RELX PLC (Reuters) - RELX Plc (>> Relx PLC), Europe's largest media group, said it raised its dividend for 2015 and enhanced its share buyback target for this year.
The company, formerly known as Reed Elsevier, said it would buy back 700 million pounds worth of shares in 2016, a 40 percent increase from last year.
The largest publisher of scientific journals said trends in the earlier part of this year were consistent with last year across its business, and that it was confident of posting growth in underlying revenue and profit.
The print industry has seen profit going downhill since its peak in 2005, when digital media lured regular news consumers away from subscribing to newspapers, and took them to websites and social media.
RELX has been able to buck the trend as it brought down its reliance on print products revenue to about 15 percent of its total annual revenue in 2015 from about 50 percent in 2007.
CEO Erik Engstrom sees further growth for the company coming mainly from its Risk unit. The company currently provides information and data analytic solutions to scientists, lawyers, doctors and the business community.
RELX reported a 3.4 percent rise in underlying revenue for the year, while adjusted pretax profit for the group rose about 5 percent.
Underlying revenue for the year was 5.97 billion pounds, just below analysts' average expectation of 6.04 billion pounds, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Continued cost control, a strategy that the company has been relying on for the last four years, helped it beat analyst estimates for adjusted pretax profit. RELX posted an adjusted pretax profit of 1.67 billion pounds compared with analysts' average estimate of 1.61 billion pounds.
(Reporting by Vidya L Nathan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sunil Nair and Gopakumar Warrier)
