(Feb 26): The London Stock Exchange Group Plc has announced plans to buy back £3 billion of its own shares, as it reported full-year results less than a month after it emerged that Elliott Investment Management had taken a stake.
The group, which bought back £2.1 billion in 2025, has already purchased £415 million of its own shares in the year to date and plans to pay out the additional £3 billion by February next year, according to a statement on Thursday. The company also hiked its final dividend, 15.7%, to 103 pence a share and set new guidance for the next two years.
Still, the increased buyback falls short of the £5 billion programme that Bloomberg News reported Elliott was pushing for earlier this month.
LSEG expects mid to high single-digit growth in 2026 and capital expenditure to fall to 8% of total income in 2029, according to new guidance unveiled alongside its full-year earnings. That’s broadly in line with the 6.5% to 7.5% range it targeted a year earlier, with the company ultimately delivering total income growth of 5.8% in 2025.
Shares of LSEG have been caught up in the broad selloff in businesses at risk of disruption from artificial intelligence. Elliott seized on the opportunity and is now pushing for LSEG to show investors how it could stand to be a beneficiary of AI.
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It wants the company to show how its sticky data business would actually see more demand from AI applications while its markets unit is largely immune, people familiar with its thinking told Bloomberg News earlier this month.
“Through the transformation of our systems and the use of AI and other technologies, we continue to deliver material operating leverage, with earnings growth significantly exceeding revenue growth,” chief executive officer David Schwimmer said. “Given our strong cash generation and balance sheet, we also accelerated returns to shareholders.”
LSEG, traditionally an exchange operator, transformed itself into a data business with its landmark US$27 billion acquisition of Refinitiv in 2021. Still, the group’s exchange business has suffered from a plunge in the volume of initial public offerings that’s seen it slide out of the ranks of the world’s top IPO destinations.
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“Elliott Management’s stake in LSEG highlights concern the market still treats it as a legacy terminal vendor vulnerable to generative AI, not as a data refinery that cleans and structures raw data for AI,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts including Juliet Abiola wrote in a note earlier this month.
The company’s annual subscription value — a closely watched metric that reflects the group’s recurring revenue - increased by 5.9%.
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