John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wiley's Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After this speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I will now turn the conference over to your speaker today, Wiley's Vice President of Investor Relations, Brian Campbell. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. A few reminders to start. 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 profitability and performance trends. These measures do not have standardized means 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 when variances are on a year-over-year basis and will exclude the impact of currency. After the call, a copy of the presentation and playback of the webcast will be available on our investor relations web page. I'll now turn the call over to Wiley's president and CEO, Brian Napak.

Good morning, all. Welcome to our Q2 earnings call. The Wiley team has delivered another quarter of solid performance, underscoring Wiley's leading position in the knowledge business and their strong performance in serving the ever-increasing demand for scientific research and for career-connected education. As you know, Wiley drives impact in three areas. We enable scientific discovery, we power career-connected education, and we shape workforces. In a world hungry for innovation and opportunity, it's not surprising that we're finding strong growth in our research and education businesses. Wiley reported good revenue growth of 9% this quarter, 5% of which was organic, driving a 7% increase in adjusted EBITDA and a 6% increase in adjusted EPS. Revenue was up 9% in research, 3% in APL, and 15% in ed services. As a reminder, all variances exclude currency impact. John will touch on our first half results, but I will say up front that we are very pleased with how the year is progressing. and we continue to track well to our full-year guidance for revenue, earnings, and cash flow. Our growth strategies are largely on target, and you can see that they are paying off. They remain well aligned with favorable and enduring market trends, such as the shift toward open research, the focus on career-connected education, and the drive of corporations to fill the widening talent gap. These trends are creating significant demand for our transformational open access research models, for our career-focused learning programs, and for the talent development services that we provide to corporations. In the quarter, we continue to see a strong post-lockdown recovery in professional learning, which more than offset a decline in education publishing. which was driven by softness in U.S. fall enrollment and the easing of last year's COVID-related tailwinds, along with the disposition of our World Languages content portfolio. Meanwhile, accelerated growth in talent development more than offset the easing of last year's COVID-related tailwinds in online education, where enrollment growth slowed to 3%. As announced in October, John Kritzmacher will be retiring at the end of December, For eight critical years, John has been an exceptional leader for Wiley, helping to drive our strategic direction, expand our growth profile, and strengthen our financial position. He built an expanding finance organization and leaves us well-positioned for a bright future. On behalf of the Board of Directors and of all colleagues worldwide, I want to thank John for his strong principled leadership. John, we all wish you the very best in all there is to come.