Revenue 2023: £9.161 billion (€10.530 billion)

Overview

Scientific journals, databases, specialist journals – for more than a hundred years, access to specialist information has been a lucrative business for the British-Dutch media company Reed Elsevier, which has been operating under the name RELX Group since 2015. The high-price policy of the RELX Journals has led to a boycott movement in recent years, which more and more universities and academics have joined.

General Information

Headquarters:
1-3 Beach
London WC2N 5JR
Great Britain
Phone: 0044 20 7930 7077

230 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10169
USA
Phone: 001 212 309 8100 
Website: http://www.relx.com/investors/investor-overview

Branches of trade:: Databases, information services, journals, book publishers, specialist publishers, trade fairs and exhibitions
legal form: Cooperating public limited company of the independent companies Elsevier NV and Reed International 
fiscal year: 01.01. – 31.12.
founding year: 1894 (Reed), 1880 (Elsevier), 2015 (RELX) 

	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019
Revenue	9.161	8.553	7.244	7.110	7.874
profit after taxes	2.156	1.961	1.471	1.224	1.505
Stock price (year end)	39,54	27,72	32,61	24,40	25,02
Employees	36.500	35.700	33.500	33.200	33.200

Executives and Directors

Management:

• Erik Engstrom, CEO RELX
• Nick Luff, Chief Financial Officer RELX
• Mark Kelsey, Chief Executive Officer, Risk
• Kumsal Bayazit, Chief Executive Officer, Scientific, Technical & Medical and Chair, RELX Technology Forum
• Mike Walsh, Chief Executive Officer, Legal
• Hugh M. Jones IV, Chief Executive Officer, Exhibitions
• Youngsuk “YS” Chi, Director of RELX Corporate Affairs and Chairman Elsevier
• Henry Udow, Chief Legal Officer and Company Secretary
• Jelena Sevo, Chief Strategy Officer
• Vijay Raghavan, Director, RELX Technology Forum and Chief Technology Officer, Risk
• Rose Thomson, Chief Human Resources Officer
  

Board of Directors:

• Erik Engstrom, CEO RELX
• Nick Luff, Chief Financial Officer RELX
• Paul Walker, Ashtead Group plc
• Dr. Wolfhart Hauser, Associated British Foods plc
• June Felix, IG Group Holdings plc
• Charlotte Hogg, Visa Inc.
• Marike van Lier Lels, PostNL NV
• Robert Macleod, Johnson Matthew plc
• Andrew Sukawaty, HG Capital USA, Inmarsat plc
• Suzanne Wood, Vulcan Materials Company

History

In 1993, the British publishing giant Reed International began collaborating with the Dutch Elsevier Group. Both companies operated as independent corporations, but since April 2002 have operated solely as Reed-Elsevier. Reed began as a paper mill in 1894, later expanding into wallpaper and paint production, and only became a media company almost 80 years later through the acquisition of popular magazines and daily newspapers – including the "Daily Mirror." From the 1980s onward, Reed ceased to supply paper and paint supplies, and a decade later, Reed gradually shifted from the popular press to the trade press.

Elsevier, founded in Rotterdam in 1880, was already the largest trade magazine publisher in the Netherlands when it began its collaboration with Reed and owned leading daily newspapers such as the "Allgemeen Dagblad." Like Reed, Elsevier also divested itself almost entirely of its general interest titles from 1995 onwards in order to concentrate entirely on further expanding its specialist information division (for example, in October 2012, Reed sold the Hollywood trade magazine "Variety"). A merger with Wolters Kluwer, another Dutch specialist publishing giant, which was thought to be certain, unexpectedly collapsed in March 1998. While Reed Elsevier blamed antitrust regulations for this, the dual structure of the Anglo-Dutch company, with two headquarters and dual management, was certainly also a factor. Since 1999, the complex Reed-Elsevier business structure has been fundamentally reformed. There is now a unified management team under a Chairman and a CEO. Each of the group's core divisions has its own CEO. Former CEO Crispin Davis was considered the driving force behind the successful restructuring of the company, which the Guardian once described as an "archaic two-country construct."

From 2005 to mid-2008, the company's connections to the international arms trade made headlines. Ironically, the renowned medical journal "The Lancet," published by Reed Elsevier, published an article criticizing the activities of its subsidiary Spearhead/Reed Exhibitions. The latter specializes in organizing trade fairs and exhibitions. In September 2005, the company hosted the DSEi (Defence Systems and Equipment International) for the first time, one of the world's largest military exhibitions, which, among other things, featured cluster bombs banned by the UN. For over two years, "The Lancet" regularly distanced itself from the parent company's ties to the international arms industry, arguing that these ties were morally unacceptable for a medical publication. In March 2007, around 80 "Lancet" editors wrote an open letter, including a list of critical questions, to then-CEO Davis. Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, the UK's leading medical organization, and US linguist Noam Chomsky, among others, protested against the arms fairs in letters to the editor on three pages. Sir Michael Atiyah, former president of the influential Royal Society, called for a boycott of Reed Elsevier publications. CEO Davis defended the controversial commitment by stating that "the defense industry is necessary for maintaining liberty and national security." In May 2008, management responded and announced that the DSEi would no longer be organized by Reed Elsevier. The pressure from shareholders and the protest movement "The Campaign Against Arm Trade" had become too great.

The company's reputation suffered further in 2009 when it became known that Elsevier had published journals in Australia between 2000 and 2005 on behalf of pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, which appeared to be independent journals. In addition, the six pseudo-journals published articles on hormone replacement therapies that were demonstrably written by ghostwriters working for the pharmaceutical industry.

Another source of conflict is the monopolistic high-pricing policy of Elsevier's academic journals. In 2012, this led to a boycott movement joined by more than 15,000 academics. They were no longer willing to publish their articles with Elsevier, only for the publisher to sell the research results, already funded with public money, at exorbitant prices to students, academics, and libraries – thus preventing the knowledge gained in academic institutions from spreading quickly and cheaply around the world. As a result, more and more universities are refusing to include new Elsevier journals in their catalogs – even Harvard University publicly warned that the exorbitant prices libraries have to pay for academic journals could restrict academic activity in the long term. The boycott grew even stronger when CEO Engstrom dismissed the criticism as a "misunderstanding." Even price reductions (Elsevier journals are typically three times more expensive than comparable publications from university presses) failed to weaken the protest movement. Frank Simon-Ritz, chairman of the German Library Association, described Elsevier's pricing policy as "partly immoral."

management

Erik Engstrom has been CEO of RELX since 2009. The Swede is considered to be publicity-shy and introverted. Public appearances and interviews with Engstrom are rare and would only fuel the numerous controversies the company has generated in recent years regarding its exhibition and trade journal divisions. One will wait in vain for a publicly announced strategic plan from him, just to boost the share price by a few percentage points.

Business segments

RELX has offices in 40 countries, customers in over 180 countries, 33,500 employees, and a market capitalization of €48.3 billion. It divides its business into four market segments:

Risk: Databases such as LexisNexis Solutions support risk management. For example, in 2021, 85 percent of all car insurance policies taken out in the US used them.

Scientific, Technical & Medical: including specialist journals (18 percent of scientific articles worldwide appear in RELX journals); databases (18 million unique visitors have monthly access to academic journals via the ScienceDirect portal; Scopus is a leading database with abstracts from 27,000 journals); the leading clinical reference platform “ClinicalKey”.

Legal: Information services on legal matters (LexisNexis legal and news database)

Exhibitions: With over 400 exhibitions, Reed Exhibitions is the largest commercial organizer of trade shows and exhibitions. Recently, there were exhibitions for 43 industries in 22 countries.

Current developments

Contrary to all predictions that academic publishers would gradually become obsolete with the spread of the internet, RELX has grown significantly over the past two decades. Despite the growing global boycott movement against its high-price policy, RELX continues to generate substantial profits.

But there is still a lot of opposition. In 2012, scientists called for a boycott of Elsevier, and in 2019, university representatives have also had enough. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, describes the three major academic publishers (besides RELX, these include Springer Nature and Wiley) as "evil in the making of publishers." Libraries are being "blackmailed with dictated prices" and achieving dream returns of up to 40 percent. Ambitious scientists, in any case, cannot forgo publishing in one of the high-profile journals.

Meanwhile, there are steps to weaken the power of the oligopoly. The "Deal Group," an association of academic institutions and libraries under the umbrella of the German Rectors' Conference (HRK), reached an initial agreement in January 2019 with Wiley, the smallest of the big three. Springer Nature was supposed to follow suit. Negotiations with RELX, the third and largest in the group, are at a standstill.

literature

• Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6).