. It's just the way things have -- what's come up and it's perfectly possible that in the next period, we may see slightly 2 or 3 larger acquisitions come up, and we would absolutely invest in those if we saw the opportunity, but it's not the core of the strategy. The core strategy is organic. And in terms of where the leverage is, as you rightly point out, because we've had relatively low M&A spend in the last couple of years, we're at the bottom end of our leverage range. Clearly, we reflect that when we think about the buyback, and we have announced a buyback of GBP 2.25 billion this morning, which is up 50% from the buyback in the previous year. That -- if you take the sort of average M&A spend we have for the last few years, it's been around the sort of GBP 250 million mark, then all things being equal, that would put us roughly in the middle of our leverage range of 2 to 2.5x. So that's why it's been pitched at that level.

We take the next question from the line of Ciaran Donnelly from Citi.

Firstly, just in terms of Legal, can you help us understand the mix between publicly available data and proprietary created curative data that underpins those products? And perhaps just comment on how difficult it will be to replicate those data sets, just looking to get a sense of how deep that competitive moat is? In addition, can you just clarify with regards to your comments on interoperability, would you be open to licensing use of your proprietary data to be integrated into, I don't know, API plug-in such as Claude Cowork? And then lastly, just in risk, it looks like the base market growth contribution was a smaller contribution in 2025 versus '24. So can you just help us understand the dynamics there? And looking forward to 2026, what the mix of growth from base and product innovation is likely to be?

Yes. So let me start with the question of our content sets. As you know, we describe RELX as a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools. And everything we do is built on that information base, which is a foundation of unique and comprehensive content and data sets. And that applies to all our divisions. And our assets are both historically comprehensive and continuously updated on an industrial scale across our divisions. And in each one of our divisions, it includes some form of public records accumulated over decades, some of which are no longer publicly available, some of which are theoretically public, but extremely difficult and complicated to collect because of the format or in print or in different locations. Then they also include licensed data sets. Across the company we have licensed data for over 10,000 different sources. Some of those sources, the usage is regulated and controlled, and we can only use them in certain ways in our tools. We then have unique contributory data sets, and we have some of those involved in Legal as well. And we have dozens of those contributory databases across the company. We then have proprietary data and content that we have created ourselves, written ourselves, either within our pool of internal employees or external contractors have created them for us over many years, right? But we combine these content and data sets then with our deep customer understanding to build proprietary algorithms, judgment, inferences and interpretations, which accumulated over decades, delivered unique insights and significant value to our customers themselves, and this would be extremely hard, if not impossible, to replicate to the same level of value. And this is what we mean when we talk about the fact that we have a content advantage that we believe is very sustainable and very strong and are very high value to our customers across our divisions, including Legal. So if you then look at the question, will we consider just licensing out our content sets and on? No, this is a centerpiece of our strategy. This is what we are. We are an information-based company. We're a content-based company. And everything we do is built around that unique, comprehensive information base. And that's the foundation for our product today. It will be the foundation of our products and their value-add in the future. And is it possible some [ small sliver ] in some noncore areas could be licensed in some places? Yes. We've always done copyright sales here and there for decades, but that's not material. It's not the core of our strategy. Our core -- the core of our strategy is to leverage those deeply embedded content and data sets and embed these new tools on top to enhance the value of those content platforms to our customers. And that's what we're seeing a confirmation of when we do that to our customers, we see that they see a value uplift. We see the spend uplift they are willing to go on those because they see the higher value. We see that customers do that when it rolls out. We see that the users, we have more active users on the new higher value-add platforms and that they use them more.

And I think your last question was about the split of the risk growth, the 8%. As you rightly pointed out, the contribution from new products has gone up. This year, the split was 6% from new products, 2% from older products compared to 5%, 3% the previous couple of years. I wouldn't read too much into that. It's only a small shift. If anything, it just demonstrates that the pace of innovation has increased. The older products perhaps are being replaced slightly quicker with new products, new functionality. And therefore, the split has shifted a little bit, but I wouldn't read too much into it.

We take the next question from the line of Steve Liechti from Deutsche Numis.

I'll take 3 well, please. First of all, just relatively simplistically, just if I'm a lawyer, and I've now embedded Harvey or Legora into my workflow, just why am I going to buy Protege as well as a workflow tool, maybe put that in the context of a large lawyer and a small lawyer? So that's the first question. Second question is on STM. You've given your -- you've moved your guidance from good to good to strong like-for-like growth. Is that code for saying that you think like-for-like is going to go from 5% this year to more like 6% next year? And then the third question is on the Risk. Just we're having a lot of conversations with people on the kind of disruptive stuff going on in the market. Just remind us or rehearse the arguments on why an LLM or disruptor would find it very, very difficult to break into the risk market in terms of either the business services bit or insurance?

Nick, would you like to take the first one?

Yes. Look, there are obviously various tools out. And as we said before, the whole ecosystem in which lawyers operate, they've traditionally used all sorts of different tools for different functionalities. It does depend on what sort of work you're doing. But if you're doing work that -- legal research work, in particular, but anything that it relies on content and what the latest information is, the latest law is, then as we've been outlining, we have a significant competitive advantage because of the data set that we've put and the content that we've articulated a couple of times already on this call. That doesn't mean to say that lawyers won't use other things as well. And if they're good tools, then as we said, we'll look to see whether we can use that functionality, replicate it in our products or make it interoperable with our products. And we'll continue to do that. But I think we're clear that we have a big customer base already using our Lexis+ AI with Protege tool that runs into the hundreds of thousands of users, tens of thousands of customers, so the scale of what we're doing is already way bigger than a lot of things -- lot of other things that are out there. So I think the starting point with that content advantage is very good for us.

And I think it's important to distinguish here between content players and competing in content, which is what we do with these layers on top, which is content-enabled processing that adds value to the content, and the people who are building workflow tools that are not in the content business at the scale that we have or the comprehensiveness of the historical trust and verified content that we have. But there, there are several hundred software and workflow companies ranging all the way from Microsoft at the top to very specialized tools that are used by lawyers in many ways. And as we said, many of the large law firms have 100 of these different tools. And the two that you mentioned that are coming up that for workflow tools that enable processing and workflows, they are more the way they describe it, going after that much larger software and services market in the legal tech space. And in a way, they have explained that they see that their biggest threat to their in their quote publicly is the LLM tools and LLM-related workflow tools themselves. We see them as additional partners. We're partnering with already 25 of these workflow and software-related companies in that space, and there's nothing that says that, that couldn't be -- do more over time. So we see them more as complement than competitors.

Steve, your second question was about the guidance around STM. I think as we said in the statement this morning, we have got improving momentum in STM. We are seeing an increased pace of the introduction and rollout of new products. We can see it in the strong new sales. So the business is in very good shape. Clearly, it's a very heavy subscription business. So things tend to change relatively slowly. But without getting into the numbers, clearly, the outlook statement is a more positive statement than we've had previously. That is an upgrade in our outlook. And your last question was about the Risk business and LLMs and things. I think the most important thing to remember about the Risk business is 90% of its revenue comes from machine-to-machine interactions. And this is a massive scale of the data sets we have and the data we collect from all the -- as we've outlined a couple of times already on this -- in this discussion, the thousands of sources, the public records, the contributory data coming back from customers with that network effect that they can all benefit from, what we do with the data, the algorithms that we apply to it and it's incredibly difficult to replicate. It's a heavily regulated area, what data you can collect, how you can -- how you're allowed to use that data is heavily regulated. And I think given it's almost all machine to machine, I think we see lots of opportunity to continue to use new data sources and using technology. But I think we will be the beneficiaries of that.

But I think it's important also to point out that Risk has been at the forefront of using AI technology now for close to 20 years. The core driver behind the entire growth rate and the growth improvement over the last 15 years in Risk has been the fact that we have all these unique comprehensive data sets that most people don't have access to any of those particularly the contributory data sets and some of the internal data sets that we generate in those markets. But the real enabler has been the fact that we have had a technology-agnostic philosophy for that entire time period and continuously look at new AI and machine learning tools and new algorithms for a very, very long time. And whenever anything comes out that can help us increase the value to our customers, we have tested them and embedded them. And that's why at this point, we are a 90% embedded machine-to-machine AI-enabled algorithm business. The new or evolving generative AI tools actually do not add significant value to those kind of mathematical calculations. I mean, just to give you an illustration, in one of our contributory database offerings, we process around 400 million transactions per day in a mathematical continuously improving model, right? So this is a completely different type of business that went through the AI enablement transformation starting about 20 years ago, it started and that's continuing to evolve, and it's already very, very far down this path. I mean I could remind you that it's exactly 20 years ago this year that because of how we approach big data, data science and algorithms, we picked up knowledge of what was going on over at -- no, over at Palantir, yes, exactly over at Palantir. And I went out to visit them personally about 20 years ago and talked about how our different technologies compare and how well we could do together and some of their tech people were at our conferences and so on. And we've evolved into a high-volume, algorithm-driven very low price per unit, but very high volume sort of transaction-based pricing installed inside industries, and they've evolved in a complete opposite direction, but we still leverage the same technology heritage and the same thinking and approach to big data, data clients and AI. So this is not a new thing, and it's not something that's likely to impact the trajectory of the Risk business in any way other than continue on the path we've been on to evaluate and look at and embed any new possible AI tools from any source that can increase the value to our customers of those algorithms we operate today.

[Operator Instructions] We take the next question from the line of Henry Hayden from Rothschild & Company Redburn.

I have 3 from my end. The first one on STM, how do you think about the corporate opportunity? So it's one you discussed in the past as a large addressable market with attractive structural growth profile. We were hoping for any incremental color you could give around end client preferences. And if there's a different approach that needs to be taken in going after that opportunity in terms of product functionality? And is there an appetite to grow corporate within the mix? And if so, what unlocks better exposure to that underlying growth? Secondly, within Legal, we're seeing this structural uplift in tech investment from law firms, which adds support to your growth, but also can drive some degree of experimentation for new solutions around legal research and workflows. At what point would you expect firms to kind of consolidate how many products they're taking? And how do you think about your positioning against that consolidation? And then finally, on Risk, you called out strong new sales and insurance again now. Is there a specific product or line item driving this? And are those competitive displacements? Or is there something else at play here?

Well, I can address first the STM market. The corporate market is, we believe, an important future growth opportunity for us. It is a relatively small segment of our revenue today. And we believe that it is more commercially oriented, and as these tools that we build become higher value, more usable with new tools on top of our content that we see an opportunity to continue to sell and package those in a way that is more appropriate for the corporate market. We believe that we're going to continue to see that growth rate there pick up as well over time as those tools are developed, integrated to add more value. But it's a relatively small segment today. It's likely to be gradual, even though on some of the tools we've rolled out today, we've actually slightly faster uptake on the sales cycle than we do in the academic markets as early signs. So we're positive, but it's small and it's still going to be gradual. On the Legal tech?

So Henry, on the legal tech. And look, I think law firms will continue to evaluate and look at new technology and look at new tools. The legal research market clearly is very consolidated already with, obviously, the two big players, of which we're one. But if you look at the wider technology provided to law firms, which is a big market, and all commentators think that's going to grow quite significantly. Individual law firms may choose different strategies, but I'm sure they'll continue to experiment. And we think we have a strong offering to move into some of that market and to continue to add value in that more consolidated legal research market where we play. And your third question was on insurance and new sales. That business is going well. It is -- we continue to innovate. We continue to have new sources of data, and we touched on it earlier when we're talking about data coming off vehicles, from vehicles, about vehicles. For example, new identity data being brought to bear. We are using new data sources in different lines of insurance. So for example, using electronic health records for -- in the life insurance market, using aerial imagery or video taken inside the home, analyzed by AI to inform property. And these are additive. These are additive to what's already there. This is not typically displacing anything. It's -- these are not either/or type products. It's something that functionality and analytics that wasn't available before. And as we innovate and make it available, then it comes into the marketplace and helps the insurance companies become more efficient, helps them price risk more accurately and they see value in them, and that's what's driving the take-up.

As there are no further questions from the participants, I would like to turn the conference back over to Erik Engstrom, CEO, for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us this morning. I appreciate you listening to us and asking us questions. And I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we delivered strong financial results in the first half, and we made further operational and strategic progress. Underlying revenue growth was 7%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 9%. Adjusted earnings per share growth was 10% at constant currency, and we have announced a 7% increase in the pound sterling interim dividend. Group underlying revenue growth of 7% was in line with full year 2024, but with a higher quality growth profile. Risk with continued strong growth, STM with continued good growth and developing momentum, Legal with a further step-up in growth and Exhibitions now established at strong ongoing growth. On this chart, you can see the first half growth rate for each business area as well as the relative sizes of the segments within each of them. You can also see that we're showing print and print-related revenue separately here. I'll come back to that later. In Risk, underlying revenue growth was 8%, in line with full year 2024 and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 9%. Strong growth continues to be driven across segments by the development and rollout of higher value-add, deeply embedded AI- enabled analytics and decision tools with over 90% of divisional revenues coming from machine-to-machine interactions. Business Services continues to be driven by financial crime compliance and digital fraud and identity solutions and strong new sales. Insurance continues to be driven by further expansion of solution sets, positive market factors and strong new sales. For the full year, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In STM, now excluding print and print related, underlying revenue growth was 5%, in line with full year 2024, but with developing momentum supported by the increasing pace of new product introductions and renewals and new sales ahead of prior year across segments. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 7%. Data business and tools growth continues to be driven by higher value-add analytics and decision tools. Generative AI capability is now being extended across the majority of the revenue base. Primary research continues to be driven by very strong volume growth with article submissions growing by over 20% and articles published growing by 10%. During the first half, we launched ScienceDirect AI, adding generative AI to our primary research platform. For the full year, we expect continued good underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In Legal, also now excluding print and print related, underlying revenue growth improved further to 9%, driven by the continued shift in business mix towards higher growth, higher-value legal analytics. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was ahead of underlying revenue growth at 11% as we continue to manage cost growth below revenue growth. Lexis+ AI, our integrated platform leveraging generative AI has continued on its successful growth trajectory in the U.S. and international markets. Protégé, our next- generation AI legal assistant, which was launched earlier this year, is progressing well and is being expanded across products and geographies. For the full year, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered underlying revenue growth of 8% with strong ongoing growth now established above pre-pandemic levels. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 9% was ahead of underlying revenue growth with margins now significantly above pre-pandemic levels. We continue to make good progress with our growing range of value-enhancing digital tools. For the full year, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with an improvement in adjusted operating margin over the prior full year. Over the past 25 years, one of our key strategic themes was the print to electronic format transition. Over that period, print has gone from 64% of our revenue to 4%, and we believe that this strategic transition is now behind us. We'll continue to provide print versions of our content as a service to those customers who still prefer to receive our content in this format. But we're now managing and reporting our remaining print separately, focusing only on customer service and value. We believe that this removes the management distraction and improves transparency. Our strategic direction is unchanged. Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to our customers. Our growth objectives remain for Risk to sustain strong long-term growth in the current range, for STM and Legal to continue on their improving growth trajectories and for Exhibitions, to sustain strong long-term growth at the newly established level. When combined with our strategy of driving continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, the result is a higher growth profile with improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I'll be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and Q&A.

Thank you, Erik. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by providing more detail on the group financials. As Erik said, underlying revenue growth was 7% with underlying adjusted operating profit growth ahead of that at 9%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved to 34.8%. The strong operating results flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which at constant currency increased by 10%. Cash conversion was also very strong at 100%, and leverage was 2.2x, up from the year-end, reflecting the first half bias of dividend payments and the buyback. Given the strong financial performance, we are increasing the interim dividend by 7% to 19.5p per share. We spent GBP 262 million on 3 acquisitions in the first half, and we deployed GBP 1 billion after the planned GBP 1.5 billion for share buybacks for this year. Looking at revenue, you can see here how all 4 business areas contributed to the overall 7% underlying growth. As you've heard from Erik, we are now managing the distribution of print versions of our content separately. Consistent with this, we have separated out the reporting of print and print-related revenues and profits, as you see here. Prior period revenue and profit splits have been restated, and you'll find reconciliations to the prior half year and full year numbers in the press release. We've been proactively reducing our involvement in all print-related activities for many years, and we've stepped this up in the past 18 months through outsourcing, joint ventures and targeted asset disposals. As a result of these actions, we reduced our remaining exposure to print by another step in the first half of 2025. Total group revenue growth at constant currency was 4%. After portfolio effects in Risk, Legal and Exhibitions and after the step- down in print exposure that I just mentioned. In addition, there were cycling and timing effects in Exhibitions with 2025 being odd and hence, a cycling out year. In sterling, total revenue growth was 2%, impacted by the comparative strength of sterling against the U.S. dollar relative to H1 last year. Here, you can see the 9% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. We continue to manage cost growth below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, all 4 delivered underlying growth in AOP ahead of underlying revenue growth. The profit contribution from print and print-related activities declined in the first half, but at a lower rate than in revenues. Going forward, we expect profit from print and print-related activities to continue to decline in the high single digits each year, in line with historical trends. Revenue could sometimes come down in larger steps depending on the actions we take, such as outsourcing and joint ventures where a partner would record the revenue, but we would retain the majority of the associated profit. Total AOP growth in constant currency after portfolio changes and the impact of print and print related was 7%. There was a similar currency effect on profit as on revenue, giving AOP growth in sterling of 4%. With profit growth ahead of revenue growth, margins improved across the board, driving the overall improvement of 70 basis points to 34.8%. Margins are up by 30 and 40 basis points, respectively, in STM and Legal and up by 50 basis points in Risk, where there was also a benefit from portfolio effects. Exhibitions margins saw a further significant improvement, helped by prior year disposals with the 40.3% for this period, also reflecting the normal bias to higher margins in the first half of the year. Print and print-related margins are not meaningful given the dynamics of outsourcing and joint venture revenue and profit recognition that I mentioned earlier. Turning to the group adjusted income statement. You can again see the underlying growth of 7% in revenue and 9% in operating profit. The interest expense was largely unchanged with the same average effective interest rate of 4.1%, resulting in profit before tax up 7% at constant currency. The effective tax rate in the first half was 22.5%, in line with the prior full year. Net profit was up 8% at constant currency and up 5% in sterling to just under GBP 1.2 billion. With a lower share count as a result of the share buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 10% at constant currency and up 7% in sterling to 63.5p. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion was again very strong at 100%. EBITDA was GBP 1.9 billion, and CapEx was just over GBP 250 million, equating to 5% of revenue. After interest and tax, total free cash flow for the first half was over GBP 1.1 billion. And here's how we deployed that free cash flow. In the first half, we completed 3 small acquisitions for total consideration of GBP 262 million and 2 small disposals. The acquisition of IDVerse, an ID document verification platform for business services in Risk was announced in December, completed in the first quarter of this year. Dividend payments in the first half at GBP 124 million being last year's final dividend. As I said earlier, in the first half, we completed GBP 1 billion of the 2025 share buyback program. We deployed a further GBP 75 million on the buyback already in July. That leaves GBP 425 million of the program to be completed in the remainder of the year. Net debt at 30 June 2025 was just under GBP 7.5 billion. Including pensions, the ratio of net debt to EBITDA calculated in U.S. dollars was 2.2x, close to the middle of our typical range of 2 to 2.5x. With that, I will hand you back to Erik.

Thank you, Nick. Just to summarize what we have covered this morning. In the first half, we delivered strong financial results, and we made further operational and strategic progress. We continue to see positive momentum across the group, and we expect another year of strong underlying growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit as well as strong growth in adjusted earnings per share on a constant currency basis. With that, I think we're ready to go to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question today comes from Adam Berlin from UBS.

I've got three, if that's okay. My first question is there's been a lot of press around the U.S. changes and the National Institute of Health, in particular, over the last few months. And people have been focused on the negative of that. But I wanted to ask a more positive question, which is on the 1st of July, the NIH changed their open access policy. So any research they fund has to be published open access, and they were willing to fund APCs in order to make that a reality. And they're the first U.S. funding body to do this. Have you seen through July any additional revenues from APCs as that policy changed? And can that be a positive source of momentum in STM? That's my first question. The second question is also over the last few months, you made the decision to partner with Harvey in the Legal side to let them access your legal databases. Can you talk a little bit about the rationale for that decision and what you're hoping to achieve through that partnership? And then thirdly, you noted the better free cash flow conversion, which was, I think, related to a better working capital in the first half than last year. Is that connected at all with the change in the print segmentation? Or is that just a one-off effect and there's no kind of structural change to working capital and cash flow conversion?

Okay. I'm going to hand the third one to Nick, but let me start with the first two. As you know, we've been in this primary research publishing business, parts of our company, for over 200 years. And we've seen many changes in policies and announcement from different bodies around the world, and we will continue to see them going forward. When it comes to how the research publication model is funded and how people pay for it, we are here to be a service provider, and we're perfectly happy to provide any of our services and any payment model that our customers would like. And in this case, like most other changes, any one institution, any one location changing it slightly is not likely to have any impact on the trajectory that we are seeing. I mean we are seeing very strong article submissions across the board in Elsevier at the moment. We're continuing to see strong new sales and strong renewals. And I think this business has very positive momentum, but I don't think it's directly related to any one of these announcements of the one you mentioned being one. On the second question on our partnership with Harvey. The way we see everything we do in this company is tying it back to our #1 strategic objective, which is the organic development of increasingly sophisticated analytics and decision tools that add more value to our customers. That's what we try to do. But the main focus is on the issue of value to the customers. So if we see that something we are doing well and organic development we are doing that adds real value to the customer, if we see that the customer can actually get more value from those, if we have a slightly different embedding our distribution partnership with any other provider of services to those customer sets, that's something we would explore and consider. And in this situation, it's clear that Harvey has started to go after certain types of use cases in legal environment that is where we have not traditionally been focused and that those use cases would benefit from having a fairly seamless interaction with our tools when you're operating in those tools. So that's why we thought if this can add value to the customer and that puts us in a place that would add value that make it more seamless to interact with our tools, that would be a good thing for us to explore and to try to partner just like we do with other types of technology providers in other areas. That's what we're trying to do. If you ask them, which you can do directly, but I assume that they would say that they have a lot of tools, but it's very important that their users can actually anchor their outcomes or their results into true and trusted and verified content that can be cited and attached and so on, which is where our traditional strength comes. And also, we have a multitude of use cases that relate to the accuracy, the quality of the content and the history we have of serving many tens of thousands of law firms in doing that on a daily basis for decades. So we believe it adds value for the customer, first and foremost. We think it's a good thing for us to explore, and we think it's a good thing for our partner to explore. I'll hand the third one to Nick.

Yes, Adam, no material impact from what we're doing with print or print related as far as working capital is concerned. As you say, the cash conversion in the first half was strong at 100% in the high 90s is perhaps more normal, but it's just because of the exact timing of receipts and payments around the 30th of June. It's just the normal ebbs and flows.

Your next question comes from George Webb from Morgan Stanley.

I have three, please, and a couple of semi follow-ups to that. Just back on to the Harvey topic and digging into one of the parts there to the extent you can. As part of that announcement, there was a note that you'd kind of co-collaborate on some new workflow tools together. Could you kind of help us understand how you think about monetizing co-created products with someone like Harvey? Whose platform would that sit on? Would that sit within Lexis+ AI or Harvey? I wasn't too clear on that. Secondly, just given the resegmentation of print, could you add any color as to whether the magnitude of the print decline was similar across both STM and Legal? Or was one materially larger than the other? And then just lastly, with regards to where you're selling solutions to the U.S. government or the agencies across the entire business, whether that's Risk or subscriptions in STM and Legal. Have you seen anything notable in the first half in terms of shifting demand patterns? Or has that all been quite consistent with last year?

Again, I'll take the first, and then I'll hand the second over to Nick here. On Harvey, we are going to explore many different ways to figure out how to add value to our customers. And as you might already know, we have hundreds of different specific use cases that we're developing today organically. We picked a couple to work collaboratively as a pilot to see how we could do it if we work together. The concept is that we would share in it, we work in it, we come up with the best technological way to do it as we go along and see how that works for us and for them relative to all the other hundreds of use cases that we are working on. So I would see it pretty much as exploring a pilot way of co-developing solutions for specific use cases. And we will see how that goes and how we can do that going forward if we can then form a model. We're not trying to now declare the answer or declare a model, but we're exploring this in a couple of very specific use cases that we think we can both bring knowledge to add value to the customer. And a second one...

Yes. So George, I mean, it is both STM and Legal seeing the reduction of the step down in print. I think for this particular period, the proactive steps we've taken perhaps have a little bit more effect in STM than Legal, but I mean, it is across both of them. And of course, our focus is really on the retention of the profit, you can expect that to decline, as I said earlier, over time as print declines, but the revenue could step down more quickly as we take these proactive steps, but it is across both.

And on government, as I think we all know, there is a lot of media coverage coming about government initiatives or changes or potential changes in U.S. federal spending and initiatives. For us, what actually has happened on the ground has not been materially different so far this year from previous years. That might change, of course. But at the moment, your question was, have we seen it? Has it happened in the first half? No, it's been very similar.

That's really helpful. Can I just ask one final question just on the Exhibitions margin. It was clearly very strong in the first half, and I think the release called out a little bit of seasonality. Just when we think to the full year margin, is there any guidance you can give around either how you'd expect the cost base to be growing year-over-year or with regards to maybe potential like rough magnitude of margin expansion? Anything around that would be quite helpful.

Yes, George, you're absolutely right. The full year margins in Exhibitions are typically anything up to 5 points lower than for the first half, and that is just the seasonality. So for the full year, we would expect a decent improvement in margin, perhaps not quite as much as we had in the first half, but there'll still be benefit from those disposals as well as the underlying performance. So something of a similar order of magnitude.

Your next question comes from Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs.

I have a few questions as well. Just in Legal, obviously, we saw the improving momentum step-up in growth versus last year. Do you think now with printing being carved out, we could see a further acceleration to potentially 10% by the end of the year? Could that be possible? And could you also give us a bit more detail in Legal, so the share of revenue now coming from analytics and how that has improved versus last year? And what's the percentage of customers when the contracts up for renewal, what percentage of their customers actually now upgrade to analytics, thanks to obviously the new AI products? That's the first question for Legal. In STM as well, obviously, you mentioned developing the growth momentum in that division. Similar question, do you think we could see an acceleration towards that 6% potentially by the end of the year? And what's the actual level of uptake of AI products amongst your customers? I appreciate it's still early days. And the third one, just on Exhibitions. So you mentioned Exhibitions established as sort of -- that's a new level. Is that 8% basically a new level of growth we should be expecting going forward? Because it does look like you mentioned this is -- it sounds like it's a new level. So just wanted to confirm that. And how much of that is pricing versus volume? Anything you can share in terms of change of latest demand, rebooking trends or booking? Any additional color would be helpful.

Yes, I'll cover the first two, and then I hand the third over to Nick again. Legal, the growth rate, as you said, has now accelerated again and took another step up to 9% on the new basis, which is the real ongoing basis going forward. And you're asking, is this likely to pick up to 10% by the end of the year. The way I would look at it is we have very positive momentum in Legal with new product introductions, with customer reception of those products, with the value add that we can demonstrate and see and with the rollout of those products across the U.S. and internationally. So we are seeing very positive momentum and strong new sales. But you have to remember that Legal is now over 80% subscription and that the average subscription length is 3 years. And even commercially oriented law firms, they look at it seriously, they consider it and they try it. So I think that the momentum we have will continue to come through. It's their objective to continue to increase their growth rate over the next few years. And their objective is to continue to do that, continue to add more value and to grow faster, to continue to improve their growth trajectory. I don't believe it's realistic for that to come through this year. We would, of course, hope that it comes through soon, but I'm also not sure that you can expect it to pick up 1 percentage point every year forever. But their objective is to grow faster, unlikely to be this year. Not impossible that we can do it soon thereafter, but their objective is focused on the next few years, not on any 1 year or being able to round up in any one specific year. When it comes to the rollout and the penetration, we said last year, a couple of things that could help you on this is that when we have moved to higher value-add platforms before and we rolled them out, we said that I think Lexis+ reached about 80% penetration after about 4 years. That's sort of the traditional when it was really fully integrated analytics and really high value add. We said that Lexis+ AI is on a very, very similar trend. This is all by contract value that we're talking about. So that -- we were on that rate last year, if not a little bit better once we got going. We're on that rate now. We continue down that path. The penetration we're seeing. New sales, the vast majority are picking the AI integrated platform, the generative AI integrated platform, Lexis+ AI. When it comes to renewals, still the majority of the revenue that's being renewed is going into Lexis+ AI, and that relative proportion, it varies a little bit by month, but the trend is again upwards. And now that we're also seeing the rollout, the early rollout of Protégé, that's likely to then start adding some to that. But it's too early for us to really declare a penetration rate or rollout metrics on that because some of the functionalities in Lexis+ AI and some you do separately. So we can't really give you math on that yet after a few months. You said on pricing, also, we are seeing the uplift. The spend uplift is the way I would look at it because this enables you to use different tools and different use cases so that people want to include those and the spending uplift is similar to what we disclosed in our meetings last year and double-digit uplift. I think that answers your Legal questions. On STM, what you're seeing in STM on the AI tools is that we're seeing very similar value-add opportunity to what we're seeing in Legal, but it is significantly more fragmented and it has longer sales cycles. That means that things are coming through more gradually. It is more fragmented by product and platform, by customer and user type and by geography. So all 3 dimensions is more fragmented. And so that means that, for example, if you take the first introduction we had in Legal, we have Lexis+ AI. If you do that in the U.S., it's about 50% of the division's revenue base. The first product we had in STM, Scopus AI, that covered less than 5% of that division's revenue base, just as an illustration. And because you have the longer sales cycles, you can also see that the penetration curves that you had on the Legal side, they are shaped similarly but take longer. So we got to the sort of the benchmark 20% uptake level in Legal roughly after a year and in Scopus is roughly 18 months. But we see similar type of spend uplifts, double-digit spend uplift in both situations. So that gives you an illustration of the comparison. We believe that in STM over time, the opportunity is significant. We have launched a significant number of tools in the first half -- up until the first half this year. We're continuing to accelerate that. It's going to continue throughout the rest of the year and during next year. And we have expanded the Chief Product Officers from legal role to now ensure that we're running the process the same. We're using the same tools, the same processes, the same technologies in STM as we do in Legal. So the similarities are likely to become greater and not the other way around over the next 2 to 3 years.

And Lisa, your last question on Exhibitions. Obviously, we've now had 2 full half years where there's been no distortion from the COVID recovery. And so I think if you look back at those last 12 months and do the math, we've had growth of about 7% to 8% in that period. Obviously, this isn't a subscription business, and so there's going to be a bit more variability, but that's the sort of level -- the ongoing growth level strong that we're referring to. And clearly that's higher than it was pre-pandemic as a business. What's driving that is the value we're providing to customers. Obviously, we're expanding events wherever we can, attracting new exhibitors, doing more for existing exhibitors, including through the digital offerings, and that's what's really driving that growth.

Your next question comes from Nick Dempsey from Barclays.

I have three questions left. So first of all, if we look at the absolute numbers for the new print line, that was down 21%. Can you at least indicate how much of that fall year-on-year related to disposals? I understand that of the rest, we've now got to think about perhaps an underlying amount and then chunks that are going into JVs, and I can see why you want to strip that out of organic. But can you at least say how much related to disposals? Second question, in risk, when you look at the shopping events data that LexisNexis publishes, the comps become a lot tougher from right about here. So will that have a negative impact on the insurance growth in the second half? And if so, do you have other factors in the division that can balance that out? And then the third question, in terms of the potential cost and funding pressures on U.S. universities, I know you won't have started renewal conversations for 2026 probably yet. But have you had any conversations with U.S. universities where they are already suggesting that when they do come to renew, they will have to reduce their spend one way or another?

So Nick, I'll take the first one on the print. Clearly, our focus is on the value here and what we need to do with customers in terms of meeting their needs for print products and then value for us, which is all about the profitability. So it's not really about the revenue. And so when we're doing things like outsourcing, it's not a disposal, but that you're going to see times when the revenue steps down in larger steps, and that's certainly true in the first half of this year. But I think if you focus more on the profit and value, which is what we're doing, and that's more representative of the strategy going forward. Yes. I think just -- I mean, I said in the presentation, if you get the normal rate of decline in print that we've had historically, that's high single digit. And if you're modeling the profit, I would certainly look at that. And then the revenue is sometimes the bigger step, but hard to forecast.

And I'll cover the Risk question here. In Risk, the main driver of the long-term strong growth rate in Risk is the development and rollout of new higher value-add products. And as you know, we develop them, we test them, we see that they add value, and then they take typically up to 5 years to fully roll out and become fully installed and used in the marketplace. Therefore, we have pretty high visibility into the main driver of this business is of product pipeline, product development and rollout. Yes, there is some additional factors that come from the marketplace, but the main driver is the higher value-add products and the rollout. At this moment in time, we can see that both the big areas in Risk, Business Services and Insurance, are growing strongly at the core at the current run rate. And their product pipelines are strong and being rolled out strongly. And we're having strong new sales compared to prior year in both of those big areas. Yes, as you said, the shopping patterns last year were high and they were high -- well, they were high for a long time, but they were particularly high in the summer and fall months. That's not directly translating into something that's the main driver of the business. It's a small contributor in terms of positive market factors, but there are also positive market factors such as insurance price changes, policy price changes, cost of claims and so on that impact how insurance companies price and market, which can encourage switching and switching sometimes is correlated to the shopping volume. Sometimes it's not exactly. So we think that the market factors are going to continue to be good, not perhaps not as strong in shopping activity as last year in terms of growth rate, but it's still growing. It's still higher. And we believe that Risk -- both Insurance and Business Services are going to continue to do very well and continue to grow strongly this year, in line with historical trends. On the STM side, any given year over the last 200 years we've been involved in this, there are always parts of the world where there are institutions that are facing particularly challenging budget situations. And sometimes it's in several places, sometimes it's in some pockets. We don't believe that any one particular year historically has had any significant impact on the outlook or the growth rate for our STM division as a whole. We will always work with our customers. We are in a service business. We will make sure that we figure out a way for them to get the value that they would like to have from us within their actual budget constraints, the way they will turn out to be in any one year. But it hasn't historically impacted the rate of growth in that division in any significant way, and we don't expect that, that will be the case this time either.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Henry Hayden with Rothschild & Co Redburn.

Three questions, if I may. So the first is in Legal. I was curious as to what you're hearing from clients in terms of the state of demand. I mean, from where we sit, demand growth in legal industry seems to have been strong into the end of the year and particularly through H1. But wondering if you're picking up on more caution around that being tariff-related pull forward or if there's an expectation of that tempering. The second question is on Exhibitions. I was hoping you could offer some color on the incremental growth and margin contribution as you kind of increasingly ramp up the digital tools mix in the business? And how should we think about the adoption curve for those? And then finally, on the balance sheet, I was wondering how you're thinking about leverage vis-a-vis future M&A? Are you open to larger transactions at this stage given capacity? Or are you focusing on bolt-ons? And in the event of the former, would you be willing to go above the top end of that target leverage range kind of as you did with ChoicePoint in 2008? .

I'll cover the first, and I'll hand -- ask Nick to cover the next two here. I think your comments about what you're hearing on the legal industry are probably accurate. But given what is going on for us today in the legal industry, which is the significant value-add opportunity that we see to help our customers differently and the excitement we're seeing from our customer base about that new opportunity, we are focusing all our energy on how we can add more value to our customers through the new tools, the rollout of those, the new development of those, the development of additional use cases and doing them faster that I believe that value uplift that we can give our customers is so much more important for us as a service provider than any actual movement in the rate of growth in the industry itself. So that's where we are focused now. And I believe that you're going to continue to see increased penetration and increased take-up of these new higher value-add tools and platforms from us regardless of what happens to the exact trends in the industry itself.

And Henry, your question on Exhibitions growth, it's obviously coming from the overall value that we're offering to clients and expanding the event portfolio, doing more for the -- attracting new exhibitors and doing more for the existing ones. The digital offerings are very much part of that and they're very much part of the overall value that we're adding -- increasing all the time. They're not always priced separately. I mean they're part of the overall -- it's part of what is attracting exhibitors to come back and renew or take more space and so on. So it's hard to separate out, but it's obviously an important part of the overall growth dynamic. And your final question on leverage and acquisition. As you know, our primary focus is on the organic development of the business, and there's lots and lots of opportunities in front of us and you can -- we're talking about today that we're going after. We will make acquisitions where we see that they can enhance and accelerate the organic development. They do need to fit with what we're doing and fit in with that organic development, but we will make those. Obviously, what comes up in any one particular period can vary and it is a variable in our overall cash flows. But the leverage range is designed to accommodate that. So 2 to 2.5x is our typical range. We can sometimes go below that if acquisitions are limited for a period. We could go above that, of course, and quickly get it back in range because of the high cash generation. And so if it were to happen that 2 or 3 larger acquisitions [indiscernible] in one period, we've got plenty of room to do that. But the primary focus, I'd say, is on the organic development.

Your next question comes from Steve Liechti from Deutsche Bank.

I've got three as well, please, sorry. Just first one, event forward booking trends in Exhibitions. Just obviously what's going on in the world right now. Any changes that you're seeing by region or kind of vertical that you can call out? That's the first question. The second two questions, just checking my math. So on your group like-for-like, it's 7% on an ex print basis. If I take the delta in print, which is sort of the difference between the 2 first half figures, that's GBP 50 million of fall. And if I do that as a percentage of last year's revenue, that's 1 percentage point. So my question really is, why is your group like-for-like on the new basis, not 8%? Why is it 7%? And then the second question, just on Legal and Academic specifically like-for-likes, what would those like-for-likes have been on the old basis? I'm getting about just trying to work backwards about 1 percentage point. Is that about the right call for those 2 figures?

I'm going to ask Nick to cover all of those.

So Steve, the Exhibitions forward bookings, as you say, obviously, it varies between sectors and between geographies, but we've got a diverse portfolio, and I don't think there's anything in particular I'd call out. We're trending similarly. So I wouldn't pick out anything for you. The business is in good shape, and it's all about the value we're providing and what we're doing rather than worrying too much about the overall economic dynamics. Your question on the impact of print and the 7%, et cetera. Remember that the first half drop in revenue is -- I mean, it's partly a little bit of currency, of course. It's also disposals. It would not have all been in underlying, which is why we say that the -- if we had managed the group -- reported and managed the group on the same basis as last year, then the group total would have been 7%, including print, and it's obviously 7% excluding print, as you can see from these actual numbers. If you do that same logic for STM and Legal specifically, if we manage and reported on the same basis, as last time, which I think aligns with your math, STM would have been 4% in this period, in line with full year 2024. Legal would have been 8%. So we have seen the step-up from that to the 9%. So on a like-for-like basis, that's effectively a 1-point improvement in Legal and obviously, 2 points on the reported basis. But yes. Your math is pretty good.

That does conclude our question-and-answer session. I'd now like to turn the conference back over for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you for taking the time to join us this morning. I look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we delivered strong financial results in 2024 to make further operational and strategic progress. Underlying revenue growth was 7%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 10%. Adjusted earnings per share growth was 9% at constant currency. And we are proposing a 7% increase in the pound sterling full year dividend. All four business areas continue to perform well. And on this chart, you can also see the relative sizes of the segments within each business area. In Risk, underlying revenue growth was 8% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 9%. Strong growth continues to be driven across segments by our deeply embedded AI-enabled analytics and decision tools with over 90% of divisional revenue coming from machine-to-machine interactions. Business Services continue to be driven by Financial Crime Compliance and Digital Fraud & Identity Solutions with strong new sales. Insurance was driven by further extension of solution sets across markets, continued positive market factors and new sales. Specialized Industry Data Services was led by Commodity Intelligence, and Government continue to be driven by analytics and decision tools. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In STM, underlying revenue growth was 4% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 5%. Growth continued to be driven by the development of analytics and further evolution of the business mix, with higher growth segments representing an increasing proportion of divisional revenue and remaining print shrinking at a faster pace than historical averages. Databases, Tools & Electronic Reference was driven by further development and rollout of higher value-add analytics and decision tools. Primary Research was driven by volume growth. The number of articles submitted continued to grow very strongly across the portfolio by over 20%, and the number of articles published grew by 15%. Going forward, we expect continued good underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In Legal, underlying revenue growth improved further to 7%, up from 6% last year, driven by the continued shift in business mix towards higher-value legal analytics. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was ahead of underlying revenue growth at 9% as we continue to manage cost growth below revenue growth. Lexis+, our integrated platform, leveraging extractive AI, continued to perform well. And Lexis+ AI, leveraging generative, made good progress in the U.S. and in international markets. Protégé, our recently launched next-generation generative AI legal assistant, which we demonstrated in our legal seminar last October, has been positively received by our customers. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered underlying revenue growth of 11%, reflecting the improved growth profile of our event portfolio and the favorable first half comparison to the prior year. We continue to make good progress with our growing range of value-enhancing digital tools and the improvement in profitability reflects the structurally lower cost base. Going forward, we expect strong underlying revenue growth with an improvement in adjusted operating margin over the prior full year. Our strategic direction is unchanged. Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to our customers. Our growth objectives remain, for Risk, to sustain strong long-term growth in the current range; for both STM and Legal, to continue on the improving growth trajectory; and for Exhibitions, to continue on the improved long-term growth profile. When combined with our strategy of driving continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, the result is a higher growth profile with improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I'll be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and Q&A.

Thank you, Erik. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by providing more detail on the group financials. As Erik said, underlying revenue growth was 7% with underlying adjusted operating profit growth ahead of that at 10%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved by just under 1 percentage point to 33.9%. The improved operating result flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which at constant currency increased by 9%. Cash conversion was again strong at 97%, contributing to a reduction in leverage to 1.8x, slightly below our typical range. Given the strong overall performance, we are proposing an increase in the full year dividend of 7% to 63p per share. Our acquisition spend was slightly below our normal range with GBP 195 million on five acquisitions, and we made seven disposals with aggregate consideration of GBP 95 million, and we deployed GBP 1 billion on share buybacks. Looking at revenue, you can see here the drivers of the overall 7% underlying growth. Continued strong growth in Risk, good growth in STM, strong growth with a further pickup in Legal and strong growth in Exhibitions. Electronic revenue, representing 83% of the total, saw 7% underlying growth with the strong growth in face-to-face activity offsetting the effects of the print decline. Total revenue growth at constant currency for the group was 6%, with the impact of disposals more than offsetting acquisitions and the benefit from 2024 being a cycling in year for Exhibitions. In sterling, total revenue growth was 3%, impacted by the relative strength of sterling against the dollar and the euro in particular. Here you can see the 10% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. We continue to manage cost growth below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, Risk, STM and Legal each delivered underlying profit growth 1 or 2 percentage points ahead of underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered very strong underlying profit growth, reflecting the increase in activity levels in the first half as well as the structurally lower cost base. Portfolio effects were a slight drag, leaving total growth in constant currency at 9%. There was a similar currency effect on profit as there was on revenue giving adjusted operating profit growth in sterling at 6%. With profit growth ahead of revenue growth, margins improved across all four business areas, driving the overall improvement of 80 basis points to 33.9%. Margins were up by 60 basis points in Risk, 40 in STM and 50 in Legal. Exhibitions margins saw a further significant improvement by 250 basis points and are now well ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Turning to the group adjusted income statement. You can see here the underlying growth of 7% in revenue and 10% in operating profit. The interest expense was slightly lower with a slightly lower effective interest rate and some currency benefit. That left profit before tax up 11% at constant currency and up 7% in sterling. The effective tax rate was 22.5%, up from the prior year, which had the benefit of some nonrecurring tax credits. Net profit was up 8% at constant currency and up 4% in sterling to just over GBP 2.2 billion. With a lower share count as a result of the share buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 9% at constant currency and up 5% in sterling to 120.1p. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion was 97%, similar to last year. EBITDA was over GBP 3.7 billion, and CapEx was GBP 484 million, equating to 5% of revenue. After interest and tax, total free cash flow was over GBP 2.1 billion. And here's how we deployed that free cash flow. We completed 5 small acquisitions for a total consideration of GBP 195 million, the most significant of which was the Henchman technology business in Legal, which brings enhanced functionality to the Protégé offering. In December, we announced the acquisition of IDVerse, an ID document verification platform for Business Services and Risk. Completion is expected in the first quarter of this year. We also made 7 small disposals in 2024 for aggregate consideration of GBP 95 million. Dividend payments were GBP 1.1 billion. And as I mentioned earlier, we completed GBP 1 billion of share buybacks. Overall, year-end net debt increased slightly to just under GBP 6.6 billion. However, with the increased EBITDA, leverage fell 1.8x. Our priorities for use of cash remain unchanged. Organic development is our #1 priority with CapEx consistently around 5% of revenues. We augment that organic development with selective acquisitions with the level of spend typically being the most significant variable in our uses of cash, depending on the opportunities that arise. Average acquisition spend over both the last 5 and 10 years has been around GBP 400 million, with 2024 a below average year. We pay out around half of our adjusted earnings in dividends, and have increased the dividend every year for well over a decade. Leverage defined as net debt to EBITDA, has typically been in the 2.0 to 2.5x range. Strong cash generation, improving EBITDA and modest acquisition spend in the year and the leverage at the end of 2024 was below that typical range at 1.8x. We continue to return our surplus capital through the share buyback with GBP 1.5 billion of spend announced today for 2025, of which GBP 150 million has already been deployed. With that, I will hand you back to Erik.

Thank you, Nick. Just to summarize what we have covered this morning. In 2024, we delivered strong financial results, and we made further operational and strategic progress. Going forward, we continue to see positive momentum across the group and we expect another year of strong underlying growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit as well as strong growth in adjusted earnings per share on a constant currency basis. And with that, I think we're ready to go to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from George Webb with Morgan Stanley.

I'll kick off with a couple of financial questions, if I can. Firstly, just on the buyback that you kind of mentioned, given the bump curve, GBP 1.5 billion in 2025, seems somewhat noticeable maybe from a messaging perspective, and I appreciate you've laid out the cash priorities. It seems like this year, the dividend plus the buyback could exceed kind of free cash flow generation. So if you could just talk a little bit about, is there a message behind that? Is this a new platform GBP 1.5 billion that maybe you can run at an increase from going forward? Secondly, just on the working capital of the business, kind of curious where you're seeing the working capital builds over the last couple of years? I think it's about GBP 150 million out in 2024, GBP 115 million out in 2023. So whether that's segments or more broadly, where is that being driven from?

Yes, George, I'll take those. Look, I think on the buyback, obviously, with growing EBITDA, as you know, if you're going to maintain leverage, you have to have shareholder returns that exceed free cash flow after acquisition spend. So with a relatively low acquisition spend that just gives us more surplus capital, which is reflected in the buyback. And obviously, last year was in net only -- actually spend of only GBP 100 million because not only was it a below average year on the acquisition front but we were more proactive on the disposal side. So that overall organic drive of shifting the business mix towards high-value analytics, our ability to accelerate that organically is obviously key, but we're more proactive on the disposal front as well. So you're seeing that coming through in the overall structural growth profile of the group, and you're seeing that come through in the cash flows and hence, in the buyback. And your second one on working capital, I mean, no particular swings in there. Remember, we have -- it's GBP 3 or GBP 4 billion of assets in the working capital and the GBP 3 billion or GBP 4 billion of liabilities. It's a net negative working capital position that we always operate in, but you do see swings from year-to-year. Obviously, as Exhibitions has ramped back up to full activity levels, there have been some working capital swings in there, but there's nothing systematic in that. And overall, you can see the cash conversion still in the high 90s.

The next question comes from Adam Berlin with UBS.

I just wanted to ask a few questions on STM, if I could. The first question is, you talked last year, the print declines in STM were above market -- normal level or normal speed. What's the trend in the first kind of 6 weeks of 2025, any improvement in that? Or is it still going to be a big drag in 2025 as well? My second question was there's been quite a noise in the White House around Trump defunding various federal agencies, including some of the agencies that fund research. Can you just talk about the timelines of that? Like, how long does it take for that to have an impact on the amount of research being funded, research produced in the U.S.? And is it something you're worried about at all? And then my third question is, I think Erik mentioned in his presentation that article submissions over 20%, published articles growing over 15%. It's amazing after COVID that these trends have been sustained. Can you just explain what you think is going on? Are you taking share from kind of poor quality journals or is it just higher overall research funding, it's just something that's really surprising that 4 years after COVID we're still seeing this level of growth.

Well, I'll do my best to try to answer these. First of all, the print decline. As you know, the #1 strategic priority for the company is to drive the improving long-term growth rate of the company through higher value-add analytics and decision tools and to create a business mix shift towards those higher value add, higher growth segments. And this is particularly present still in STM, where we're focusing most of our time at the top end improvement as we've talked about many times, but we're also trying to be more proactive on the bottom end, which means that we're trying to move faster out of the print segment on an organic basis, and we're also doing some more disposals of some noncore portfolios at the bottom end, as Nick mentioned. But that's a good thing, and it's what we're trying to drive strategically, but it also has the side effect of in the short term, slightly higher than historical print declines. So what we have seen are print drag. We've seen that now for the last -- it's probably a couple of years where it's been above average, historically. And it's hard to tell what's going to happen looking 1 year out because the beginning of the year is not the main driver of that, that tends to build throughout the year and the heavier print periods are during the summer and then towards the end of the year. So I don't know what's going to happen during 2025. But the one thing we're 100% certain of is that over time, the print segment is going to shrink down to be very small and the print drag is basically ultimately going away. And that's what we're driving towards strategically. On research funding, I think it's important to point out that we've been in the scientific research publishing business now for over 200 years, and we have customers in 180 countries. And we've seen quite a few changes in the world economy in -- we've seen quite a few elections and changes in government and funding levels. And our objective is basically to continue to serve that industry throughout all those changes no matter what happens. And we think we can continue to do so successfully. But the main driver of growth in the research publishing business is the volume growth, which is driven by the number of researchers first and foremost, and then by the global growth in research spend, and that tends to cut across time periods and across regions and funding areas. What exactly will happen with the funding of specific U.S. research agencies, it's very hard for us to have an opinion on it. But direct funding from U.S. government on our research articles is a low single-digit percent basically. So we don't focus much on what that timeline will be or how that could flow through because these cycles have always come and gone over many, many years. The last question was article growth. And as I said, this is the main driver in the long term of the growth of the STM division, and it has continued to be very strong. During COVID and post-COVID, there's a bit of a time shift that you accurately pointed out. But now I think what happened last year was more of an issue of volume flowing a little more than usual to the higher quality tiers of journals. I mean we have around 3,000 journals, and they're mostly positioned in the upper quartile of quality of journals. So if there is a little bit of uncertainty, a little bit more attention being paid to the question on scientific fraud or research fraud, people tend to migrate towards the larger, high-quality providers. And our objective is always to try to be higher quality than the other major providers, better technology platform and technology tools than the other majors, but still operate at least the same or even better value or pricing equation for our customers. So therefore, we're trying to make sure that we're always positioned that way. And if we do that right, that means we should gradually seek out slightly improved share in the higher tiers over time. I personally believe that the submission growth rates to us are going to normalize relatively soon and that over the next 5 years or 10 years, we'll likely get back to an average of submission growth to us in the high single digits in a typical year. But that's a personal opinion. I can't tell you any direct mathematical evidence that that's happening. At this point in time, it's continuing to grow strongly. But I would expect that to moderate over time.

The next question comes from Nick Dempsey with Barclays.

I've got three left, please. So first of all, just sticking with STM, we've seen a few U.K. universities that have chosen to drop the big deal as they are struggling financially. As to Adam's question, we know a few universities in the U.S. are likely to be seeing some financial hardship if some of these cuts to the funding go through. So I'm wondering whether there are financial difficulties at the universities in other countries? And whether you are seeing an uptick in universities looking to drop the big deal? I know if it's a few of them, it won't make a difference, but I'm wondering if it's a trend. The second question. You've talked about Exhibitions being able to achieve better organic revenue growth than in the past on a permanent basis. And it sounds like you'll remain confident on that. Do you think that Exhibitions can also deliver more margin improvement than in the past on the back of that higher growth as a permanent effect? Third question, just on Protégé. Can you talk about how the take-up of this product should logically flow into numbers and you encourage lots of customers to start taking this up even if their subscription is not up for renewal, but jump in mid subscription? And will you get firms taking it up for the whole firm? Or are you seeing kind of early adopter department, therefore, it flows in a bit more gradual?

Yes. On your first question, the STM side, every year, there are some customers somewhere in the world that are going through financial difficulties. And as I said before, we've been in this business for over 200 years. We always try to work directly with any one institution to figure out what's the best way for us to serve them and help them reach their objectives. We have not seen a specific trend break or any change in the overall numbers, given that we serve, order of magnitude, 15,000 institutions around the world. There are always some every year that are going through difficulties. We will work with those, but we have not seen a trend change, and we have not seen any volume of people going in one direction or the other. The long-term trends are very clear that our customers tend to be taking larger and larger shares of what we serve them, and they also tend to have more and complex combinations of services in their agreements with us, whether that involves portions of pay-to-read and pay-to-publish and other types of things that we can offer them. So the bottom line on it is there's no trend break. We're continuing to see strong growth. Number two, on Exhibitions. Yes, everything we have seen so far indicates that the exhibition business, the way we now operate it and the way we're now building organic growth initiatives into it, that this should be a higher value add and higher organic growth business going forward than it was pre-COVID. And as you said, yes, it is also definitely a much higher margin business than it was before COVID. We're already at significantly higher margins than we were before. And because the way we have now structured the business, the way we run the business, there should be a larger gap between the organic revenue growth, the underlying revenue growth and the underlying cost growth, there should be a wider gap between that than we had before, and therefore, that on a 2-year basis because we have cycling, the margin should continue to increase every year, but over time, also increase at a faster pace than it did before COVID. On the last point on Protégé. This was launched commercially now a couple of weeks ago. And we're literally in the early days of this. We have had several customers sign up already and opt in, but it's very early in that process. We get very positive feedback. We get very positive user feedback. A lot of customers are very interested, but it's too early to tell how the actual adoption curve will develop. I mean, as I've said before, the Lexis+ and Lexis+ AI curve have gone very well, and we updated you on that at our seminar in October, but it's really still too early to talk about Protégé other than it's been a very positive launch.

The next question comes from Sami Kassab with BNP Paribas.

Three questions as well, please. The first one is on Legal. How much of the acceleration in Legal from 6% to 7% was driven by GenAI products versus older legal analytics products that are still ramping up and driving growth? In other words, is the GenAI-driven acceleration still ahead of us? Secondly, on STM, in November '22 at the STM Investor Day, the message was growth will accelerate. It has not accelerated in '23. It has not accelerated in '24. Share price has gone up. PE has gone up. Given the mix shift, given [ India ], given the article volume growth you're talking about, do you think STM organic revenue growth can accelerate to 5% in '25? And lastly, on Exhibitions. You sold out of Austria last December. Have you identified other markets or other verticals you would consider exiting from?

I'll ask Nick to cover question -- the first question on the Legal growth rate impact as well as the Exhibitions side. But maybe I'll first focus on STM. Yes, it's very clear to us and probably clear to you that the growth objective for STM is to continue to improve the underlying growth rate, and we believe that our strategy of changing the business mix shift will drive that. Number one, because the faster growth, higher value-add segments become a larger proportion of the division; and number two, because when we add the higher value-add tools and analytics on top of the existing databases on tools, customers tend to see more value, therefore, want more and spend more. So that the absolute growth rate in that segment should over time continue to improve. At the same time, part of this acceleration is to reduce the print drag at the bottom. And as we're driving to get to that endpoint of a much higher growth business over time, we're trying to drive it there faster. That means that in that transition, the print drag is higher during that time period, which is why you have not seen a further acceleration in the divisional growth rate in the last 2 years. Whether that is going to come through in 2025 or later, that depends quite a bit on the trajectory of the relatively transactional and unpredictable lumpy print tail that's left and we're trying to get out of it faster, which might mean that it continues to drag a bit. But over time, we're confident that this is a business that is moving towards a higher underlying long-term growth trajectory, just like the other divisions.

Sami, your question on the Legal growth. Obviously, every year, the growth in our businesses and the growth in Legal is driven by new product introduction, increased adoption of those products by our customers. In Legal's case, greater adoption of legal analytics. So clearly, in 2024, Lexis+ AI was an important component of that new product introduction that you see coming through. Lexis+ was still being rolled out. Increased adoption was still coming through, but Lexis+ AI was an important component. Obviously, we're continuing to innovate. And we've talked about on this call. Protégé is the next-generation product. So you'll keep seeing that going forward. And your question on Exhibitions. Yes, we have sold out of our Austrian business. It was a slightly different business, we've had some sand building in it, had some venue management in it, so it's slightly different. I'm sure there are other small things that will continue to -- things don't offer the same growth opportunity and the fit in the portfolio going forward. But that was -- together with the other things we sold last year, they did aggregate the disposal out of acquisitions are about 5% of the revenue base, of which generally sort of 1% really has affected 2024. So you'll see more of that come through in '25, but I'm sure there'll be other things in the future, but maybe not quite as big as that all in 1 year, which is perhaps a bit unusual.

The next question comes from Henry Hayden with Redburn Atlantic.

Three questions, if I may. Just first on risk. It was nice to see kind of an uptick in margin expansion for 2024. I was curious as to how we should think about the balance between margin expansion in that division and organic growth going forward? And where should we expect the contribution from new products to go from the current levels? The second one is on costs. So other data and analytics companies that we cover have been talking about rising cloud costs impacting their margin outlook. And I was just wondering what this means for RELX, how much of cloud costs as a percentage of your total operating expense and will this be a headwind to margins as you continue this mix shift towards analytics tools? And then finally, just on STM. I was wondering if we could get an update on kind of the state of adoption for analytics tools in that division, both with and without AI overlays, how you see the growth profile of those products going forward? And should we, alongside that expect more investment in that division?

Well, I'll take the first and the third now and I'll let Nick to cover the second question. So in Risk, the contribution from new product first, as you've probably seen on the 24 slides, we have those at the back in the appendix, I think, on the presentation, what many people refer to as the green-orange slide. Well, you can see that the contribution from new product launches and the rollout of recently introduced products continued to be the main driver of growth in Risk and it continues to stay at the strong levels it has been now for many years. And in addition, of course, the markets are growing, and we are seeing increased adoption and growth rate in our mature products as well, which is the other segment on that. But I expect that to continue. We're very focused here on maintaining a very strong pipeline of new developments of higher value-add tools that are then being introduced and rolled out, and we're seeing strong new sales of those tools across Risk. So I think that's an organic innovation machine that's continuing to run very well. On the second question on that or the first part of your risk question, how do we look at the margin versus growth? We don't see it as a trade-off. Our number one priority in Risk is the organic development of the new high value-add tools and the people working on building and launching and rolling out those tools are 100% focused on that. And they do as much of that as they can handle and as our customers can introduce and adopt and rollout. Separately, we run our cost base. And the people running our cost base do as much as they can to manage process innovation and leveraging new technologies to do everything they can to manage their cost growth below revenue growth. So everything we do all the time in the Risk division should be better, faster and cheaper every single year all the time forever. And that's really a separate initiative, but equally important to our business. So we don't see there's a real trade-off of margin versus growth, but we have guided again to the fact that our cost growth, we are going to continue to manage our cost growth in Risk to be slightly below our revenue growth. So all else being equal, on the portfolio side, you're likely to continue to see a slight increase eking up on a like-for-like margin each year over time.

And Henry, your question on cloud costs. I mean they're relatively small both to our overall cost base actually. And clearly, we have been increasing our spend with the cloud providers over the last 2 years, but that has been as we shifted out of our own data centers. So net-net, that's clearly been a significant cost saving and an efficiency. And now as we go forward, we're continually finding ways of making our use of cloud more efficient, our use of the large language models more efficient. And we're clearly putting more volume through as we introduce new products and so on, but we're finding efficiency savings as we do that. And clearly also, we're using the things that we're developing in the cloud, not just in our products, but also internally. We're using AI, generative AI and AI more broadly internally to help make ourselves more efficient, so those cost initiatives that Erik referred to. So notwithstanding the fact that spend in cloud has increased but I think overall, we continue to be confident that we can keep managing cost growth below revenue growth as we continue to invest in the new product introduction soon.

So on the third question, STM analytics decision tools, we have this segment in there that we refer to as databases and tools, which is, as we've said, becoming a larger and larger portion of it because our customers see the value, we get increased adoption across the global customer base, and they tend to inherently grow faster. That is before we have done any significant step-up on what we consider the newer generative AI-based tools, many of the analytics and decision tools that we have been selling for several years have components of what we call extractive AI machine learning contributions to the algorithms and that's been well received and growing well and continuing to grow well from our customers. During 2024, we also saw the commercial launch of three different generative AI-based tools during the year, but they've only been out a few months, and there is not a lot of history of using these kind of tools in those subsegments. And therefore, as it's relatively early days, our customer base in STM are historically customers that take slightly longer to work themselves through the sales cycle and also have different regulatory and other scientific and compliance constrains on how they need to verify and test new tools before they install them and roll them out. So we're seeing slightly longer sales cycles there than we've seen on the generative AI tools in Legal. But we have launched three what I consider main GenAI-based commercial introductions during 2024. There will be more to come in 2025.

The next question comes from Steve Liechti with Deutsche Numis.

Just a few questions. Just on STM. Would you mind giving us the hard revenue breakdown numbers that you've given previously at these results figures? You mentioned a couple of times, for instance, database and tools. What kind of percentage is that now in fiscal '24? And secondly, I just wanted to just clarify your low single-digit figure that you said for U.S. government. Can you just clarify exactly what that figure is in terms of direct spend? And then give us any kind of clues in terms of U.S. spend of total global research budgets? And if you have a government figure within that, and Google tells me the overall U.S. is about 30%. Just some clarification there. And then finally, on Events, the second half like-for-like revenue, if my calculation is correct, is about 6%, just double checking that number? And also just trying to work out whether that's a sort of a reasonable number to extrapolate the growth into fiscal '25 and '26 on a normalized basis?

Let me look at those. Maybe I'll do them in reverse order here. I'll start with the RX. As you know, there's seasonality as well as rounding and timing, different industries at different time of the year, different exhibitions, different time of the year. So I'm not sure you can do the math exactly that way. But I think you should look at it this way that before COVID, Exhibitions had an underlying like-for-like growth rate of 5% to 6%, and our objective is to make sure that we operate that with slightly higher underlying revenue growth on an annual basis going forward. So that will give you an indication of where we think we are on our annualized run rate at this moment. The second question -- let's look at -- well, let's look at the first one first, the easy one. The hard breakdown of the numbers. Broadly speaking, in STM, the numbers that we've given to you before, we had them during 2024, can only move a fraction of a percent each year. So basically, you have database tools and electronic reference, by the time you add them up together, it's around 40% of the division, other mid-single-digit percentage sort of corporate primary research, about 45% of the division is primary research, academic and government. And now we're down to about 9% sort of print and other face-to-face related. So it's pretty much those numbers within 0.5 point or 1 point or so. When it comes to U.S. spend, Well, the numbers I gave were sort of direct spend and direct spend with us, which also tends to mirror a little bit their portion of the articles that we publish and so on. It's in that range that we mentioned. There are so many other ways to measure research spend in the world and its impact that I don't want to get into the definition of global research spend. We tend to be a very international company. We operate historically across countries, we operate on multi-country funding, we operate with -- an average article published through us has 5 to 6 authors often across borders. And we tend to have slightly higher market share in newer, faster-growing economies than we have in older, established economies in Europe and the U.S. So I don't want to try to get into the global research spend allocation between countries.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Erik Engstrom for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much for joining us on the call this morning. I very much look forward to talking to you again soon.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we delivered strong financial results in the first half, and we made further operational and strategic progress. Underlying revenue growth was 7%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 10%. Adjusted earnings per share growth was 10% at constant currency, and we have announced a 7% increase in the pound sterling interim dividend. All four business areas continue to perform well. And on this chart, you can also see the relative sizes of the segments within each business area. In Risk, underlying revenue growth was 8% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 9%. Strong growth continues to be driven across segments by our deeply embedded AI-enabled analytics and decision tools, with 90% of divisional revenues now coming from machine to machine interactions. In Business Services, which represents around 45% of divisional revenue, growth continued to be driven by Financial Crime Compliance and digital Fraud & Identity solutions, with new sales strengthening further. In Insurance, which represents just under 40% of divisional revenue, growth was driven by further expansion of solution sets across markets, continued positive market factors and new sales. In Specialized Industry Data Services, which represents just over 10% of divisional revenue, growth was led by Commodity Intelligence and Aviation. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In STM, underlying revenue growth was 4%. Development of analytics continue to drive the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth segments. This business mix shift accelerated in the first half. A further improvement in the electronic revenue growth rate was offset by the remaining Print revenue shrinking roughly twice as fast as usual. In Databases, Tools & Electronic Reference and Corporate Primary Research, which together represents around 45% of divisional revenue, growth was driven by further development and rollout of higher value add analytics and decision tools. Primary Research, Academic & Government segments, which also represents around 45% of divisional revenue, continue to be driven by volume growth. The number of articles submitted grew very strongly by over 20% across the portfolio so far this year and the number of articles published grew by 15%. Going forward, we expect continued good underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In Legal, underlying revenue growth improved further to 7%, up from 6% last year, driven by the continued shift in business mix towards higher-value legal analytics. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was ahead of underlying revenue growth at 9%, as we continue to manage cost growth below revenue growth. In Law Firms & Corporate markets, which account for over 60% of divisional revenue, Lexis+, our integrated analytics offering, leveraging extractive AI, continues to perform well. The rollout of Lexis+ AI, our new platform leveraging generative AI, is making good progress. During the first half, we've continued to update and extend this functionality in the U.S. and launched in international markets. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered underlying revenue growth of 16%, reflecting the improved growth profile of our event portfolio and the favorable comparison with the early part of the prior year. We have continued to make good progress with our growing range of value-enhancing digital tools and the improvement in profitability reflects the structurally lower cost base. Going forward, we expect strong underlying revenue growth with an improvement in adjusted operating margin over the prior full year. Our strategic direction is unchanged. Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher-growth analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to our customers. We develop and deploy these tools across the company by leveraging deep customer understanding to combine leading content and data sets with powerful artificial intelligence and other technologies. This has been a key driver of the evolution of our business for well over a decade, and will remain a key driver of customer value and growth in our business for many years to come. Our growth objectives are: for Risk, to sustain strong long-term growth in current range; for both STM and Legal, to continue on the improving growth trajectory; and for Exhibitions, to continue on the improved long-term growth profile. When combined with our strategy of driving continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, the result is continued strong earnings growth with improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I will be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and Q&A.

Thank you, Erik. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by providing more detail on the group financials. As Erik said, underlying revenue growth was 7%, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth ahead of that at 10%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved by just over 1 percentage point to 34.1%. The improved operating result flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which at constant currency, also increased by 10%. Cash conversion was again strong at 95%, and leverage was 2.0x, unchanged from the year-end. Given the strong overall performance, we have been able to increase the interim dividend by 7% to 18.2p per share. We spent GBP 61 million on two acquisitions in the first half, and we deployed GBP 700 million out of the planned GBP 1 billion for the share buyback this year. Looking at revenue, you can see here the drivers of the overall 7% underlying growth, continued strong growth in Risk, sustained growth in STM, another pickup in growth in Legal and strong growth in Exhibitions. Electronic revenue, representing 84% of the group total, saw 7% underlying growth, with a strong growth in face-to-face activity offsetting the higher-than-usual Print decline. Total revenue growth at constant currencies for the group was also 7% after some portfolio effects in Risk, STM and Legal, and after cycling and timing as well as portfolio effects in Exhibitions. In sterling, total revenue growth was 3%, impacted by the comparative strength of sterling relative to H1 last year. Here, you can see the 10% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. We continue to manage cost to keep cost growth below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, Risk, STM and Legal each delivered underlying growth in AOP ahead of underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions underlying AOP growth was more than double its revenue growth. Overall, portfolio effects were net neutral, leaving total AOP growth in constant currency, also at 10%. There was a similar currency effect on profit as there was on revenue, giving AOP growth in sterling of 7%. With profit growth ahead of revenue growth, margins improved across the board, driving the overall improvement of 1.1% to 34.1%. Margins were up by 30 and 40 basis points, respectively, in STM and Legal, and up by 60 basis points in Risk, where there was some additional help from portfolio changes. Exhibitions margin is now well ahead of the levels from 2018 and 2019, was at 37.1% for this period, reflecting the normal historical bias to higher margins in the first half of the year. Turning to the group adjusted income statement, you can see the underlying growth of 7% in revenue and 10% in operating profit. The interest expense was largely unchanged, with higher average debt offset by a fractionally lower effective interest rate. Profit before tax up 11% at constant currency and up 7% in sterling. The effective tax rate in the first half was 23%, up from the prior year, which had the benefit of some nonrecurring tax credits. Net profit was up 8% at constant currency and up 4% in sterling to just over GBP 1.1 billion. With the lower share count as a result of the share buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 10% at constant currency and up 6% in sterling to 59.5p. Turning to cash flow. Cash conversion was 95%, in line with the same period last year. EBITDA was over GBP 1.8 billion, and CapEx was GBP 233 million, equating to 5% of revenue. After interest and tax, total free cash flow for the first half was just over GBP 1 billion. And here's how we deployed that free cash flow. In the first half, we completed two small acquisitions for a total consideration of GBP 61 million, with three small disposals for a similar aggregate amount. Last week, meaning it was in the second half, of course, we completed the acquisition of Henchman. Henchman is a legal technology business which will give us a leading capability to integrate our generative AI solutions with law firms' internal document management systems. Dividend payments in the first half were GBP 782 million being last year's final dividend. As I said earlier, we completed GBP 700 million of the 2024 share buyback program in the first half. We have deployed a further GBP 50 million on the buyback already in July with at least GBP 250 million of the program to be completed in the remainder of the year. Net debt at 30th of June 2024 was just under GBP 7 billion. Including pensions, the ratio of net debt to EBITDA calculated in U.S. dollars, was 2.0x, the same as last year-end, and down from 2.2x 12 months before. With that, I will hand you back to Erik.

Thank you, Nick. Just to summarize what we have covered this morning. In the first half of 2024, we delivered strong financial results and we made further operational and strategic progress. The improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in our business mix towards higher growth, higher value analytics and decision tools. Going forward, we continue to see positive momentum across the group, and we expect another year of strong underlying revenue growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit as well as strong growth in adjusted earnings per share on a constant currency basis. And with that, I think we're ready to go to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from George Webb with Morgan Stanley.

I'd like to kick off with a few questions, please. Firstly, no surprise there continues to be a lot of investor focus on the Legal segment. So around the pace of rollouts of Lexis+ AI, can you give any sense on the kind of proportion of customers that have taken it up so far maybe in the U.S. market? Or maybe ensure -- you may well be tracking this. But if you're at 7% underlying now, do you feel this gives you a platform to actually potentially accelerate further as the rollout continues through this year and next? Secondly, and a little bit tied to that question, can you help fill in what you think is happening with legal firms' budgets around tech? Are these AI tools in any way cannibalizing the budget allocation that might have gone into areas like legal analytics? Or are their tech wallets just expanding in more of a step-change way? And then lastly, on the STM business, you talked about strong growth on the article side and on the commission side. Given some of the construction we've seen at the pure open access publishers over the past year or 2, and I'm curious as to whether you think that's pushing some of the submission share in your direction.

Okay. Let me cover those in order here. On Lexis+ AI, as you know, we started to launch this commercially late last year and it is starting to have a bit of an impact during this year. But as you know, the main driver of the improvement in the growth rate in Legal over the last few years has been the rollout of Lexis+ leveraging extractive AI as that has been the integrated platform that integrates the leading analytics, that has enhanced the value to customers. They use those tools more, they see more value, they buy more of them and their total spend has gone up. And that increased penetration of Lexis+ has been the main driver. In the last 9 months now, that has also been now supported by the rollout of Lexis+ AI. And we have now gradually gotten to a point where, on new sales, the majority of our new sales revenue is coming from Lexis+ AI sales. And we’ve also gotten to a point where our renewal revenues, in our renewal revenues, the majority of renewal revenue is now also coming from Lexis+ AI sales. On the legal firm budget, I think this is a very important evolution for the legal industry and for law firms. And I think many of them are looking at how they’re going to grapple with the technology evolution, what tools are available and how they can improve the value they get from the tools. It’s too early for us to reach any conclusion about how they will behave going forward. But we get a lot of attention on our new tools. We have a lot of conversation and is clear that this is something that is important to them, not just to us. On the STM article side, you asked specifically about what I think the industry research integrity issues that came up during last year, during 2023, this got more attention than it had for a while. And in particular, some of the companies that are primarily focused on the pay-to-publish model instead of the pay-to-read model. This is an issue for the whole industry, and it’s an issue for us, and it’s one that we’re working on. We’re working on trying to tackle both by ourselves and with others. But it has been a much smaller issue for us than for many of the other players that you mentioned. And I think the reason for that is, of course, that we’ve been in this business for a very long time. We have a very high-quality portfolio of journal brands. We have a rigorous review process to identify fraudulent articles, and have a lot of manual as well as technology tools to check that. I mean no process is perfect, but we have had a smaller exposure to this than many others. And therefore, I’m not actually surprised that we have probably seen a higher increase in article submissions to us than perhaps the others have seen over the last 6 to 12 months.

Your next question comes from Samik Majumdar with UBS.

Sorry, it's Adam Berlin from UBS. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can hear you fine. Go ahead.

Okay. Yes, a couple of questions. In STM, you talked about the Print impact being twice as fast as usual. Do you expect that to continue in the second half? And if that were to normalize in the second half, could we see an acceleration in STM organic growth given that you said there was an acceleration in the other parts of the electronic revenues within that business? That's the first question. Second question is, can you give us some indication about the tax rate for the full year? I know it's 23% in the first half. Is that what we should be thinking about for the full year? Is there any reason the second half would be different? And then maybe on the Risk side, can you just give us a bit more detail on what were kind of the better-performing and worst-performing businesses within Risk? You've talked about Risk being in the 7% to 9% range. Is there any particular reason that we're at the top of that range, given kind of very positive KPIs we're seeing in the market overall?

I'm going to ask Nick to answer the second, but let me start with the first one. STM Print, we typically have seen Print declines over the last few years that average in the mid- to high single digits for the Print portion and Print is now -- well, last year, the print's base was 10% roughly of the division. Of course, it's shrinking every year. But typically, the decline has been in the mid- to high single digits. So far this year, we're running at basically double that rate, and it's in several different pockets of Print. Overall, we believe this is a good thing. This is the business mix shift we're trying to drive. That's what we want. But when it's happening, of course, it increases the Print drag during that time period. Historically, it's relatively hard to predict, but we have not often seen complete reversals during a year. So I would say it's probably unlikely that you see a complete reversal within this year. But it's hard to predict exactly what happens in any one time period. But in the long run, medium to long run, we know what is happening. This will continue to decline and the Print portion will become a smaller and smaller part of this division, and therefore, the Print drag will reduce. But I think it's unlikely you see it this year.

Adam, on the tax rate, the tax rate the 23% you see in the first half is a very good starting point for the full year. You can always get some noise, of course, some credits and debits and things, but that's a very good starting point if you think about the full year numbers.

And then to the different segments of Risk. As you might recall, we had a period of time where – we had a period of time during the pandemic when the Business Services segment was growing very, very rapidly for lots of different reasons. And the Insurance slowed a little bit based on people driving less and lack of availability of new cars and other things. Then we went through a period when the economy sort of reversed a little bit, as the services slowed down a little bit and insurance started to pick up, and Insurance, I think, grew very strongly last year. Now we’re getting to a point where the new sales and business services have continued to strengthen and moving up. So Business Services are coming back up. And the Insurance has continued to run strongly, both in terms of our product rollouts and uptake as well as the marketplace. But there, we start to lap a very strong year. So that’s going to gradually come down to historical averages again. So I think we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect to see at this point in the cycle, and they’re normalizing towards their averages at the point that we’re seeing now.

Your next question comes from Sami Kassab with BNP Paribas.

In Exhibitions, H1 margins expanded by over 5 percentage points. Shall we think that full year margin can expand by as much? Secondly, historically in STM, the Print revenues were sensitive to timing factors of big orders coming in June rather than July, or July rather than June. Was part of the accelerated decline in STM Print driven by the timing of large orders moving from H1 into H2? And lastly, given average article turnaround times in the journal publishing business, is it fair to expect Primary Research revenue growth to accelerate in H2 given the acceleration in submission growth in H1?

I'll ask Nick to cover the first one and then I'll take the next two.

Yes. Sami, obviously, the margin improvement was very strong in Exhibitions in the first half. That reflects that strong underlying revenue growth that you saw of 16% which is partly helped by the favorable comparison with the early part of last year, which still had a bit of disruption in it. And obviously, that has flowed through to the very strong profit growth in the first half and therefore, the margin step-up. So as we say in the outlook, we are expecting an improvement in the margin for the year over last year's prior year. But obviously, you won't necessarily have that benefit of the comparison against the disruptive period.

On the Print revenues, as this business has continued to evolve, the importance of the bigger orders in certain types of book segment has gradually been reducing as you probably know. And therefore, the relative timing of specific orders have become of a factor and it was not a material factor this year. So we have seen Print declines a little higher in most pockets this year, again, as we shift the business mix in the direction we would like to go strategically. So I don’t think it’s a material issue in terms of first half, second half Print declines this year. The STM article submissions, these started to pick up – the submission rates started to pick up materially actually in the second half of last year when many of these research integrity issues start to have a real impact on the market. And the submission growth of over 20% has now almost been running for a year. So I think that already has started to have an impact coming through, and I don’t see it picking up further in the second half and we started to lap that. But it’s also important to remember that we have a mixture of payment models in these article submissions than what we publish. Some are under pay-to-read traditional publishing payment models, where the actual article volume doesn’t have a direct impact on the revenue at that time. Some are paid to publish where it does have impact directly when you publish the article, but some of those are now also under a subscription model where you have agreed the payment model and the total amount for the year. So the impact is less on any one time period then the actual volume growth would indicate in that time period. But over time, the main driver of revenue growth in the Primary Research business, over time is the volume growth of number of articles submitted to us and published – and that we publish. And the direction of travel here is very positive for us as a publisher and for us as our position in the market.

Your next question comes from Nick Dempsey with Barclays.

I've got two questions left. First of all, just maybe to ask the article submissions question the other way around. If we're seeing historically high article volume submissions now, more than I remember ever in the past, and we aren't really seeing that much of a change in organic growth on the positive side, is there a risk that as that starts to normalize a little bit over 18 months to slightly lower levels, do we have to worry about that as a bit of a drag on future STM organic growth? Second question, for many, many years now, there's been almost no change in share, I think, between Lexis and Westlaw in legal in the U.S. Do you think that the AI products could change that, could break that pattern, could change the stickiness of the two with lawyers, and therefore, you have some potential options to gain share versus the much larger Westlaw?

On STM and article submissions, in the long run, we have seen article submission growth to us in the high single digits on average now for the last couple of decades, probably. And if you look at industry trends, we would expect that we’ll continue to see our growth on an annual basis in the high single digit for many years to come. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen a higher rate of increase to us based on, I think, many different factors, including the quality of our journals, the technology platform we have and the longer focus we have had on research integrity issues. Just like I said before, that the growth in article submissions does not have a material short-term impact on our revenue growth in this year, the normalization of that growth rate, if that is what we believe will happen or you believe will happen over the next few years, therefore, should not have a material impact in the other direction. In the long term, the main driver is the long-term average growth rate in the high single digits, which I still believe in. On Lexis versus our competitors in the U.S., as you know, we always say that we have respect for our competitors. There are competitors in our marketplaces that have been around for a very long time and have large positions. I am sure that they will come up with ways to serve their customers well. We remain focused 100% on improving our own value proposition to our customers. And we believe that if we can increase the value that our tools can provide, we can increase the number of our tools that our customers want to use, we can increase the usage of those tools if they see value in it, and therefore, they will spend more value with us. They spend more money and they’ll see more – spend more money with us and they see more value from us. How their spend evolves with others is not clear, but we are focused on our value equation.

Your next question comes from Tom Singlehurst with Citi.

Yes, Tom here from Citi. I've got three, if that's okay. Slide 11, growth objectives, continue on improved growth trajectory. I'm just wondering whether you're explicitly signaling the growth can continue to improve from the 7% that you're doing, which is already obviously a material improvement on history. I can see why STM might continue tracking up, but it would be exciting to hear whether 7% can become 8% or 9% in your view? That's the first question. Second question, linked to that. I mean, for many years, legal was an area that was sort of plodding along, if I can put it that way, sort of low single-digit growth with relatively low margins versus peers. And I can see why in that context, the industry for legal and analytics may not have attracted a huge amount of investment capital. By contrast, with the growth of law tech and your very, very strong growth and improving margins, I wonder whether you are already seeing a sort of change in the competitive landscape with smaller start-ups and how ultimately you can sort of navigate that without necessarily losing share to similar players. And then the final question, which I presume is to Nick, is on Exhibitions. Obviously, an incredibly strong growth and margin performance. I suppose the question is, if we go back to sort of pre-COVID, I think the way I would characterize RELX was always as being willing to accept lower margins in return for better growth, you're more willing to invest. And I'm just interested whether, now that you've got a much, much higher margin and you've talked about taking structural costs out, we should -- once sort of recovery has calmed down, we should also expect lower revenue growth than trend. Or whether there is genuinely a new paradigm where sort of faster growth and higher margins are both possible.

In Legal, our objective is to continue to improve the growth trajectory of this division. That's what I'd say. That's what we've said for a few years. That's what our division head would continue to say. However, we do have to remember that this is an 80% subscription business, and that the average contract subscription length is 3 years, which means that any improvement in the long-term growth rate is likely to come through very gradually. Now we have slightly outperformed that expectation, I would argue, for the last 2, 3 years in terms of moving up that growth rate a little faster than it would naturally imply in an 80% subscription business with average contract length of 3 years. But our objective is to continue to improve, but I think it's harder and harder to do it at this rate that we've done in the last 2 to 3 years where it keeps improving on almost an annual basis. But our objective is clear, we would like to continue to move it up a little bit more if we can. On Legal, investment in law tech or legal tech, this has been actually a relatively active investment area for many years. We have been very active in that area ourselves. We've spent a lot of time meeting with start-ups in legal analytics for over a decade. We have focused on organic build-out of higher value-add legal analytics tools, and we have made some small partnerships, licensing deals, and we bought a handful of small legal analytics companies that would benefit from being in partnership or owned by a large global platform like what we have under the LexisNexis umbrella. So that's something we have been working on for a long time. Now going forward, as you said, I think this area has gotten a lot more attention and people talk about it more given the improvement we've seen and given the sort of the deployment of generative AI. But I think the principle remains the same, that we're very actively involved in that start-up scene and talking to companies and where they're licensing content or comparing our tools. We remain focused on the absolute value add that we can give. And our strategy that we talk about all the time is to leverage our really deep, deep customer understanding inside of this marketplace by combining basically sort of unparalleled or if you want to call it that, content and data sets that we've had in the legal industry, and combining those with a powerful new technologies that come out, whether that's previous sort of extractive artificial intelligence or now generative artificial intelligence technologies. I believe we are positioned in a way that very few other players are because we have the combination of the three components, which is number one, deep customer understanding and deep pipes already installed with a very large number of customers; as well as the deep content that -- the broad content set; and we have the ability to spend the money and evolve our technology spend that's already very significant, to focus it on the new technologies and the value that's added by the new technologies. So has the competitive landscape changed over the last 10, 20 years? It has changed. Will it continue to change? Yes, it will continue to change. Do I believe that it will have a significant impact on our strategy? No, because we believe that this is what we have been trying to do now with our focus on AI-supported legal analytics for over a decade, and we're now using a slightly different tool kit that includes generative AI tools. On Exhibitions, we are now 100% focused on the growth opportunity and the value uplift we can get from running this business differently, and in particular, introduction of data-driven digital tools. And it's becoming clear to us that this business is on track to become a higher value-add, higher growth and higher margin business than it was before the pandemic. And we do not believe that there is necessarily a trade-off between us having now a higher margin, lower growth business. But rather, we believe that we can be higher value-add based on these new digital tools and faster pace of innovation in the business, and that we can be higher growth based on our ability to commercialize our high value add and higher margin based on the structurally lower cost base.

That's great to hear. One final question on that. I mean would -- as a group, would you consider allocating more capital towards Exhibitions? Or are you happy to pursue that organically?

Across the business, our primary focus is on organic development, organic development and deployment of higher value-add tools. That’s what we do in all our divisions, and that’s what we will do in Exhibitions. That’s what we will continue to do. That can be supported by small additional tuck-in adjacent acquisitions when we’re the natural owner and we can see that we can help that small business grow faster, or that it can support an existing organic growth strategy, but I do not believe it’s going to be a material part of our growth strategy.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Steve Liechti with Deutsche Bank.

Just three, if I can. So first of all, can you break out on the submission growth of 20% OA and other? I don't know whether you can put OA and hybrid together or whatever, just to get a feel for OA submissions relative to others. That's the first question. Second question, just in terms of like-for-like growth in Events in the second half, given the first half strength, is it fair to assume a sort of very, very strong performance there, momentum continues in the second half? Any kind of feel for what we should be thinking there? And then thirdly, you talked about when you're signing up new clients and bringing on people for contracts and renewals in Lexis, Legal. Are you managing -- well, can you give us any feel at all for ability to charge extra for when you switch someone from a Lexis+ platform to a Lexis AI+ platform offering?

Well, I'm going to ask Nick to cover the second, but let me take the first one here. On the submission growth, we have seen very strong submission growth, an increase in that rate over the last 6 to 12 months across the board, across the entire journal portfolio, both for pay-to-publish, open access and pay-to-read, if you want to call them that, hybrid or traditional journals. Because we have submissions that come to the subscription of hybrid journals, where then the person submitted can select later which payment model they want to pursue, it is not as black and white a description as you might think. But we are continuing to see very strong submission growth across the portfolio. There's no difference between the two in terms of the trend line. But as we have seen over the last several years, our growth rate in the pure stand-alone pay-to-publish, open access or gold open access journals, if you want to call them that, that has been higher than the overall for several years and continues to be a bit higher than the overall number. So -- but it's over 20% overall and that's across the board. On Exhibitions, Nick?

So obviously, as Erik was saying, we believe we have a higher growth profile business than we had historically. And you can see that in our outlook, and clearly, the second half won't have the benefit of the first half, that is comparing to slightly disruptive period in the early part of 2023. But nonetheless, we are looking for strong growth in that business through the year.

On the last question here about the spend uplift when people switch. When people were switching from the old Lexis Advance platform, as it used to be called, to Lexis+, we saw an increase in spend because they were moving to an integrated legal analytics platform, which enable them to buy analytical tools and broader content sets that were then easier to use, so they could use more of them, and therefore, they wanted to own more of them, they use them more and they spend more with us. There was a meaningful spend uplift when you switch from Lexis Advance to Lexis+. We continue to see a meaningful spend uplift when people switch from Lexis+ to Lexis+ AI. And it’s slightly different because this is here a platform functionality set that’s offered as sort of a premium tier to the existing Lexis+ offering, reflecting that it has a higher value-add functionality that we’ve seen with our customers, being confirmed with our customers, across the usage base and across the different functionality sets. But the actual spend uplift from a customer that switches actually depends quite a bit on which content sets and which tools the customers have got to before the upgrade and which they’re adding or switching to after the upgrade. So there is quite a bit between different customers, customer types and different types of subscriptions, but it’s another meaningful increase in the total spend that we’re seeing so far from our customers. So it’s another step up in spend from those who are converting.

Thank you. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Erik for any closing remarks.

I just want to say thank you all for joining us on our call today, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we delivered strong financial results in 2023, and we make further operational and strategic progress. Underlying revenue growth was 8%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 13%. Adjusted earnings per share growth was 11% at constant currency, and we are proposing an 8% increase in the pound sterling full year dividend. All four business areas performed well in 2023. And on this chart, you can also see the relative sizes of the business segment within each business area. In Risk, strong fundamentals continue to drive underlying revenue growth of 8% with underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 9%. In Business Services, which represents around 45% divisional revenue, growth continued to be driven by financial crime compliance and digital fraud and identity solutions, and we saw a strengthening in new sales in the second half. In Insurance, which represents just under 40% of divisional revenue, strong growth was driven by further expansion of solution sets across markets supported by positive market factors. Specialized industry data services, which represents just over 10% of divisional revenue, saw strong growth led by the Commodity Intelligence and Aviation segment. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth, slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In STM, further development of analytics continues to drive the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth segments. Underlying revenue growth was 4% and underlying adjusted operating profit growth was also 4% with a slight increase in adjusted operating margin. In databases, tools and electronic reference and corporate primary research, which together represents around 45% of divisional revenue, strong growth was driven by further development of higher value-add analytics and decision tools. Primary Research, Academic and Government segments, which also represents around 45% of divisional revenue, continued to be driven by strong growth in article submissions with pay to publish open access articles growing particularly strong. Going forward, we expect continued good underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly exceeding online revenue growth. In Legal, we saw a further improvement in underlying revenue growth to 6%, up from 5% last year, driven by the continued shift in business mix towards higher-growth legal analytics. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was ahead of revenue growth at 8%. We continue to see strong growth in Law Firm and Corporate Markets, which account for over 60% of divisional revenue. Lexis+, our integrated analytics offering, has continued to see strong uptick and usage growth across customer segments. Lexis+ AI, our new platform, leveraging generative AI functionality, was launched commercially in October. The initial customer reaction has been very positive and the rollout has started well. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth with underlying adjusted operating profit growth exceeding underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions delivered strong revenue growth and an improvement in profitability. Underlying revenue growth was 30%, driven by a significant increase in face-to-face activity with average like-for-like event revenue across the portfolio ahead of pre-pandemic levels for the full year. The improvement in profitability reflects both the higher activity levels and the structurally lower cost base with the adjusted operating margin also above pre-pandemic levels for the full year. Going forward, we expect strong underlying revenue growth with a further improvement in adjusted operating margin. Our strategic direction is unchanged. We leverage deep customer understanding to combine leading content and data sets with powerful technologies in global platforms to build increasingly sophisticated information-based analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to professional and business customers across market segments. We have been able to develop and deploy these tools across the company by embracing artificial intelligence technologies for well over a decade. We are confident that our ability to leverage AI and other technologies as they evolve will continue to be an important driver of customer value and growth in our business for many years to come. Our growth objectives are: for Risk, to sustain strong long-term growth in the current range; for both STM and Legal, to continue on the improving growth trajectory; and for Exhibitions, to continue on the improved long-term growth profile. When combined with our strategy of driving continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, resulted continued strong earnings growth with improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I will be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and our usual Q&A.

Thank you, Erik. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by providing more detail on the group financials. As Erik said, underlying revenue growth was 8% with underlying adjusted operating profit growth well ahead of that at 13%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved to 33.1%. Improved operating results flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which increased 11% at constant currency despite higher interest rates. Returns continue to improve with ROIC up 1.5 percentage points to 14%. Cash conversion was strong at 98%, contributing to a slight reduction in leverage to 2.0x at the lower end of our typical range. Given our overall performance, we have been able to increase the proposed full year dividend by 8% to 58.8p per share. Acquisition spend in the year is relatively modest at GBP 130 million, and we deployed GBP 800 million on share buybacks. Looking at revenue, you can see the continued strong growth in Risk, while STM maintained its improved growth rate and Legal with a pickup in its growth. These strong growth, together with the sustained recovery of Exhibitions took underlying revenue growth for the group as a whole to 8%. Electronic revenue, representing 83% of the total, grew GBP 0.07 underlying with the strong growth in face-to-face activity, more than offsetting the print decline, given the overall rate of 8%. It was a 1 percentage point drag on overall growth from the effects of biannual events cycling out in Exhibitions while currency movements were broadly neutral to the group level, resulting in reported revenue growth in sterling was 7%. Risk and Legal delivered strong underlying growth in adjusted operating profit, both slightly ahead of revenue growth while STM underlying profit growth was in line with revenue growth. Exhibitions profit saw very strong growth, reflecting the increase in activity levels against a structurally lower cost base. Overall, group adjusted operating profit was up 13% underlying, up 12% in total of constant currency and up 13% in sterling to over GBP 3 billion. Margins were up slightly in Risk and STM and up a little more in Legal as we continue to focus on keeping cost growth below revenue growth across the group. Exhibitions margins are now above the levels achieved pre-pandemic. Combined, these movements saw group margins increased to 33.1%, an improvement of 1.7 percentage points. Here's the group adjusted income statement showing the underlying growth of 8% in revenue and 13% in operating profit. The interest expense increased with the effect of interest rate and gross debt up to 4.6%, reflecting higher rates for dollars and for euros. The interest expense includes a charge of GBP 26 million for the early redemption of a high coupon bond. Without that, the effective interest rate would have been 4.2%. The tax charge was GBP 553 million with an effective tax rate of 20.4%. The tax rate benefited from nonrecurring tax credits, which resulted in an effective rate below our normal ongoing rate. Net profit was close to GBP 2.2 billion, up 9% at constant currency and up 10% in sterling. All that gave us adjusted earnings per share of 114p, up 11% at constant currency and up 12% in sterling. Here, you can see how the high earnings flow to cash flow with EBITDA now over GBP 3.5 billion. CapEx was GBP 477 million equating to 5% of revenue, leaving us with adjusted cash flow conversion of 98%, similar to typical levels pre-pandemic. Cash interest paid was GBP 294 million, the increase reflecting higher interest rates. Cash tax paid of GBP 619 million was higher than the income statement charge, which benefited from the nonrecurring tax credits, which were noncash. Total free cash flow was just under GBP 2 billion. Here's how we deployed that free cash flow. We completed 6 small acquisitions during the year for a total consideration of GBP 130 million, the largest of which was Human API, a health care data platform that joins the life insurance segment within Risk. Total dividend payments in the year were close to GBP 1.1 billion, and we deployed GBP 800 million on the share buyback. Overall, with an acquisition, dividends and share buybacks broadly utilized the full GBP 2 billion of free cash flow. Year-end net debt decreased slightly as a result of currency translation effects. Our priorities for use of cash are unchanged, although it remains our #1 priority, and we continue to invest in the business with CapEx consistently around 5% of revenues. We augment that [indiscernible] with the level of visions, with the level of spend typically being the most significant variable in our uses of cash, depending on the opportunities that arise. Average acquisition spend over both the last 5 and 10 years has been around GBP 400 million with 2023, a below average year. We pay out around half of our adjusted earnings in dividends and have been able to increase the dividend every year for well over a decade. Leverage has typically been in the 2.0x to 2.5x range, strong cash generation, improving EBITDA and modest acquisition spend in the year mean leverage was at the lower end range at the end of 2023 at 2.0x net debt to EBITDA. We continue to return our surplus capital through the share buyback with GBP 1 billion of spend announced today for 2024, of which GBP 150 million has already been deployed. Alongside our financial performance, we continue to make progress on our corporate responsibility objectives. Anchored by the purpose of the company, we focus primarily on our unique contributions using our products and skills to benefit society in ways only we can. We also performed well on those metrics where we can be compared to others. This is a selection of our key CR data showing that 2023 was another year of solid progress. And our commitment to corporate responsibility continues to be recognized by external reporting agencies. We rated AAA with MSCI for an eighth consecutive year and ranked second in our sector globally with Sustainalytics in the top 1% of companies overall. With that, I will hand you back to Erik.

Thank you, Nick. Just to summarize what we have covered this morning. In 2023, we delivered strong financial results and we made further operational and strategic progress. The improving long-term growth trajectory is being driven by the ongoing shift in our business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools. Going forward, we continue to see positive momentum across the group and we expect another year of strong underlying growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit as well as strong growth in adjusted earnings per share on a constant currency basis. And with that, I think we're ready to go to questions.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of George Webb with Morgan Stanley.

Thank you, I want to start with 2 areas, please. Firstly, on the Lexis+ AI side, in terms of how customers are reacting around commercial launch, noting that this is a platform upgrade, are you expecting customers to wait until the end of their renewal cycles if they want to make the upgrade? Or are you seeing customers come in to you ahead of renewal? And then also around that [indiscernible] days, can you give any feel for the levels of initial commercial uptick you've been seeing as you've gone through that rollout? And secondly, when you think about the M&A environment into 2024, you pointed out, Nick, that over the last few years and particularly in 2023, it's been a -- about smaller deals, that spend has been at a lower end. Do you expect that to change this year based on what you're seeing in terms of your potential acquisition pipeline as well as the valuation levels out there?

Okay. I'll let Nick answer the second, but let me take the first here that I think when it comes to something as important, I guess, as the deployment of generative AI, I think we're likely to see a combination of both. Traditionally, platform upgrades have come into play at the renewal cycle, most of the time, which is typically 3-year renewals, which is why deployment or penetration of new platforms come through gradually. But I think in this case, I think we're going to see a combination of both. I think we'll see some of that wait renewal, and I think we will see many that also step up as a new sale, as an upgrade whenever they see it available. We will see, of course, over time how that pattern develops. You asked about early signs because we are doing very well in the marketplace, we get very significant positive feedback from our customers. We track a significant number of internal metrics on that. But because it's a competitive market, and we have other players also participating, we have not been disclosing and don't plan to disclose detailed tracking of what those metrics look like. But it's a very, very positive early launch that I think our customers are very happy with and that we are very happy with.

George, on your question on M&A. And obviously, as you know, our focus is on organic development primarily as a business, and there's lots of opportunities to continue to grow, continue to adopt new technologies within the business without acquisition. But we do look for where there are things that can enhance, accelerate the organic development. We will look at acquisitions. That typically means they are in what you might call bolt-on size. And obviously, what happens in year-to-year very much varies with the opportunities within that. But there's nothing different in the pipeline and range of opportunities that we see today than normal. Last year happened to work out to be a relatively low year, but that was just the way it fell. No change in approach and nothing particularly different in the pipeline valuations. Not the key, really. Obviously, what matters is the value to us, and that's where we see opportunities that can add value to our business, we'll go after them, but it does vary from year to year.

The next question comes from the line of Adam Berlin with UBS.

Two from me. Firstly, on STM, can you give us some metrics on the Journals business for this year, submissions, articles published growth in number of pay to publish articles, that would be very helpful, just to understand the dynamics there. And the second thing is, can you give us the impact of the biannual events returning in 2024, the pound impact or percentage impact to help us model Exhibitions revenue for 2024?

Again, I'll give the second one to -- ask Nick to answer the second one here. On STM, in the Journal business, as you know, the main driver of that business is the long-term volume growth in the industry. The long-term driver, of course, has been the increase in number continues to grow. But how that then impacts their research activity and submissions to us is a key driver. And the number of article submissions to us increased significantly last year so that if you now look at an absolute growth rate maybe average two years typically because it was, again, higher this past year than it was the year before, and it came back pretty rapidly. But if you look at the two together, we're back in the sort of strong growth, high single digits that we've averaged over a longer term historically, and you would probably take as a typical increase in the long run. So back to very strong growth even if you take a 2-year average, not just a strong -- the very strong one we had last year. When it comes to submissions to pay to publish, that's going even faster. I mean we're talking now at -- depending on who define some of the ones where they opt later, we're talking about submission growth rates in the 30% plus category and we're talking about number of articles published in pay to publish growing at 20% or 20% to 30% range in the past year. So it's very -- continued very strong growth and that looks very healthy to us. And Nick, on Exhibition.

Yes, Adam, the cycling events, the biannual cycling events, as you say, and we are now really back to the normal historic pattern and being an even year 2024, it's like continuously you'll see a boost to the revenues from that. But that typical -- if you look back in history, 5%, 6% plus or minus, depending on which is whether it's cycling in or cycling out, that's a good guide.

Great. And can I just have one more question. Any comment on Germany, German -- I know that you don't comment on specific deals, but are the uni in Germany, can you tell us if the German universities are signing up to the new project deal and if that -- if there's momentum there?

Well, I mean, as I said, the main driver of growth, growth in volume and growth in revenue in the primary research segment of our STM business is volume growth, volume of article submissions and therefore, over time, what we publish on that. And as you have seen, if you followed us for a long time, as many of you have, you've noticed that the exact method with which they pay, whether pay to read or paid to publish or if they put together or separately, how they buy doesn't seem to have had much of the impact on the growth trade trajectory historically. And I expect that to continue, that the main driver is going to continue to be volume growth and that how they pay and how they buy together or separate, again, it's not likely to have a very big impact on the growth trajectory going forward either.

The next question comes from the line of Carl Murdock-Smith with Berenberg.

Two from me. Firstly, just in terms of your comments, you said that you expect both STM and Legal to continue on the improving growth trajectory. I just wanted to kind of ask what you mean by trajectory there. So do you expect further acceleration from the 6% in Legal and 4% in STM? Or do you mean for it to simply continue at that higher growth rates relative to historic? And then secondly, along the same theme, I was wondering if you could just comment on pricing discussions with customers, particularly if inflation comes down or whether you're finding your pricing discussions kind of not really impacted by inflation as your growth has been in the past?

Yes. So I'll again cover the first, and I'll ask Nick to cover the second on pricing. Well, as we say in our press releases, as you've seen, is that the improving growth trajectory over the last few years and in this year continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher growth analytics and decision tools. That's our strategy, and it continues to be our strategy. And therefore, the growth objective, for both STM and Legal, the growth objectives are to continue on this improving trajectory. That means to continue to drive the business mix shift towards higher growth analytics and decision tools. However, to develop, to deploy and then to sell these tools have a certain cycle and those divisions are 75% to 80% subscription based often with sort of 3-year contracts that roll through. So therefore, I think you have to continue to assume that the improvement in growth rate is going to come through gradually over the next several years that this is not a 1-year flip and it isn't what we have had, and it's probably not what you're going to see going forward. But when I say the growth objective is to continue on the improving growth trajectory, that's what I mean.

And on the question on inflation. I mean our pricing has never really been that influenced by inflation, whether it's high or low. It's all about the value we can provide to customers. And of course, the growth is being driven by the introduction of new tools, new features, new data sets, new analytics. And of course, if we get greater adoption of that across a range of customers and each and individual a customer taking up more of those tools, you will see increased spend from individual customers. That's not really an increase in price. And if you look at any kind of unit pricing metrics, actually, it's always coming -- typically will be coming down, and we're representing that additional value. So it's -- we've not seen a change in that. So the inflation rate in the general economy is not particularly relevant to our pricing.

The next question comes from the line of Nick Dempsey with Barclays.

I have three questions. So first of all, Thomson Reuters last week was talking about price contributing about 3.5 points to their revenue growth, that was on a group basis. Obviously, quite a lot of that is legal. Nick just talked about price not being a very relevant part of what you do. So is there a true difference between how Thompson Reuters and you are thinking about pricing legal? Was there perhaps a definitional difference here between whether we're talking about customers spending more or a true price increase? That's the first question. Second one, can you give us an indication of the underlying market trends that you are currently seeing in both insurance and business services within Risk? So are you seeing some tough comps now in insurance after last year's good start to the year? Just an understanding of that picture now. And the last question, you've already answered a couple of questions on Lexis+ AI. I was just wondering if you can give us a bit more of an indication of this interest. So are we talking about hundreds of law firms? And within firms, are they taking that product, that platform on a widespread basis across the firm, so you'd see a noticeable difference on their spend? Or are we talking about a few units or geographies trialing it?

Maybe Nick will take the first one as a follow-up to the price question.

Nick, you have to ask other companies what they -- when they talk about price and exactly how they describe it. But I think the point for us is it's about each customer taking more modules, taking more analytics and taking up more of our content sets and so on. So that should lead to an overall increase in spend on that individual customer, but we wouldn't regard that as price they're getting more value for the additional spend. So that's how we would characterize it.

So if you go on to risk, I would say, basically, as expected, we saw last year towards the end of last year, continued improvement, both in new sales and in activity levels in Business Services. So Business Services growth rate within Risk have gradually been coming up over the last few months and it continues that way in the beginning of this year. And as you said, they are actually now like in a slightly less strong growth period in early 2023. So we expect that to continue. And then, on the other hand, Insurance that had that ramp up towards a late -- towards the end of 2022 and grew very strongly during all of 2023, they are now starting to lap at a time when they grew a little more strongly than they have in the past. So we would expect that the overall growth rate on top of that now maybe then moderates down towards historical averages relatively soon. And that's exactly what has happened over the last month or two. And as a whole, that division, therefore, continues to grow, almost exactly in line with what we had expected and what it has done at this time of year, most years when they had a good year. So it's on track for what we expected. And as you said, slightly moderating in one and slightly accelerating in the other. The last part, you asked about Lexis+ AI. And yes, we are seeing very strong interest, very strong uptake. We had many thousands of law firms signing up for the initial sort of commercial insider program. We had certain advantages and certain previews and test and other. And since it's gone commercial, we have seen many firms signing up fully with large and wide deployment and significant step up in usage, and we've seen some others that have done small and initial tests, but it's a full range and it's very active out there, very active, it's very positive. And the feedback we are getting is very good and we've gotten some very specific reports on how much they estimate they save in time and effort and so on that are, of course, very feature-specific and function specific and very private, but, to each firm. But it is very positive, and we have basically a full range of the alternatives that you mentioned. It is not one that's dominating.

The next question comes from the line of Tom Singlehurst with Citi.

Yes. Tom here from Citi. Three if it's okay, two on AI and one on Semantics, I think is probably the right word. But on AI, Lexis+ AI you've talked about. You've also launched Scopus AI within STM and one of the webinars you hosted explicitly said that it was an add-on charge for product. I'm just wondering whether you expect that to have a distinct positive impact on STM growth in 2024 or whether it will just take time to sort of work through in the same way that you described the impact at Lexis. The second question on AI is around investment. Publicists have said they're investing EUR 100 million a year, WPP GBP 250 million a year, Thompson Reuters more than $100 million a year. Can you quantify the investment that you are making or have made and whether there's any incremental spend on AI beyond the existing R&D budgets? Second question. And then thirdly, I just really wanted to go back to that point you just made, Erik, on sort of historical trends because all the way through last year, there were constant references to historical trends, either you grow above them or in line with them. I suppose I'm just trying to get a sense of whether you are signaling that we've had a period of above-trend growth and we're going to be slowing down or whether the new level, the new base that you set in 2023 is the new normal. Those are the three questions.

Yes. I'll cover the first and the third, but maybe I'll cover the first and ask Nick to do it in order here, right? On AI, yes, we have several initiatives in STM. The ones that have been announced to the market would be the Scopus AI, which was announced last summer and then launched commercially recently. And we had, of course, CinicalKey AI, which was announced now a couple of months ago. And the difference between the Legal division and the STM division, is that the Legal division has a main core platform that's being used across over 60% of the customer base, maybe even more over time and that core platforms then leverage internationally, and we put feature and functionality on top of that or embedded in a fully integrated platform. So that Lexis+ AI is an integrated platform that then would have feature and functionality launches within it. STM has -- even though it's technically behind the scenes, the same infrastructure is that has several different and separate products that are sold to the market that then have their own AI tool kit on top. And they will, therefore, be brought to market at different times and separately, which means that any one of those will have a smaller impact on the commercial progress of the division individually. But of course, taken together over time, it's going to be a significant positive impact. But so if you look at Scopus AI specifically, it's a very sophisticated high-end embedded research platform tool and it is not covering a large part of the STM division. So therefore, its impact commercially to us is going to be gradual and will take time to come through and drive any impact on revenue growth for the division. But the customer feedback has been very positive. The customer interest has been very high. We have had a very high number of customers engaged with us on this platform over the last few weeks on different types of introductory calls and presentations we have had, but it's going to be gradual and it will take time to have a commercial impact.

Tom, your second question on investment, et cetera, and AI. Look, we are always, of course, spending on and investing in adopting new technologies, either AI or anything else, building new data sets, building new products. And generative AI is obviously a significant opportunity, particularly for Legal, but also for STM as we've been discussing. But what we're putting into it and behind it is really where are we directing our resource, where are we directing our spend and it's not really changing the overall amount that we're spending and putting behind the growth opportunities. And of course, the other thing generative AI gives is internal opportunities to make ourselves more efficient, our internal processes, and we're obviously working on that as well. So when you put all that together, we are obviously bring a lot of focus and effort into the generative AI opportunities, but that doesn't change our overall approach of ensuring that cost growth gains below revenue growth in all of our businesses as we go forward.

On the third question, the fact that we have now stopped referring to historical trends in our comparisons is an accurate observation, of course. We have used the reference to historical trends a few times for several years now. But we have stopped doing that because the company has now had several years of our improving growth trajectory in both revenue and profit. So the question of what we are referring to when you say historical trends have become less clear to some of our observers. So we moved off of that and instead focus on describing our growth objectives very clearly, overall, as well as by each division. And then in the guidance, in the outlook for each year, describing what we see for that year very precisely, so that it's clear the range of growth we expect right now. But just to make sure that it's clear, we do not expect the improving long-term growth trajectory to stop or reverse. Our objective is to continue on this improving long-term growth trajectory, which is driven by the shift in business mix that we've talked about. But if you then bring that down to each division, we say that for the Risk division is to continue to drive strong growth in the current range for STM and Legal to continue on this improving growth trajectory, Legal will be gradual primarily subscription, it will come in over time and for Exhibitions to now operate in the higher growth -- higher value, higher growth and higher margin environment that they have now ended up in after the pandemic redefined that business.

The next question comes from the line of Steve Liechti with Numis.

Yes, good morning, everybody. I've got two, please. First of all, on the STM for database and tools, I know you put it together in your commentary with corporate primary research. But can you give us a harder figure for STM database and tools as a percentage of that division? Maybe this year and last year. I've got 40% in my head, but I just wanted to confirm that. That's the first question. And then on Exhibitions, you kind of mentioned it there actually in your last comments on sort of faster long-term growth rate. And given the business as it is structured now today, what do you think would be a good like-for-like growth rate going forward from here? Again, in my head, I've got 5% to 6% organic growth historically was kind of the right number for you in the old days.

So the first question on what proportion is database and tools, it's just under 40%. And then if you put in corporate primary research as well, you got to towards 45%.

And on Exhibitions, I've said this before that in the near term on Exhibitions, we are 100% focused on sort of capturing the growth opportunity that exists there, which has here was the reopening as well as other opportunities. But now and going forward for the next few years, that we're really 100% focused on the growth opportunity and the value uplift we see from the introduction of new data-driven digital tools and the commercialization of that. But it's very clear to us now that Exhibitions is on track to become a higher value add, higher growth and higher margin business going forward than it was before COVID. I mean it's going to be higher value add based on the fact that we are introducing a range of digital tools, and we have increased the rate of innovation, the pace of innovation in that business now. It's going to be higher growth based on the improving ability that we have developed to commercialize this higher value add, and it's going to be higher margin based on the structurally lower cost base that we now have in the business. So that's the direction that we are going. Exactly how big that value uplift will be, exactly how much higher the growth rate will be, I guess we will see over the next few years. But it's going to be all of those three. I think that's pretty clear to us. But I would assume the next few years, it's going to be higher than it was before COVID or the numbers you mentioned.

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.

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.

The next question comes from the line of Konrad Zomer with ABN AMRO ODDO.

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.

I'll ask Nick to cover the first one.

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.

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 Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Sami Kassab with BNP.

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?

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.

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.

Well, thank you for joining us today, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Hello, and welcome to the RELX Half Year Results Webcast. There will be a presentation from management followed by Q&A. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand over to CEO, Erik Engstrom, to begin. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. As you may have seen from our press release this morning, we delivered strong financial results in the first half, and we made further strategic and operational progress. Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher-growth analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to our customers across market segments. Underlying revenue growth was 8%. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was 16%. Adjusted earnings per share growth was 14% at constant currencies. And we have announced an increase in the pound sterling interim dividend of 8%. All 4 business areas grew well, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth in line with or ahead of underlying revenue growth. So let's look at the results for each business area. In Risk, strong fundamentals continue to drive underlying growth. Underlying revenue growth was 8% with underlying adjusted operating profit growth slightly ahead of underlying revenue growth. In business services, which represents around 45% of divisional revenue, growth continued to be driven by financial crime compliance and digital fraud and identity solutions with last year's acquisitions in compliance and behavioral biometrics performing well. Other segments saw some strengthening towards the end of the period. In insurance, representing just under 40% of divisional revenue, strong growth reflected the improvement in business momentum seen throughout the prior year. Customer proposition has been further strengthened by recent small acquisitions in the home and life insurance segment and new sales growth has remained strong. Specialized industry data services, which represents just over 10% of divisional revenue saw strong growth overall with commodity intelligence and aviation growing particularly strongly. Government, representing just over 5%, continued to grow well. Going forward, we expect another year of strong underlying revenue growth in line with historical trends with underlying adjusted operating profit growth broadly matching underlying revenue growth. In STM, underlying revenue growth of 4% continued to be driven by the ongoing shift in business mix towards higher-growth analytics and decision tools. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was in line with underlying revenue growth. In databases, tools and electronic reference and corporate primary research, which together represents around 45% of divisional revenue, strong growth continued, driven by further content development and enhanced analytics. In primary research, academic and government segments, which also represents around 45% of divisional revenue, growth was driven by a return to strong growth in article submissions with pay-to-publish open access articles growing particularly strongly. So far this year, renewals and new sales are going well. Going forward, we expect underlying revenue growth to remain above historical trends with underlying adjusted operating profit growth, slightly exceeding underlying revenue growth. In Legal, we saw a further improvement in underlying revenue growth to 6%, up from 4% in the first half of last year and 5% in the full year. The acceleration in growth has been driven by the continued shift in business mix towards higher-growth legal analytics. Underlying adjusted operating profit growth was slightly ahead of revenue growth at 7%. Strong growth has continued in our law firm and corporate legal markets, which account for over 60% of revenue. Lexis+, our integrated analytics platform, has continued to see strong uptake and usage growth across segments. In May, we held customer previews of Lexis+ AI, our new platform, leveraging generative AI functionality. Renewals and new sales remain strong across all key segments. Going forward, we expect continued strong underlying revenue growth, with underlying adjusted operating profit growth continuing to exceed underlying revenue growth. In Exhibitions, we saw strong revenue growth and a recovery in profitability. Underlying revenue growth was 27%, driven by a significant increase in face-to-face activity with venues now open across all geographies, and average like-for-like event revenue across the portfolio running ahead of pre-pandemic levels by the end of the period. We also continue to make good progress on digital initiatives in support of our physical events. The improvement in profitability reflects the increased activity levels and a lower cost structure from the streamlined event portfolio. Going forward, we expect a year of strong underlying revenue growth. The operating results will continue to benefit from the structurally lower cost base, with margins now expected to be above pre-pandemic levels. Our strategic direction is unchanged. We focus on the organic development of increasingly sophisticated information-based analytics and decision tools that deliver enhanced value to our professional and business customers across market segments. Our growth objectives are: for Risk, to sustain strong growth in the current range for a long time to come; for STM and Legal, to continue on their improving growth trajectories; and for Exhibitions, to capture the growth opportunities from venue reopening and data-driven digital tools. Across all market segments, the improving long-term growth trajectory is being driven by the ongoing shift in our business mix towards higher-growth analytics and decision tools. It is by embracing artificial intelligence technologies for well over a decade that we have been able to develop and deploy these analytics and decision tools across the company. And we believe that our ability to leverage AI, as it evolves, will continue to be an important driver of our business going forward. When combined with our strategy of driving continuous process innovation to manage cost growth below revenue growth, the result is continued strong earnings growth with improving returns. I will now hand over to Nick Luff, our CFO, who will talk you through our results in more detail. I'll be back afterwards for a quick wrap-up and our usual Q&A.

Thank you, Erik. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by providing more detail on the group financials. As Erik said, underlying revenue growth was 8% with underlying adjusted operating profit growth well ahead of that, at 16%. As a result, the adjusted operating margin improved by almost 2 percentage points to 33%. The improved operating results flowed through to adjusted earnings per share, which increased 14% at constant currency. Cash conversion was again strong at 95%, and leverage was 2.2x, slightly up from last year end, but down this time last year. Given the strong overall performance, [ we had to ] increased interim dividend by 8%, while returning dividend cover to 2x on a 12-month trailing basis. We spent GBP 111 million on 2 acquisitions in the first half, and we deployed GBP 550 million of the GBP 800 million planned for the share buybacks this year, with a further GBP 50 million having already been deployed since the end of June. Looking at revenue, you can see the continued strong growth in Risk, the sustained high growth rate in STM and a further pickup in growth in Legal. These growth rates, together with the continued recovery in Exhibitions, took underlying revenue growth for the group as a whole to 8%. Electronic revenue, representing 84% of the group total, saw 7% underlying growth. Total revenue growth at constant currencies for Exhibitions was well ahead of underlying growth because of favorable timing and cycling effects as we returned close to a normal event schedule. Being an odd year, 2023 full year will see net cycling out. So by the year-end, we expect cycling will be a drag of around 10 percentage points on Exhibitions' total revenue growth. Group revenue growth for the first half, taking into account small portfolio effects and exhibitions phasing, was 9% at constant currency and 13% in sterling. Risk and Legal, both delivered strong underlying growth in adjusted operating profit, ahead of underlying revenue growth, with each seeing a small drag from portfolio effects in total constant currency growth. STM saw underlying profit growth in line with underlying revenue growth. Exhibitions' profit recovered further as activity returned to more normal levels, and we benefited from the lower cost structure. Combined with the strong performance of the 3 largest business areas, that drove strong group operating profit numbers, up 16% underlying, up 15% in total at constant currency, and up 20% in sterling, to nearly GBP 1.5 billion. Margins were unchanged in Risk as portfolio effects offset the underlying improvement. In STM, margins were up slightly, benefiting from favorable currency movements. Legal's margin improved by 30 basis points as we continued to keep cost growth below revenue growth. Exhibitions' margins were close to those seen in the first half of 2019, pre-pandemic, benefiting from the return to the normal seasonality in the business, which drives higher margins in the first half than in the full year. Overall group margins were up almost 2 full points, taking them to 33%. Turning to the group adjusted income statement, you can see the underlying growth of 8% in revenue and 16% in operating profit. The interest expense increased with the effective interest rate on gross debt up to 4.2% as we saw rates rise on floating rate debt and increased rates on new term debt issuance. That left profit before tax, up 12% at constant currency and up 16% in sterling. The tax charge in the first half was GBP 284 million, with an effective tax rate that came down to 21%, with nonrecurring tax credits more than offsetting the effect of the increase in the U.K. corporation tax rate. Net profit was up 13% at constant currency and 17% in sterling to just under GBP 1.1 billion. With a lower share count as a result of the share buyback program, adjusted earnings per share were up 14% at constant currency and up 19% in sterling to 56.2p. As you've seen, currency was a benefit to the first half results. Pound averaged 1.23 to the dollar against 1.30 in H1 last year, a weakening of 6%. That was the main reason of turning EPS growth 5 percentage points ahead of constant currency growth. The pound is now stronger against the dollar than it was in full year 2022 and in H1 2023. So if the exchange rates stay at current levels, the average turning rate for the full year this year will be a little ahead of 2022, reversing the weakening that helped the sterling numbers in the first half. Here, you can see how the operating profit flow through to cash flow with EBITDA of over GBP 1.7 billion. CapEx was GBP 227 million, equating to 5% of revenue, leaving us with cash conversion of 95%, which is in line with historical trends. Cash interest paid was GBP 128 million, the increase reflected in higher interest rates and currency effects. Cash tax paid of GBP 320 million was slightly higher than the income statement tax charge, reflecting timing of tax payments. Total free cash flow was GBP 928 million. Here's how we deployed that free cash flow. We completed 2 acquisitions during the first half for a total consideration of GBP 111 million. The larger of the 2 was Human API that joins Risk in the life insurance segment. Dividend payments were GBP 738 million, being last year's final dividend. As I said earlier, we completed GBP 550 million of the 2023 share buyback program in the first half, with a further GBP 50 million deployed already in July. That leaves GBP 200 million of the program to be completed in the remainder of the year. Net debt at 30 June, 2023 was GBP 6.9 billion. Including pensions, the ratio of net debt to EBITDA calculated in U.S. dollars was 2.2x. Finally, our commitment to corporate responsibility continues to be recognized by external reporting agencies. We rated AAA with MSCI for an eighth consecutive year, achieved the top ranking amongst media companies globally with Sustainalytics and achieved fifth position in the Responsibility 100 Index. With that, I will hand you back to Erik.

Thank you, Nick. Just to summarize what we have covered this morning. In the first half, we delivered strong financial results, and we made further strategic and operational progress. Our improving long-term growth trajectory continues to be driven by the ongoing shift in our business mix towards higher-growth analytics and decision tools. As we enter the second half, momentum remains strong across the group, and we expect underlying growth rates in revenue and adjusted operating profit to remain above historical trends, driving another year of strong growth in adjusted earnings per share on a constant currency basis. And with that, I think we're ready to go to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Adam Berlin from UBS.

Three quick questions for me. Just firstly on Legal, can you talk a little bit about how the trial for the new AI product is going? Any feedback you can give, from the customers who are using that product, and whether that's going to have -- when you think that's going to have a revenue impact would be really helpful. Second question is on Exhibitions. When you talk about improving momentum throughout the first half, just thinking about how we model that, given what you said about cycling effects. Should we be thinking -- should we still be comparing to, say, 2019 and just thinking it's going to be a better percentage of 2019 in H2 versus H1? Or do we need to think about the cycling effects are different in 2023 as they were in 2019? So just some help in how we should model H2 Exhibition revenues would be helpful. And thirdly, just on interest costs. Just trying to think about those in H2, given that clearly, U.S. federal policy rate has gone up throughout the first half, but at the same time, the currencies changed, so that should be helpful to interest costs. Should we broadly be thinking the interest costs in H2 will be similar to H1?

Well, thank you, Adam. I'll cover the first one, and then I'll hand the next 2 over to Nick here. So you asked about Lexis+ AI. As you know, we previewed this with customers in May, and you asked about the customer response. We have had very positive customer response, both from people who've seen the previous and the small number of large customers that we've been working with now to actually continue to sort of refine the product. We have had several thousand customers that have signed up to be part of our go-forward insider program. And we're progressing well on the process exactly as we had planned on our planned time line, but we have not yet communicated any precise future dates or specific commercial terms to the market. So we will communicate that first to our customers before we do any other summarization at this level. But it's going well and we got a very positive response. And you said, when will we see this -- you asked, when will we see this come through in any type of market or revenue difference. Well, because we're not commercially out there yet, there shouldn't be any material impact this year on that because the main driver of the improvement in our Legal division now, the growth rate improvement that you've seen from first half last year of 4% to full year last year of 5% to this year now growing at 6%, that's driven by the Lexis+ platform, which has the integrated legal analytics that we've been working on for many years, and that's still the main driver of the improving growth trajectory in Legal, and we continue to be for a while. Nick?

Yes, Adam. So if you're looking at Exhibitions against full year 2019, you should take off 10% for the event portfolio as you know that we no longer run those shows. At current exchange rates, you need to knock off 4% or 5% for currency movements, particularly the yen and then whatever like-for-like comparison you want to use. And obviously, at the beginning of the year, we're running slightly behind on that. But as it says in the statement, we're now running ahead. And your last question on interest. Yes, [ 4.2% ] effective rate in the first half, it will be slightly higher than that in the second half based on where interest rates are right now. Currency, as you say, moves around a bit, but full year charge perhaps slightly more than double the first half.

Your next question comes from Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs.

I have 2. Just firstly, on Exhibitions, so now you're expecting margin to be above 2019 level. Could you maybe confirm how much you're expecting from China? So obviously, the JV was a [ GBP ] 283 million profit back in 2019. So where do you expect that figure to be for the full year? And where were you at the H1 level? That's the first question. And the second question is on AI more broadly. You're obviously the first, probably, company media to announce a new product incorporating generative AI. So just wondering if you could maybe give us an update on the progress you're making on integrated generative AI in other divisions and whether we should also start to see maybe new product launches in the coming sort of 6 or 12 months. And what you're seeing also from your competitors? Have they not come up with anything yet? So just wondering -- yes, any update on that would be helpful.

I'll let Nick cover the first one, and then I'll get back and cover the second.

Yes. So I mean, China is obviously not a huge part of our overall Exhibitions business. There's a bit of phasing difference because of this. We moved some events back [ over in the ] year. But full year, that's -- it looks pretty similar to 2019 by the -- in terms of the overall trends.

And when it comes to AI, as I think I said earlier, we have been leveraging different types of AI technologies across our divisions for well over a decade in Risk, STM and Legal, and more recently, over the last few years, also in Exhibitions for specific types of applications, but much less. That's the [ old type ] what I consider extractive AI, which is the broader umbrella for machine learning, deep learning tools and algorithms that's used [ to ] scoring and prediction and helping you find things and look at things. So that's what we have been using for a very long time across those divisions. We have some large language model-based internal process support tools that have been ramped up, but they're not of any large scale at this moment, but using them a little bit in a couple of places. But we have several customer-facing initiatives being worked on across customer markets that are following the similar principle of what you've seen in Legal for Lexis+ AI. They have not yet been announced to our customers, and they are also going to be more market-specific and application-specific as opposed to what we're doing in Legal, which is really a Lexis+ AI upgrade to the whole platform, which will be a new platform covering the research and integrated analytics in the -- on the Legal side. I mean if you get specific, you could say, in Risk, we've been using AI for well over 15 years, where it's embedded in our algorithms. And in Risk, almost 90% of our revenue is really machine-to-machine, meaning that the old type of algorithms, sort of extractive AI and machine learning tools are very important to what we have done. And the generative AI step-up is a much smaller step than it is in a text-based segment like Legal, just as an example. And when it comes -- you also said what do we do -- what our competitors -- you asked about competitors as well, I think. And I think you're going to have to ask our competitors what they're doing, specifically. The way we see it is that the AI tools that are out there in the marketplace have been available for many years. The new ones are going to come out and be available to all users. And I have no doubt that competitors in our markets will also continue to look for ways to leverage it for their -- for building their analytics and their decision tools. We stay focused on how we can increase the value to our customers by modeling and developing our own tools.

And maybe if I could just ask a very quick follow-up. If you take, for instance, the longer term only, the [ turnover ] time view, let's say, next 3 to 5 years, what -- how do you think about the potential incremental revenue or margin benefit from generative AI for the group? I know it would be hard to quantify, but is it fair to say it should be, I don't know, positive, whether it's [indiscernible] basis points of revenue and [Technical Difficulty] margin?

We don't think about it -- yes, unfortunately, we don't think about it this way because we think technologies have evolved for decades already and will continue to evolve for many decades to come. And we see as one of our key strategic sort of cornerstones is to continue to look for, to scout for, to test and to integrate new technologies as they come along. And we believe that our ability to do that has been behind the gradual improvement in our long-term growth trajectory that you have already seen in our divisions and have continued to see in this half year in Legal. And we believe that generative AI is just one of those technologies that will continue to support that direction of travel for many years to come.

Your next question comes from Tom Singlehurst from Citi.

Hopefully, you can hear me. Tom here from Citi, 3 questions, if it's okay. Firstly, on Risk, can you just talk about your aggregate exposure to the interest rate cycle and sort of refinancing activity, which I expect is quite low? And the reason I ask is, I just wonder whether that will be a differentiator in terms of growth for you in Risk relative to the professional information peer group. So that was the first question I had with the exposure to interest rate cycle. Within Legal, I just -- it felt significant to me that you have talked about your growth in the past as being above historical trend. And now you're talking about it as continued strong growth. Are you formally signaling that we are just in a higher growth stage now for the Legal business? And then thirdly, on Exhibitions, great news on the margins. I'm just wondering, though, you've taken all that cost out of the backbone. And I'm just wondering whether that constrains revenue growth in any way or whether some of those sort of [indiscernible] sort of fixed costs you took out at some point have to come back in.

Okay. Risk, our exposure to the interest rate cycle. Well, our direct exposure to interest rate cycle is very low, just as you said, you're absolutely correct. But that's not something that we see as a big direct impact. Of course, there's always a bit of activity in some of our customer groups, financial services type customer segment where general activity levels might be slightly impacted by it. And I think we saw a little bit of that in last year and the beginning of this year, in particular, in some of our subsegments in business services. But that's a very small part of what we do. It's a small part of the influence on our growth rate. And the main tenet of what we are doing there is to provide higher value-add tools for them to drive financial crime compliance, fraud and identity, et cetera. So a very small impact is there, but it's very small, and it's not something that we think is going to be a major factor overall for the Risk division in any way. And as you can see, in the first half, we continue to run at basically pretty much the rate you would expect on average for us to continue to run. And we have not seen any change recently on that overall blended growth rate for the Risk division. Legal, you asked, we have been talking about the improving long-term growth trajectory now for a while and the fact that Legal has moved up above its historical trends and continue to improve from there. And we are now saying that, because of the higher value-add analytics and decision tools and the integrated platform that we're operating there, we are seeing higher customer interest in those tools. We're seeing higher customer usage, and we're seeing, therefore, increasing customer spend because they do see the value in these tools and they use them more. And we don't see any reason to believe that, that trend is going to reverse in any way. And that's why we're now saying that we believe that the growth rate in Legal will remain strong, which is what we laid [Technical Difficulty] what has happened in the first half of this year. So that's a correct interpretation. When it comes to Exhibition's cost structure, the answer is very simple, it's no. We don't believe that that's going to have any impact. We cleaned up the portfolio, eliminated about 10% of our revenue with a significant number of exhibitions at the beginning of COVID and changed the operating and management structure around that. That's why we now operate with a business that we believe now based on what we can see is heading towards a higher value-add business, higher growth and higher margin than it was before COVID.

Your next question comes from Nick Dempsey from Barclays.

I've also got 3 left. First of all, Thomson Reuters, we saw them spend $650 million on Casetext recently. Does that help them leapfrog you a little bit in terms of Gen AI legal offerings? Or it's a very expensive catch-up? Second question, in Risk and the insurance component, I think the volumes on shopping events were pretty strong, certainly through Q1, and you referenced that being helpful in the first half. When you look at the comps there, are we coming back to more normal levels of growth in the second half? Could that be slightly depressing on the growth rate of that part of Risk in the second half? And third question, end of June Plan S in the STM world in Europe for open access, those guys disallowed some of your journals as being not transformative. Does that create a problem when you come to renew your publisher and re-deals with several European countries or not?

Well, first, on legal analytics and generative AI. And the companies you mentioned are -- have existed in our business, in our market segment for quite a while. They're out there with our customers. We have a lot of respect for our competitors. The question of who owns which subsegment and which tool is not something that we spend much time thinking about. We spend all our time thinking about our main strategy, which is the organic development of our data assets, of our analytical tools and now the incorporation of generative AI into those existing tools and into our existing platform. We believe that, for us, it's a better strategy to continue to build them organically and therefore, from the beginning, plan all the tools with full integration into our systems based on the architecture -- the modular architecture that we have built over the last several years. We think that way not just for generative AI inclusion, but also for all the other technologies that have come before and will continue to come in the future. That's how we approach it. And of course, there will always be other players in our market that also use those tools, but that's what you would have to expect in all our market segments. This is no exception. So we don't think that this changes our strategy or our approach to the market in any way. Risk, you asked about insurance. First of all, in the first half, we saw a continuation of the trends that we were building in the second half of last year, which was that both shopping activity and switching new policy activity build up during the second half, and they remained strong during the first half this year. Then just towards the end of the first half, shopping activity growth started to come, what I consider, almost back down or you can say, in line with historical growth trends, right? So the growth rates on shopping seems to have normalized a bit. But the growth rates in switching and new policies remain very high because people are switching for differences in price when prices are going up and claims severity has been increasing and so on, driven by the economics of the insurance industry. So at the moment, shopping growth rates have normalized a bit, but switching remains very high. And you asked how that then influences the division. It's interesting that in business services, we said that towards the end of last year, we saw a bit of a slowing growth rate there, driven by some of the points that I've made earlier about the economy and interest rates and sort of activity level in some online channels. So the growth rate slowed a little bit in business services, and they remained sort of at those moderate levels for most of the first half. But as we said in our press release, it started to pick up a bit towards the end of the first half. So if you look at these overall, you blend them together, you actually see that our current growth rate in the Risk division is very much in line with the overall growth rate for the first half because these are slightly operating in different directions. The last question on STM. As you know, there are lots of different organizations, funding bodies, policy groups around the world that continuously work to figure out how to articulate their preferences on how this industry should evolve and how customer -- our customers could evolve with the changing landscape of different -- of the growth of number of articles published and the evolving payment landscape for those articles to be published. We are very happy to work with any of those models and continue to engage directly with all our customers and with all those funding bodies to make sure we fully understand their preferences and come up with slightly adjusted ways of serving them so that they get what they want from us and they get that from us at attractive terms compared to other major providers. And this is no different. It's just one more step in a long sequence of steps like this that have been discussed and articulated over many years.

Your next question comes from Matthew Walker from Credit Suisse.

The first one is just -- I mean, people have asked questions about what new products you've got in AI coming out in other divisions. But just to think about how do you actually defend the content that you have to prevent it from being called by other people's large language models, whether they subscribe to your product or not. How does copyright work for the different elements in different divisions? And yes, basically, how do you defend your content being called by others? And then the second question was on business services. It was beginning to slow down, business services, I guess, because of tighter credit conditions. Apparently, it sort of sped up a little bit recently. What do you think the outlook is for business services within Risk. Are you going to see this sort of small increase in June as a sort of one-off? And is it going to go back down? Yes, just interested [Technical Difficulty] outlook there? And then finally, on free cash flow, you've seen basically a working capital outflow in the first half. What is your outlook for working capital and free cash flow for the full year?

I'll answer the first 2 questions, and I'll let Nick handle the third here. Yes. So on AI and you -- specifically, for instance, general language -- generative AI and large language model tools. The way our contracts work with any customer that subscribes to accessing and using our content is that it's for specific purposes. And those purposes do not generally include any large language model training or any type of generative AI extraction. And that's very clear and that's been now discussed both in our industry and in other industries and more generally, we the LLM providers. So -- and that's why the industry has gone towards our strategy, which is that there are many large language model providers. We are working with several of them, a large number, and we're building our tools to be, over time, model-agnostic, meaning that we can use different types of LLM. We also -- when we train them or we have done all different versions of this, we have used some in our pilot products where you just see what they can do as is, which clearly does not work very well for specific business and professional purposes. Then we do some sort of prompt engineering and what we look at as fine-tuning. When we then roll it off, we license in the actual software tool and then apply it and only train it on our content that exists. That is proprietary or copyrighted or created by ourselves and firewalled and then we use those tools to train the model and then to only serve content sets and results that are based on those tools. And that's why we believe that the LLMs are going to license into us, we will apply them to our tools. It's just an additional technological or technical capability, a tool that we can use to refine and advance and improve our analytics and decision tools that already exist. So that's the way the copyright and intellectual property rules work around, our content sets for large language model providers. Business services, yes, it started to slow. The growth rate started to slow a little bit actually last year, and that started to -- in the second half of last year, in particular, and then during the first half, and we have seen it pick up a little bit on a like-for-like growth rate basis as well as on an absolute basis over the last couple of months. And how do I see this going forward? The key point there is actually that we are seeing a little sequential strengthening now, and we're also, on a growth rate basis, starting to lap the period that was a little slower in growth. I mean we're not talking about big shifts here, but that's how I see it going forward. That's why I believe that the more recent trends are likely to continue.

And Matthew, your question on free cash flow and working capital. As you know, we have a very attractive large negative working capital position. It's pretty stable. It doesn't tend to move much. Sometimes in a full year, we got a small inflow, sometimes a small outflow, but it just depends on what exactly happens towards the year-end. But overall, I'm not expecting anything different. Our typical mid-90s cash conversion, as you saw, that's what we did in the first half and no reason at this point to think we'll do anything different for the full year.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Konrad Zomer from ODDO BHF.

The first one is to try again on the working capital on the back of the previous question. Can you explain to us why there was a working capital outflow in the first half? I fully understand that on a full year basis there's no material shift. But just struggling to understand why your working capital outflow would be negative in the first half? And my second question is, previously, you indicated that growth in the articles -- sorry, open access article was more than 20% year-on-year. You still talk about strong growth. Would you confirm that growth in that particular part of primary research is still above 20%?

I'll take the second one, and then I'll let Nick cover the first here. So I'll take the second. I'll get Nick to cover the first one because the second is very simple. Yes, I can confirm that article submissions growth is back to strong growth overall. And when we say particularly strong growth, in sort of pay-to-publish open access. Yes, I can confirm that the growth rate in article submissions in open access is still over 20%, yes.

Konrad, it's not unusual for us to have a working capital outflow in the first half. We have quite a few of our subscriptions on a full year cycle with billing in advance. So we often kept the cash before the start of the relevant year and then just the deferred revenue unwinds in the first half a little bit. But it's a small number on some -- the overall gross working capital balances are into the billions. So you just do get small net flows one way or the other. We obviously very carefully manage everything and manage the cash conversion. And as I said, that 95% cash conversion in the first half, that's in line with historical trends. We've had a couple of years, slightly oddly with the dynamics around exhibitions, which put us over [ 100% ] in the first half. But the 95% you see there for the first half this time is entirely in line with historical trends. And for the full year, no reason to expect anything different.

Your next question comes from Henk Slotboom from The Idea.

A very simple question. With more and more companies having to report on CO2 footprint and that sort of things, the Exhibitions business, it involves a lot of travel for people. Could that be a constraining factor going forward in time? And if so, how do you deal with that?

Yes. The -- obviously, exhibitions are a way actually of helping people to reduce their carbon footprint because by bringing people together in one place where you can meet many customers and industry contacts, it saves a lot of travel. So I think exhibitions have a role to play in helping people need to travel less.

Well, thank you very much for taking the time to join us on the call today, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.