Stride, Inc.

Well, good day, everyone, and welcome to the Stride Inc. Q1 FY25 conference call. At this time, I would like to hand the call over to Mr. Tim Casey. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Welcome to Stride's first quarter earnings call for fiscal year 2025. With me on today's call are James Rue, Chief Executive Officer, and Donna Blackman, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, today's conference call and webcast are accompanied by a presentation that can be found on the Stride Investor Relations website. Please be advised that today's discussion of our financial results may include certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures is provided in the earnings release issued this afternoon and can also be found on our investor relations website. In addition to historical information, this call may also involve forward-looking statements. The company's actual results could differ materially from any forward-looking statements due to several important factors as described in the company's latest SEC filings. These statements are made on the basis of our views and assumptions regarding future events and business performance at the time we make them, and the company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call. Following our prepared remarks, we'll answer any questions you may have. Now, I'll turn the call over to James. James?

Thanks, Tim. This year marks the 25th anniversary for K-12, Stride's preeminent brand. In those 25 years, we have served over 3 million families and students. It took us over 15 years to reach the first million, and it has taken us just over three years to reach the third. In that time, technologies have advanced, our footprint has grown, and the country has evolved. But one constant has remained, our focus on providing customers choice in education. Just as we have choice in most facets of our lives, from shopping to entertainment to healthcare and financial services, so too should customers have choice in education. And all the surveys and research I have seen, irrespective of political leaning, supports the customer preference for choice. Education should not be a political issue. It should be a customer-focused one. As we prepare for our next 25 years, we are positioning K-12 to continue to lead by delivering tomorrow's education today. And that vision extends beyond the hundreds of thousands of students we currently serve each year. We believe we can deliver meaningful products and services to millions of students and customers each year with the range of initiatives that we are currently in development. A key element of our evolution is to ensure we stay focused on our customers. And we see the families that have embraced our programs come from a broad range of backgrounds. Why? Well, because what we offer caters to the needs of families instead of forcing them to cater to the rigidity of the program. That's choice. Our programs are affordable and accessible. We embrace being career-forward, and we are leaning into new technologies and investing in innovation like never before. Now, in our core business, which as you can see remains robust and where demand, as indicated by our application volumes, is accelerating, the issues that we can address for families span a wide range, from safety to academics to mental health to mobility to flexibility and on and on and everything in between. It is that range of promise that we offer families that will be a cornerstone for our next 25 years. Now, as you saw in our press release, we announced record enrollments for our first quarter, an 18.5% year-over-year growth and an acceleration in demand from this time last year. Apart from the pandemic year, this is the highest recorded year of gross enrollment growth this company has seen since it became publicly traded over 15 years ago we've seen continual and rising demand for the services we provide and the support for students this enables in our 25th year i feel confident saying that we continue to raise the bar for families looking for educational opportunities we remain as committed as ever to offering tomorrow's education today our results for the first quarter demonstrate that more and more families are embracing what we have to offer and our guidance suggests we are on pace for another record year. I'll now turn the call over to Donna. Donna?

Thanks, James, and good evening, everyone. As James mentioned, the demand we saw this quarter has set us up for another strong year. As with every year, I'm incredibly grateful to all the Stride employees who support the thousands of families who come to our programs. It's an incredible opportunity for us to impact the lives of so many students. The strength of our enrollment this year gives me confidence that we remain on track to achieve our fiscal 2028 targets. I think our competitive fiscal year 25 guidance further demonstrates that we are well on pace and confirms the continued underlying demand for our offerings. Turning to our quarterly results. Revenue for the quarter was $551.1 million, up 15% from first quarter of fiscal year 24. Adjusted operating income was $58.4 million, an increase of $43.6 million, or 295% from last year. Diluted earnings per share were 94 cents, up 83 cents from last year. Capital expenditures in the quarter were $14.8 million, down $1.3 million from last year. As we discussed last quarter, these results reflect the continued demand for our core offerings. Our total enrollments for the quarter exceeded 222,000, almost 100,000 more than we had prior to the pandemic in FY20. Families continue to seek out educational opportunities, and STRIVE is still in need in the market for virtual options. Our execution around marketing, enrollment, and school operations demonstrates our ability to grow enrollment sustainably for the long term. Career learning middle and high school revenue for the quarter was $198.9 million, up more than 30% from last year. Career learning enrollments grew 30.4% to 91.7,000. General education revenue grew 10% to $329.4 million on enrollment growth of 11.3% to 130.9,000 students. Total revenue per enrollment across both lines of revenue was $2,303, up slightly from last year. As we mentioned in the fourth quarter, the loss of ESSER funding is a headwind to our revenue per enrollment this year. However, this is being offset by a positive funding environment. While we're up this quarter, we expect to see some impacts from the state mix and timing and therefore believe we will finish the year flat or sit down slightly in revenue per enrollment. Adult learning revenue continues to be impacted by the slowdown in our software development products, which we've outlined previously. Revenue for the quarter at $22.8 million was down from last year. Looking at the full year, we think this quarter's adult learning revenue is a good proxy for what we expect for revenue in the upcoming quarters. Gross margins for the quarter were 39.2%, up 320 basis points from last year. We continue to see improvements in gross margins as our business scales, and like last year, we managed our teacher hiring well. Those fees contributed to our strong gross margins in the quarter. For the full year, we expect gross margins to improve by 100 to 200 basis points compared to FY24. selling general and administrative expenses totaled $168.5 million in line with last year. As I've mentioned before, I think we've done a good job of holding down our administrative costs, even as we've continued to grow. While we've managed these costs well, we do expect to see some SG&A increase for the full year. Even with this slight increase, we will still generate significant operating leverage out of the business. Stock-based compensation for the quarter was $8.4 million in line with last year. We expect to see a modest increase in stock-based compensation due to the impact of some long-term performance grants. And therefore, full year of stock-based compensation will likely be in the range of $34 to $39 million. Adjusted operating income per quarter was $58.4 million. up almost 300% compared to FY24. Adjusted EBITDA was $83.9 million, up 111%. Valued earnings per share were 94 cents, up 83 cents from last year. Our profitability strength was driven by growth and operating margin improvements as we continue to see benefits of scale as we grow. For the full year, we expect depreciation and amortization to increase marginally from last year. Capital expenditures in the quarter were $14.8 million, down $1.3 million from last year. Free cash flow, defined as cash from operations and less capex, was negative $156.8 million compared to negative $151.5 million in the prior year period. Cash flow in the first quarter followed our typical seasonality related to school launch and the onboarding of students. As with last year, we expect to see positive cash flow for the next three quarters. We finished the quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities of $539.4 million. Turning to our guidance. For the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, we are forecasting revenue in the range of 560 to 580 million dollars. Adjusted operating income between 115 and 125 million dollars. And capital expenditures between 13 and 15 million dollars. For the full year, we expect revenue in the range of 2.225 to 2.3 billion dollars. adjusted operating income between 395 and 425 million dollars, capital expenditures between 60 and 65 million dollars, and an effective tax rate between 24 and 26 percent. Thank you for your time today and for your continued support. Now I'll pass the call back to the operator for your questions. Operator?

Thank you. And just a reminder, everyone, that is Star 1 if you have a question. We'll take the first question today from Jason Tilton, Cannon Cord Genuity.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I'm curious, in terms of the really strong demand that drove the rec and enrollment in the quarter, if you could maybe shed a little more light on some of the different drivers of this momentum. Are there certain use cases or certain states that saw really strong growth? Some of this driven by some of the more effective marketing spend. Any color that you show would be greatly appreciated.

Yeah, I think it's pretty broad-based. We actually, I think as Donna mentioned in her remarks, our SG&A was pretty flat year over year, and so the increased demand sort of would imply all things being equal, lower cost of acquisition, Profile, which you know, I think from everything we can see at least. Points to a lot of sort of growth in organic demand. I think you know word of mouth organic demand. You know the sort of general. Word of mouth type of virality that we're seeing for our programs has been pretty strong. And so, you know, just over the past couple of years, we keep seeing that growing. And it's, I think it's sort of a good indicator that the customer voice for our product is strong and continues to grow.

Great. That's really helpful. And then just one follow-up. I'm curious, in terms of the, you know, you talked a little bit in the prepared remarks around how school choice becoming a more bipartisan issue. over recent years. I'm curious, as we look at the election coming up in a few weeks, are there any states, or even from a national perspective, anything we should be focusing on in terms of any potential benefits or risks to the company, either from a school choice perspective or from a funding perspective?

You know, listen, I certainly don't want to project what's going to happen in a couple weeks here with the election. I think that's probably a dangerous thing to do. What I would say is double down on my comment that I don't think education should be a political issue. I think that the customers have spoken that this is a pretty bipartisan type of product. We see a lot of demand from people with all different kinds of backgrounds. And I just think that our politicians should govern the country. and uh and focus on educating everybody and providing this kind of choice for people who really need it is uh is an important part of the educational system and so hopefully we can get all of our politicians irrespective of party to focus on those things great thank you very much the next question is from jeff silver bmo capital markets thank you so much um

I wanted to focus on the comments about revenue per student. I know there's been some questioning in terms of the impact of the roll-off of ESSER funding. Can you talk about what the impact of ESSER funding was on your company last year from a revenue perspective and if possible from a profit perspective and how that's impacting your guidance this year?

So I think we've previously discussed that last year the revenue impact was less than 3%. I don't believe we've previously disclosed the exact profit impact of that, although I think it's not, even if it's in the range of our normal profitability, it's completely immaterial. If it was anything significantly more than that, I think you would have seen a different profile this year than we're giving. So clearly it's not out of the range of uh sort of profit margin that we saw for the overall company last year um and so uh you know i i'd rather we get everybody looking forward uh for this company we've got a tremendous demand profile customers are really gravitating to our products and services and um you know and i think we've set ourselves up for a really strong year okay and as long as we're looking forward can we talk about the impact in the current fiscal year

In in terms of nuke schools or schools that were lost and you know, going forward or any major schools at risk that we should be aware of.

Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked before that. Generally speaking, we see long term. There's going to be an opportunity to add a school or two here or there. We we have not lost any significant programs for this year. We are currently unaware of any significant programs that we would lose for next year or future years. So I think we would consider continuing to add programs. Not all of those programs that we would add would be in new states necessarily. We like the diversity sometimes of having multiple programs serving different customer constituents in the same state. It gives us greater flexibility and helps us meet customer demand in those states. So we think we're set up pretty well for meeting future customer demand.

Okay, appreciate the call. Thanks so much.

Gregory Parrish from Morgan Stanley has the next question.

Hey, good evening. Thank you. Yeah, congrats on the pretty incredible result here. I'm going to talk about enrollment a little bit differently again. Maybe the drivers this year, if you think about kind of retention, what you're doing there, maybe reaching new students, the messaging that you're going to market with, you know, the conversion rates that you have, you know, what really, what are the biggest drivers this year? I imagine it's a combination, but maybe kind of flesh out really where you're finding success and, you know, what's improved versus last year.

Yeah, I mean, I think, well, to sort of reiterate, I think that the biggest piece of this equation that is helping drive our business is the demand side. Customer demand has been strong. And everything else, all the things you mentioned, retention, conversion, all the other stuff, sure, we're always looking to make those things better. I don't think that they were, and any one of those things, by the way, were the single driver of our performance this year. I think it was clearly customers have said that they want this product. And the demand side of this equation has been very strong. It continues to look very strong. We continue to obviously drive as good conversion as we can, retention, all those metrics. But this year wasn't driven by those things. This year was driven by the demand side of the equation.

Yep. Okay. Helpful. And on the margin, I think guidance here is up nearly 400 basis points at the midpoint. Regarding the 11% revenue growth, so I think a lot of this is operating leverage, but Donna, I guess maybe if you could help sort of flesh out how much is operating leverage, how much is from efficiencies, if you could kind of contrast the two, if you could.

Yeah, so on the gross margins, we are expecting 100 to 200 basis points increase in margins. And, you know, that's certainly driven by the strong demand that we have that we saw and the leverage that we have in the business. And we expect to continue to see that. And you've heard me talk over the past couple of years about making sure that we continue to see that strong, to maintain that strong leverage. And then on the SG&A side, look, we talked about being disciplined, right? We talked about how we're able to grow the business this year without adding more marketing spend, without adding more enrollment spend, showing discipline around that without adding some additional headcount. So it is a combination of the flow through that we see on the top end from the gross margin perspective, but also on the SG&A, which is driving the AOI that we're seeing.

Okay, that's great. And then for my last one, you know, I think this could be helpful for a lot of investors. Maybe talk about why, you know, the public financials of some of the nonprofit schools that you manage, you know, why those don't necessarily line up with what flows to you, why there can be differences. And then maybe more specifically, you know, why, you know, some of those nonprofits could take ESSER funding and, you know, why that wouldn't necessarily go to you and what those could be used for. I think that could be helpful here.

Yeah, I'm not going to speak on behalf of all of our clients. I think that's a very irresponsible thing for us to be doing. I'll speak for what we do and how we do it. And, you know, I have great respect for how our clients manage what they do. And, you know, I'd let them speak for themselves. But, you know, I think that whatever our clients do, we want to be supportive of their mission and their goals. And indirectly, that means that we're supporting the students that want to be participating in these programs. And so the rest of that stuff, like what our clients are doing, I mean, first of all, we have no providence over that. And so it's not like we have an ability to even always have insight into how they make all those decisions. Those are proprietary to them. And I'd rather leave it to them to describe.

All right. Fair enough. Thank you. And next up is Alex Paris, Barrington Research.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Congratulations on the super strong quarter. I'm wondering in terms of your guidance, Donna, you know, for fiscal 2025, have you embedded in that any expectations for new states or states in which you have caps that may be or will be lifted or raised?

We have not factored in any new states. We have some increases in some caps that's already factored into the results that we have in Q1 as well as for the full year. But the overriding factor that is driving our revenue is, as James has said, the demand that we're seeing. And so we are able to meet the demand with our ability to execute via our marketing, via our enrollment, but really is us being able to capture the demand that's in the marketplace.

Great. Thanks for that. And then looking at the two programs, general education and career learning, I think last fall you had 91 GE and 56 career learning. Do you anticipate opening up additional career learning programs in existing states in fiscal 25?

We have the same number of programs this year that we did last year in terms of our career learning programs in total.

Okay. Do you envision opening up additional career learning programs this year or next year?

Not for this fiscal year. I do think that there's a chance we might open a couple next year.

Gotcha. And then last question, and it's a follow-up on some of the other questions regarding ESSER funds. How do the ESSER funds come to stride? It's my understanding that they've largely been used by school districts within your learning solutions business. Is that accurate?

Like I said, really, it's tough for us to be able to answer how ESSER funds go to all of our partner clients because, you know, that's something that they manage that they're responsible for. What we know is that during the time that ESSER was in place, certainly there are some of our clients who made the decision to support programs that we provided that were eligible for those funds. But, you know, it's sort of, I don't know, I'll say it's sort of beside the point at this time. Because for this fiscal year, ESSER's in the rearview mirror, and we've got tremendous demand for the business that we're running. And that's, you know, with ESSER in the rearview mirror. So I think we've set ourselves up well from here to grow. and that's with all that in the rearview mirror. So I think I want this company to stay focused on this year, which doesn't really have the ESSER benefit in it, and moving forward from there.

Gotcha. Not only does it not have the ESSER benefit, it has a little bit of a headwind on a year-over-year basis. You had previously said less than 1.5% of revenue would be the impact in fiscal 25. Is that still a good thought? Yeah. yeah and uh so so yes year over year it would be as you're defining it a headwind correct gotcha but that'll be largely offset by state funding increases in mix so we're expecting flat to slightly down revenue per enrollment for the full year just to clarify that is correct great thank you both congratulations again thank you next we'll hear from tom singlehurst city

Yeah, thank you for taking the question and congrats on the results. I mean, apologies to ask about ESSA as well, but I'm interested in any second order impact from reduced ESSA funding. Actually, I'm thinking about this on the positive side. I mean, are there programs that would have been handled by school districts or schools internally that now might be outsourced? Any views on that would be very much appreciated. That's my first question.

Yeah, I don't know that I see any second order impact of that nature having any material or significant impact on our business for this year. And again, I just, I don't want to guess how district clients out there either have or are using or intend to use any remaining ESSER funds as it pertains to us. So I don't really have a lot of comment there. Perfect.

The second question, if it's okay, is on whether you've seen or expect to continue to see sort of intra-year enrollment growth. I mean, the last couple of years, we've had a sort of new normal where the 1Q enrollment numbers, not the high water market, happens later in the year. I'm interested in whether you think that might happen again in 2025. Yeah, it's a great question.

As I said, we continue to see strong demand. I don't know if it's a new normal yet, but it has been two years running, as you said. I can tell you that as of yesterday, I haven't looked yet today, but as of yesterday, we continue to see that strong demand come through. So we are, as of yesterday, higher than we were as of September 30th. And You know, if the trend continues, yeah, I think we would expect that. But I don't think we're guiding to that, and we're not indicating that right just yet. We want some more of this in-year period to mature for us to feel comfortable. You know, we're only three weeks into this in-year period. So I don't know that it's a complete set of information for us to be making those statements yet. But, you know, like I said, 21 days in, demand remains strong. Perfect.

But the guidance is not based on that.

The guidance reflects certainly taking into account what's happened in the past 2 years, but also take into account that we only have 2 years behind us. Right? So, with the balance of what's happened over the past 2 years, but not ignoring what's happened over the past 23 years. Right? And so it's a balance of it, but to James's point, what we've seen today. there's more upside. And so the full benefit of it may not be taken into account. But again, we're only, you know, we're still in the month of October and that number could change. And so there could be some more upside. But again, we don't know what that trend will look like for the rest of the year. So the three years end, it's not quite yet a trend.

Okay, perfect. And one very final one, I promise. Any change to the 2028 outlook and guidance on the back of today?

We're not providing any update to the 2028 today.

I wouldn't say that we feel confident in our 2028 numbers, as I said in my prepared remarks, and we are reiterating our confidence in our 2028 guidance.

That's it. Thank you.

As a reminder, that is Star 1 to ask a question. We'll go next to Stephen Sheldon, William Blair.

Hi, team. You've got Pat McElwee on for Sheldon's team today. Just a couple of quick ones here. So you talked about the demand side a few times now, but can you just talk us through what supported the outsized growth in career learning this quarter and if you've made any progress in building out that kind of separate marketing funnel you've talked about in the past there?

Yeah, really good question. So I think that I'll take that second part first and then Circle back on the first part. Unfortunately, I don't think we've made a lot of progress in building out the separate funnel. So it's something we continue to work on. I think for all the great work that the marketing team has done over the past year or so, that's one area where I think we still haven't cracked the nut. And we continue to look at ways to do that. But the first part of your question, you have to remember that pretty much now at this point, Most of our high school is basically a career program. And so the growth in career learning is in some respects a proxy for the growth in certain grade levels. And so we're seeing a lot of strong demand in in those grade levels that support career learning. And you know, and I think that that that's been a trend that we've seen for some period of time, and so.

know we're going to continue to support all the grades but uh but we are seeing a little bit stronger demand in certain grade levels that really um cater to the career learning programs that we have okay makes sense and then in tandem to the questions on the elections and you know career learning program expansion as well you've previously talked about opening schools and hopefully a handful of new states in 25 26 Can you just provide any updated thoughts on state expansion targets at this point in time?

Yeah, listen, it's any state expansion is a multi-year effort that has a lot of uncertainty to it. We, of course, want to plant flags in every state that we're not currently in. As long as it makes sense for the business, right? And there are probably a couple of cases where it actually just doesn't make sense because of whatever the regulatory environment, demand characteristics, whatever. But by and large, you know, for most of at least the states that we're not in, we have efforts underway that look to expand into those states. I think as we diversify some of our portfolio, whether it's, you know, things like tutoring or other things, we see that there's opportunities potentially to plant flags in those states that may not include just the pure core managed program. And so we're looking to do things in a lot of states that may not just be around the core managed program, but may include some other types of products and services that we can provide. Of course, to the extent that we can break down and get into these states that don't have the sort of the full-time online programs, we're trying to do that as well. But like I said, no new news to report for this fiscal year. We are cautiously optimistic that over the next couple of few years, we will be able to make some progress on some new states.

That's great. Thanks for the call, James.

And at this time, there are no further questions. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.