RELX PLC

What does RELX own?
RELX owns four operating divisions: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Elsevier (Scientific, Technical and Medical), LexisNexis Legal and Professional, and RX exhibitions. Notable products include ScienceDirect, Scopus, The Lancet, Cell, Lexis+ AI, and hundreds of trade shows.

Is RELX publicly traded?
Yes. RELX PLC is listed on the London Stock Exchange under REL, with listings on Euronext Amsterdam and NYSE American depositary receipts under RELX. It is a FTSE 100 component.

Who founded RELX?
RELX was created by the 1993 merger of Reed International, a British paper and publishing company founded by Albert E. Reed in 1894, and Elsevier NV, the Dutch scientific publisher founded in 1880.

Where is RELX headquartered?
RELX is headquartered in London, England, United Kingdom. Its major divisions maintain operational headquarters in Amsterdam, New York, and Atlanta.

What is RELX's revenue?
For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, RELX reported revenue of 9.59 billion pounds and adjusted operating profit of 3.34 billion pounds, with underlying revenue growth of 7%.

Who owns RELX?
RELX is owned by public shareholders, primarily institutional investors. No single shareholder or family controls the company.

Does RELX own Elsevier?
Yes. Elsevier is RELX's Scientific, Technical and Medical division, contributing about 28% of group revenue in FY2025. The two have been under common ownership since the 1993 merger.

RELX descends from two Victorian-era businesses. Albert E. Reed built a paper manufacturing company in England in 1894, which evolved into Reed International, a publishing and information group. Across the North Sea, Dutch publisher Elsevier NV had been founded in 1880 in Rotterdam, taking its name from the 16th-century Elzevir printing family, and grew into the largest English-language scientific journal publisher in the world.

The two companies merged in 1993 to form Reed Elsevier, pairing Reed's reference and business publishing with Elsevier's scientific monopoly on prestige journals. The merged group spent the 1990s and 2000s acquiring aggressively: LexisNexis legal and risk databases, Harcourt's journal portfolio in 2001, and a string of business information titles.

A strategic overhaul followed under Erik Engström, who became CEO in 2009. The company sold off most of Reed Business Information's trade magazines, exited print directories, and pivoted hard toward data analytics. Acquisitions such as ThreatMetrix in 2018 for about 580 million pounds built the Risk division into the group's largest segment. In February 2015 the group renamed itself RELX, shedding both legacy names to signal that it was no longer primarily a publisher.

Structural simplification continued with the collapse of its dual UK and Dutch listing into a single London-headquartered RELX PLC in 2018. The exhibitions business took a severe hit during the 2020 pandemic but recovered through 2023. In FY2025 the group completed five acquisitions for a combined 270 million pounds and a 1.5 billion pound share buyback, while reporting its fourth consecutive year of 7% underlying revenue growth.

RELX has held CarbonNeutral Protocol certification for its own operations since 2020 and reports net zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions alongside long-term Scope 3 targets. It has ranked at the top of its industry in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and related ESG assessments.

The more relevant ethics questions for RELX concern its products: the fairness of risk-scoring algorithms used in policing and insurance, the pricing of scientific publishing, and data privacy in consumer data brokerage operations. The company publishes an annual corporate responsibility report addressing each.

Elsevier's publishing economics have drawn the loudest criticism. The 2012 Cost of Knowledge boycott collected more than 17,000 researcher signatures over journal pricing. From 2019 to 2021 the University of California system, one of Elsevier's largest customers, cut access for two years during a fight over open access terms before reaching a transformative agreement in 2021, a model since adopted widely.

The Risk division faces periodic scrutiny over the accuracy of consumer data used in tenant screening, insurance pricing, and law enforcement tools, and LexisNexis data contracts with US immigration agencies drew public criticism in the late 2010s. RELX has also faced litigation over historical insurance-data products. These issues remain recurring regulatory and reputational risks rather than resolved matters.