How to deal with the “Claude crash”: Relx should keep buying back shares, then buy more | Nils Pratley
As the FTSE 100 index bobs along close to all-time highs, it is easy to miss the quiet share price crash in one corner of the market.It’s got a name – the “Claude crash”, referencing the plug-in legal products added by the AI firm Anthropic to its Claude Cowork office assistant.This launch, or so you would think from the panicked stock market reaction in the past few weeks, marks the moment when the AI revolution rips chunks out of some of the UK’s biggest public companies – those in the dull but successful “data” game, including Relx, the London Stock Exchange Group, Experian, Sage and Informa.Relx, the former Reed Elsevier, whose brands include the Lancet and LexisNexis, is the most intriguing in that list.The company’s description of itself contains at least five words to provoke a yawn – “a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers” – but the pre-Claude share price was a thing of wonder.
It was £5 in 2012 and £41 in May last year, at which point Relx was worth £70bn-ish and was the fifth-largest company in the FTSE 100 index,And now? The shares have halved from their highs and the biggest falls have come since Claude’s supposedly terror-inducing plug-ins appeared,The market has flipped from seeing Relx as an AI winner – because it is using AI to boost existing products – to fearing its beautiful 34% profit margin will implode,What does the company itself think? Well, Thursday’s full-year results were not titled “the stock market’s gone mad”, because that’s not Relx’s style,But the numbers and statement oozed confidence: revenues up 7% to £9.
6bn and operating profits up 9% to £3,3bn; a forecast of “another year of strong growth in 2026”; a dividend raised 7%; and a bigger share buyback of £2,25bn,Chief executive Erik Engström also offered a coherent argument for why the evolution of AI would “remain a key driver of customer value and growth in our business for many years to come”,Short version: AI tools are not new; the recent launches that have caused the fuss are “workflow” products for storing, sorting and reviewing documents for specific projects; Relx mostly fishes in the smaller market for must-have information that is comprehensive and can be relied upon in court.
Some of Relx’s data may be public, some may have been public in the past but no longer is so; some is hard to find; some is licensed; some is proprietary; it all comes with “judgments, inferences and interpretations gathered over decades” that are useful to scientists, lawyers, insurance and City professionals and risk assessors; and AI may assist in that value-adding process, or just make the stuff easier for customers to use.His other big point is that Relx is free to do limited licensing deals with AI companies if it wishes, and can continue to launch its own “workflow” products, but it is never going to surrender its impossible-to-replicate proprietary information because that’s where the value in its business lies.It was good for a 2% bounce in the share price, which is better than nothing, but still suggests market worries about where the AI evolution goes next, and whether Relx’s “competitive moat”, as the analysts say, is as deep as advertised.The issue, in part, is fear of the unknown.But Relx’s tactical response should be obvious.
If it thinks growth can be relied upon “for many years to come”, as Engström says, and, if the shares are available at half the price of a year ago, just keep the buybacks rolling.This year’s £2.25bn version, up from £1.5bn, equates to 6% of the entire equity base.If it keeps up that pace for a few years, it will get a serious boost to earnings per share – assuming, of course, that the projections for the business itself really are solid.
Bigger buybacks, reportedly, are also the activist investor Elliott Management’s prescription at LSEG, where the AI worries and counter-arguments are similar,If you are truly confident, it is the right thing to do,
Anthropic raises $30bn in latest round, valuing Claude bot maker at $380bn
Anthropic, the US AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, has raised $30bn (£22bn) in a funding round that more than doubled its valuation to $380bn.The company’s previous funding round in September achieved a value of $183bn, with further improvements in the technology since then spurring even greater investor interest.The fundraising was announced amid a series of stock market moves against industries that face disruption from the latest models, including software, trucking and logistics, wealth management and commercial property services.The funding round, led by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and the hedge fund Coatue Management, is among the largest private fundraising deals on record.“Anthropic is the clear category leader in enterprise AI,” said Choo Yong Cheen, the chief investment officer of private equity at GIC
How to deal with the “Claude crash”: Relx should keep buying back shares, then buy more | Nils Pratley
As the FTSE 100 index bobs along close to all-time highs, it is easy to miss the quiet share price crash in one corner of the market. It’s got a name – the “Claude crash”, referencing the plug-in legal products added by the AI firm Anthropic to its Claude Cowork office assistant.This launch, or so you would think from the panicked stock market reaction in the past few weeks, marks the moment when the AI revolution rips chunks out of some of the UK’s biggest public companies – those in the dull but successful “data” game, including Relx, the London Stock Exchange Group, Experian, Sage and Informa.Relx, the former Reed Elsevier, whose brands include the Lancet and LexisNexis, is the most intriguing in that list. The company’s description of itself contains at least five words to provoke a yawn – “a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers” – but the pre-Claude share price was a thing of wonder
Share values of property services firms tumble over fears of AI disruption
Shares in commercial property services companies have tumbled, in the latest sell-off driven by fears over disruption from artificial intelligence.After steep declines on Wall Street, European stocks in the sector were hit on Thursday.The estate agent Savills’ shares fell 7.5% in London, while the serviced office provider International Workplace Group, which owns the Regus brand, lost 9%.The UK’s two biggest property developers, British Land and Landsec, dropped 2
Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January
Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output. The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.Musk’s posts included him repeatedly claiming white people face systemic discrimination, endorsing the conspiracy that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in countries around the world and promoting a claim that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority
The big AI job swap: why white-collar workers are ditching their careers
As AI job losses rise in the professional sector, many are switching to more traditional trades. But how do they feel about accepting lower pay – and, in some cases, giving up their vocation?California-based Jacqueline Bowman had been dead set on becoming a writer since she was a child. At 14 she got her first internship at her local newspaper, and later she studied journalism at university. Though she hadn’t been able to make a full-time living from her favourite pastime – fiction writing – post-university, she consistently got writing work (mostly content marketing, some journalism) and went freelance full-time when she was 26. Sure, content marketing wasn’t exactly the dream, but she was writing every day, and it was paying the bills – she was happy enough
Is it possible to develop AI without the US?
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Today in tech, we’re discussing the Persian Gulf countries making a play for sovereignty over their own artificial intelligence in response to an unstable United States. That, and US tech giants’ plans to spend more than $600bn this year alone.I spent most of last week in Doha at the Web Summit Qatar, the Gulf’s new version of the popular annual tech conference. One theme stood out among the speeches I watched and the conversations I had: sovereignty
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