London, April 27, 2026, 13:03 BST
- RELX PLC applied to admit 70,000 new ordinary shares in London under its 2023 employee share purchase plan.
- The filing follows a fresh £350 million buyback tranche and broad shareholder backing at last week’s annual meeting.
- The larger question remains whether RELX’s paid legal and data tools can keep pricing power as AI competitors move deeper into professional workflows.
RELX PLC has applied for a block admission of 70,000 new ordinary shares on the London Stock Exchange, a small staff-share filing that lands days after the information and analytics group secured buyback authority and kept its 2026 outlook intact.
The shares, with a nominal value of 14 51/116 pence each, will be allotted under the RELX PLC Employee Share Purchase Plan 2023. Admission is expected on April 30, and the shares will rank equally with existing ordinary shares, a regulatory filing showed.
The move matters less for dilution than for timing. Investors are watching RELX’s capital returns and its artificial intelligence strategy after a difficult spell for data and legal-information stocks, where fears over generative AI have cut across the sector.
RELX said last week it would run a £350 million non-discretionary share buyback between April 23 and May 22, after completing another £350 million programme on April 22. The two tranches sit inside a wider £2.25 billion buyback plan for 2026, with repurchased shares to be held in treasury to reduce capital.
Shareholders gave the company plenty of room. AGM poll results showed 99.67% support for the authority to buy back shares, 94.49% support for authority to allot shares and 99.82% support for the final dividend, with roughly 84% of issued capital voting on the main resolutions.
Operationally, RELX told investors it had “started the year well” across all four business areas and still expected strong underlying growth in revenue, adjusted operating profit and adjusted earnings per share at constant currencies. Underlying growth strips out items such as currency moves, recent acquisitions and disposals, giving investors a cleaner view of the core business. ([relx.com][4])
Legal remains the pressure point. RELX said Law Firms & Corporate Legal grew at a double-digit rate, helped by adoption of Lexis+ with Protégé, its AI-enabled legal research and analytics platform with an “agentic” assistant — software designed to carry out multi-step tasks rather than just answer a single prompt. ([relx.com][4])
Morningstar senior equity analyst Rob Hales wrote after the update that RELX gave “no first-quarter numbers” and made no change to its guidance wording. He kept a GBX 4,200 fair value estimate, called the shares “deeply undervalued” and said the company could benefit from AI through product innovation, even after the stock was hit by the AI disruption narrative. Morningstar
The competitive backdrop is moving quickly. Freshfields and Anthropic said on April 23 they had agreed to develop legal AI tools, while Freshfields is also testing a newer version of CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters, a RELX rival in legal information. Thomson Reuters Chief Technology Officer Joel Hron told Reuters the market was shifting from AI experiments to embedding the technology “into day-to-day workflows at scale.” Reuters
But the downside case is still live. In February, Anthropic’s legal tool announcement triggered a sharp selloff in European data and legal software names, with RELX, Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters all hit; Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, said the risk was that such tools could cut margins or remove some data providers from the workflow altogether.
RELX also flagged a more prosaic risk in Exhibitions: some events in the Middle East had been rescheduled. The company still expects strong underlying revenue growth and an improved adjusted operating margin there, but the note was a reminder that not all of RELX’s growth test is about AI. ([relx.com][4])
Shares were little changed in Monday trading, with Investing.com data showing RELX at 2,695 pence, down 0.04%, after a 2,696 pence close on April 24. For now, the filing is small. The real test is whether RELX can turn proprietary content, buybacks and AI-enabled tools into enough growth to quiet the disruption trade.
[4]: https://www.relx.com/media/press-releases/year-2026/trading-update-april-2026 “
Trading Update – RELX – Information-based analytics and decision tools
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