John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Wiley's first quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to introduce Wiley's Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Brian Campbell, please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us. With me are Brian Napat, President and Chief Executive Officer, and John Pritzmacher, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. A few reminders and starts. The call is being recorded and may include forward-looking statements. You shouldn't rely on these statements as actual results may differ materially and are subject to factors discussed in our SEC filings. The company does not undertake any obligations to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. Also, Wiley provides non-GAAP measures as a supplement to evaluate underlying operating profitability and performance trends. These measures do not have standardized meanings prescribed by U.S. GAAP and therefore may not be comparable to similar measures used by other companies, nor should they be viewed as alternatives to measures under GAAP. Unless otherwise noted, we will refer to non-GAAP metrics on the call and variances are on a year-over-year basis and will exclude the impacted currency. After the call, copy this presentation and a playback of the webcast will be available on our investor relations webpage. I now turn the call over to Wiley's President and CEO, Ryan Napak.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 earnings call. Today, Wiley is reporting another quarter of solid revenue growth across all segments. We continue to take advantage of strong demand for scientific research and career-connected education throughout the global economy. Our performance underscores the tight alignment of our strategy to prevailing trends in the market, and now more than ever, the critical importance of the work we do empowering discovery and learning worldwide. Simply stated, the more researchers and learners that Wiley can help to succeed, the greater the positive societal impact. One pointed example of this is in our talent development business, where today we are filling the critical technology skill gap while also actively targeting the acute lack of diversity in the technology space overall. In partnership with our clients, we target underrepresented populations and train them so that they can get great, get great jobs and succeed in those high demand, high paying jobs with leading corporations. As a result of this specific focus on diversity and equity, the representation of people of color in our tech career placement programs is far above the national average. From ensuring equity in hiring to making education more accessible to facilitating breakthrough climate research, Wiley continues to have an outsized impact on society. Across Wiley, we're making substantial progress on ESG and sustainability. Wiley's diversity disclosure in our annual report was cited as a top example by a leading corporate governance authority who recently earned a silver rating from Ecovatus, a leading sustainability ratings firm. This placed Wiley in the top 25% of all companies assessed. After achieving carbon neutrality in fiscal 20, We've kicked off our fiscal 21 carbon measurement initiative and engaged a third party to guide us through the process of committing to and achieving science-based targets. Despite lots of progress, we've got a long way to go in this journey, and we look forward to updating you regularly. Now on to our Q1 results. The team continues to execute well, and our performance reflects that, with revenue up 9% overall and 7% organically. This revenue growth drove a 12% increase in adjusted EBITDA and a 17% increase in adjusted EPFs. Revenue growth was strong across all segments with research up 10%, academic and professional up 7%, and ed services up 13%. As a reminder, all variances exclude currency impact. Simply stated, our strategy is on the mark for where the market is headed. And this was reflected in our Q1 performance. The long-term trends that we're pursuing continue to advance. Here, of course, I'm talking about the shifts toward open research, hybrid and online education, and digital learning tools and courseware. Further, the drive of corporations to fill the talent gap continues to be a great, excuse me, continues to create a significant demand for Wiley's career-connected learning products and programs. In fact, we're seeing great momentum in our corporate offerings across research and education. Corporations have long showed strong demand for our research products to fuel innovation, and they rely on our learning products and platforms to upskill their teams. Increasingly, corporate leaders are coming to Wiley for their talent development needs and, in fact, for job-ready talent to fill their critical skill gaps. Looking ahead, the corporate customer is a clear and compelling opportunity. Earnings growth this quarter was largely fueled by strong profit performance in research and APL, mainly driven by revenue growth. This performance offset a profit decline in ed services due to higher marketing costs in university services and investment to expand client relationships and talent development. Overall, we're pleased with how we started the year. However, COVID-related uncertainty remains a reality for now, particularly as it relates to university enrollment and related customer buying behavior as students and schools adapt to changing market conditions. That said, we're confident in the ongoing strength and expansion of our core markets. At its core, Wiley does three things. We enable discovery, we power life-changing education, and we shape workforces. These three important areas of impact are central to human advancement, and we're deriving strong growth from each. We're enabling discovery through our leadership in open research, where we're making record volumes of new research freely available to the public. The rise of open research publishing has accelerated research revenue growth overall. Our strong growth this year is based on both the enduring draw of our journal brands and the execution of our open research strategy including our multi-year read and publish agreements. This performance is being augmented by strong growth in our corporate lines of business, which include career centers, science databases, and advertising to our very valuable audiences. We're powering education by delivering high impact learning experiences and online degree programs that connect education directly to career outcomes. Wiley is helping institutions plan and deliver career-connected education, and this is driving growth in our university services and digital courseware lines of business. And Wiley is shaping the workforce by working with leading corporations to find, train, and develop the talent they need to overcome the widening skill gap. Demand for our talent development services is particularly strong now, as corporations remain challenged by the war for talent and the persistent shortage of critical tech skills. Our professional learning lines of business that deliver corporate training and professional publishing are seeing a strong recovery as corporations and professionals alike focus on upscaling to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market. Let's take a look at our Q1 performance by segment. Wiley Research delivered another good quarter with revenue up 10%, 5% of which was organic. Our performance was driven by open research publishing, research platforms, and corporate sales. Adjusted EBITDA rose 12% for a Q1 EBITDA margin of 37%. Research article output continues to grow nicely, although as expected, article submissions have slowed a bit from last year's COVID-related spike. Notably, underlying OA revenue growth was over 50%, including Hindawi, Our OA revenue nearly doubled. Our multi-year read and publish agreements, often referred to as transformation agreements, continue to drive incremental volume growth this quarter. The pipeline remains strong for these mixed model deals, which provide full access for a client community to read and publish Wiley's journals. We continue to expand our major society partnerships, delivering a broad range of products and services that help them succeed. including research publishing, research platforms, author services, and career services for the society's constituents. In August, we announced a landmark agreement with the Society of Hospital Medicine to publish its industry-leading publications and to grow its career center. SHM has more than 15,000 hospitalists as members. We recently launched a knowledge hub for Gilead Sciences that targets HIV specialists. We also signed new career center partnerships with LexisNexis and with the Institute of Physics, among others. Going forward, there's a significant opportunity to upsell additional products, platforms, and services to our unmatched network of societies and corporations. In summary, for research, there continues to be very good momentum and lots of opportunity for growth as we drive the transition to open research and expand our portfolio of partner solutions. I'm very pleased to report 7% organic growth this quarter for the academic and professional learning segment. This was driven by 13% growth in professional learning compared to what COVID impacted last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter rose 37% for Q1 EBITDA margin of 19%. This is up from 15% in the prior year period. Education publishing revenue rose modestly with continued strong growth in digital courseware and modest growth in print and digital content, both offsetting ongoing COVID-related challenges in test revenue. As noted, COVID continues to hinder visibility on fall enrollment and student buying behavior. Industry projections for enrollment range from flat to modestly down, but data remains limited thus far as we drive through the busy back-to-school season. Note that in June, we sold our world languages publishing list to Vista Higher Learning, a specialist in language learning. This sale, although a small one, is a reflection of our important strategy to focus on high demand skills in careers such as STEM and business. Professional learning saw strong growth in both professional publishing and corporate training, benefiting from favorable comparisons to prior year. Corporate training continued to see a very strong recovery through both virtual and in-class delivery with revenue growth of 46% against the lockdown Q1 last year. Finally, our cloud-based cross-knowledge corporate learning platform also grew this quarter, albeit modestly, while signing 10 new corporate clients. In summary, we're encouraged by our return to growth in APL as we continue to scale our digital courseware offerings and leverage our strong corporate relationships and professional learning brands. Ed Services reported 13% growth for the quarter, with University Services up 8% and Talent Development up 34%. As a reminder, University Services was formerly reported as OPM and Talent Development as M3. Adjusted EBITDA for the segment was down 21% due to higher marketing costs in University Services as competition increased for student leads and increased investment in talent development to accelerate the expansion of client relationships. In our smallest quarter of the year for university services, adjusted EBITDA margin was 9%. University services growth was driven by eight new partners we added last year, along with student enrollment growth. While no new partners were signed this quarter, we recently signed important renewals and added 13 new degree programs with existing partners. Online enrollment was up 9% for the quarter, down from 14% we saw for the full fiscal year 21. We are seeing slower online enrollment growth compared to last year's COVID-related spike. Over the summer term, for example, we saw a lower rate of re-enrollment compared to historical patterns and expect some of that to continue into the fall. This variability in enrollment patterns is to be expected as the system adapts to the ongoing impact of COVID. As expected, we are seeing great momentum in talent development where, as you know, Wiley helps corporations identify, train, place, and retain hard-to-find talent. In the quarter, we signed three more multinational clients, including a leading financial services firm, a leading industrial services service areas company, and a global retailer. These new clients are on top of the seven we signed in the previous two quarters. We also delivered record talent placements to our existing Fortune 100 customers, such as Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and many others. In a great example of our business model having impact, we recently launched a program with Amazon Canada to reskill warehouse workers and truck drivers with software development skills. The goal of this program is to provide great new career path opportunities for these workers, that they gain skills that allow them to leave Amazon to pursue higher potential careers. Amazon, like many leading companies, knows that they need to provide career development opportunities to both attract and retain high-quality workers. We truly appreciate this forward-thinking, socially positive partnership, and we're seeing real impact already. This is another clear example of the significant corporate opportunity that Wiley is now tapping into. The pipeline in talent development is strong, and we're expanding our reach into international markets such as India and Australia. We're also making great progress in industries outside of our core financial services vertical. In summary, we're pleased with the growth of ed services as we continue to drive online enrollment growth and launch new degree programs in university services, and as we sign major corporations and deliver record placements in talent development. Again, we do anticipate some moderation of online enrollment growth this year as students return to physical campus and focus on their personal career path. Overall, it was a good quarter in which all three segments of Wiley contributed to our revenue growth and to the achievement of our mission to unlock human potential. I'll pass the call over to John to take you to our financial position and outlook.