Anthony Habgood
Management
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to RELX’s 2018 Results Presentation. Thank you all very much for coming, and for those of you listening on our webcast, thank you for joining us. 2018 was an eventful year for us. We spent almost GBP 1 billion on nine acquisitions during the year, the largest two of which were important moves in our highly successful and growing Risk & Business Analytics group. In September, we completed the corporate simplification process, the first stage of which we accomplished in 2015. Back then, just to remind you, we simplified our structure by combining all of our assets below the two parent companies into a single group entity and eliminating parent company across shareholdings. We also moved all share listings to an equalization ratio of 1:1, fully aligned our board and produced consolidated results for the first time. In 2018, we moved to a single parent structure, RELX PLC. And with an over 99% vote in favor, both in the UK and in the Netherlands at shareholder meetings in June, we had quite remarkable consensus among shareholders in both jurisdictions. And we now have full weighting confirmed for RELX PLC shares both on the London Stock Exchange and AEX Amsterdam. Interestingly, the largest investors in the Dutch parent company before September, whether I measure the top 5, the top 10, the top 20 or the top 30, have not sold down their overall shareholding in RELX. So they now have as great an investment in PLC as they did in NV and PLC combined before the simplification, which I hope you’ll agree with me is a fantastic result. Most important of all in 2018, as Erik will explain in detail, we continued to deliver on our organic strategy in each of our businesses and across RELX. Underlying revenue was up 4%. Adjusted earnings per share up 7% in constant currency, and as you will have seen, we’re recommending a 7% increase in the dividend for the year to 42.1p. So all in all, we’ve had a really good year of progress on all fronts. Erik?