1. Company oversight
The company Relx Group is a provider of analytics and information for business, professional and academics to customers from different industries. The company has customers in 180 countries with offices in 40 countries. The company has 30 thousand employees; a half of the payroll is located in the United States of America. The company operates in the following market segments:
■ Scientific: The Company stores more than 16% of the scientific articles of the world that were published in the last ten years with peer-reviewed conditions with strategic associations with scientific magazines and universities.
■ Technical and Medical: The Company offers information support to medical institutions around the world by a monthly and yearly subscription. The company has strong relations with technology providers, investigators supporting investigations and obtaining new technology information that lease to its customers.
■ Risk and business analysis: The Company has a business and risk analysis that supports institutional and individual investors in the most important markets of the world. The company has research units in New York, London, Singapore and Tokyo generating valuable information to the investors about the market evolution and how the market will develop in the future. The company evaluates the risks of the markets and relates that analysis with the business recommendations (RELX Group, 2016).
■ Legal: The Company has a legal unit that offers legal advisory to clients in areas of investment and patents issues. The technical information database results in an important asset for the company to give the best advice to the customers.
■ Exhibitions: The Company develops more than 500 exhibitions a year with more than 7 million visitors. The development of exhibitions has the potential to boost local economies and allows the company to promote its products and services.
The company had an underlying growth in 2015 of 3% in revenues with adjusted earnings per share of 7%. The company improved its leverage position from 2.2 dollars per one dollar of earnings before interest, taxes depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) to 1.8 dollars per one dollar of EBIDTA.
The net profits per year evolved from 2013 to 2015 from 1,115 million pounds to 1,014 million pounds, recovering from a slip in 2014. The cash flow values evolved from 1,943 million dollars in 2013 to 1,882 million dollars in 2015 that represents a decrease of 3%.
The total assets of the company stuck in a value over the 11 billion dollars with no variation from 2013. The company improved the liability ratios and an equity position due to a repurchase program of stocks on the London Stock Exchange and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
2. Brands and products
The company has dozen of brands and products in each of the five segments of the company.
Scientific, technical and medical:
■ Elsevier: Database of technical journals and the biggest editorial of books in scientific literature and medicine in the world.
■ The Lancet: It offers medical journals since 1823. The service was acquired by RELX in 1997.
■ Scopus: The service is focused on scholarly research and worldwide clients. The service offers a database of abstracts and citations.
■ Cell: A medical journal with high impact in investigations of biochemistry and molecular biology.
■ Scival: Service to analyses research offering the best strategies to organizations.
■ Hesi: An application focused to nursing and health professionals for their preparation and testing.
■ Science Direct: A database of medical and scientific research articles.
■ Mendeley: The last innovation of the company combining social networks application with a new research management tools.
Risk and Business Analysis:
■ Flight Global: The service is focused on professionals working in the air industry offering advisory services, news, and data.
■ C.L.U.E: The service offers a claims database of the United States personal insurances. The service works for an individual that require advisory in the acquisition of insurance.
■ Accuity: The service offers information and advisory to the banks and corporate customers of efficient payment solutions, customer information, and money laundering.
■ Icis: The service offers price benchmarks, news, and analytics to several industries in the field of chemical and energy.
Legal:
■ Lexis Advance: The service is an online research tool that supports legal professional to execute investigations and research.
Exhibition:
■ World Travel Market: The company plan, procure and execute global events for the travel industry.
■ International Security Conference: It is a security service for global events, exhibitions, and conferences. The security service includes personnel, control access and video recording of events.
■ Metalex: The most important provider in South East Asia of metallic structures and machine tools for fairs, exhibitions, and events.
3. Risks analysis
Economy and market conditions: The demand for the services of the company may be affected by the market conditions of Gross Domestic Product, inflation, unemployment in the most important markets of the world as United States of America, Europe, and South East Asia. The government funding to the investigation, universities are an important factor in the sales of the company.
Intellectual property rights: 100% of all the intangible assets of the company are protected by trademarks, patents, and property of the countries where the company operates. A change in the property rights and legislation may affect the sales and revenues of the company.
4. Business analysis
Data resources: The company depends on of third party providers for the storage of its entire intangible asset, those are, the scientific articles, market data, and research information. Third party database storage providers are from different countries as United States of America, Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong. The failure in the service of the database and potential attacks of virus and hackers affect the secure functioning of the services.
Paid Subscriptions: The Company sells the services to its client's thanks to paid subscription on a monthly or yearly basis. In intellectual scenarios, there are always the critics about the free availability of scientific information after a specific time. Today, the company does not have problems with this issue, but it represents a risk for the business in the future.
Customer acceptance of products: The Company depends on the necessity of the customer to demand the services of the company. There is a risk for the company not to meet the requirements of the clients and that cancel the subscriptions.
Competition: The Company is in a highly competitive market, requiring a constant evolution and market research to offer new products and service and abandon the services that are not profitable.
Acquisitions: The Company cannot abandon the current strategy to acquire information services that are available in the market and match with the mission and goals of the company. If the company stops in their acquisition policy, may lose in the long term competitiveness.
Supply chain dependency: The Company has an organizational and operational structure that depends on of outsourced and freelance collaborators that help to reduce cost operations and improve time product delivery. But on the other hand, that condition increase the risk of the company to have a poor performance in the service quality due to difficulties of control and failure of third party providers.
5. Corporate responsibility
The company has the corporate responsibility as an integral part of its core business. The company with the intangible assets as its more important asset, the use of the information to create benefits for the community is part of the corporate responsibility of the company. The Elsevier service dedicates more than ten percent of all its research capacity to support the Research4Life project, a joint initiative with the United Nations that helps the medical investigation in more than 50 undeveloped countries.
Another initiative of the Corporation is the Automated Delivery of Alerts on Missing Children (ADAM). Since the launching of the service, the program has helped more than 155 children from Africa and India.
6. Competitor comparison
The direct competitor of the Relx Group is the Thomson Reuters Corporation, well known in the markets as one of the most important providers of financial data and information in Stocks Exchanges and a news agency with representation in more than 180 countries.
The market capitalization of Thomson Reuters Corporation is lower than Relx with a value of 30,939 million dollars compared with the 37,517 million dollars of Relx group (Morning Star, 2016).
7. Corporate structure of the company
The company has two parent companies. Relx PLC is the British parent company with headquarters in London, and the Relx NV is the Dutch parent company with headquarters in Amsterdam, Relx PLC owns the 52.9 percent of the group, and Relx NV owns 47.1 percent of the group.
Reference List
Morning Star, 2016. RELX PLC ADR RELX. [Online] Available at: http://financials.morningstar.com/competitors/industry-peer.action?t=RELX®ion=usa&culture=en-US [Accessed 15 May 2016].
RELX Group, 2016. Annual Reports and Financial Statements. [Online] Available at: http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_ar_2015.pdf [Accessed 15 May 2016].
Appendix
Appendix 1: Summary of RELX financial data
Appendix 2: Profit per year of RELX Group
Appendix 3: Balance sheet of RELX Group
