John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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 US 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 held-for-sale assets and the impact of currency. Additional information is included in our filings with the SEC. A copy of this presentation and the transcript will be available on our investor relations webpage at investors.wiley.com. I'll now turn the call over to Matt Kistner.

Thank you, Brian, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. At the end of last fiscal year, I said that we were seeing strong momentum in our businesses and value creation activities. and that our culture had been reinvigorated by a much simpler and more efficient Wiley. I said then that we look forward with renewed confidence and optimism. I'm pleased to report that all of this is playing out in our solid performance indicators, colleague engagement scores, and in our financial results. As I said in June, We have more work to do to realize our full potential, and that work will continue. But the leadership team and I are pleased with our momentum and progress as we enter the new fiscal year. Our Wiley colleagues around the world have done a terrific job getting our businesses on a successful track. I can't thank them enough for their hard work and dedication. and their unwavering commitment to serving our customers with excellence. In July, I was privileged to be named Wiley's CEO after serving in an interim capacity since October. I see no change in my approach. We will continue to be relentless in our execution as we publish more high-value content to meet global demand move decisively on AI growth opportunities, and drive operational improvements and rigor across the organization. I am grateful to our colleagues and stakeholders for their positive reception and support. And I want to thank the Wiley Board of Directors for their confidence and continued ownership. I'll start today with a quick reminder about our two businesses. review how we did against our objectives, and discuss our Q1 performance, notably the strong recovery and growth we're seeing in research. I'll also say a few words about how we're thinking about the IP licensing opportunity for Gen AI training and development. Christina will walk through our segment performance, value creation activities, and reinvestments, outlook, and financial position. Jay will then join us for questions. As a reminder, Wiley is enabling the creation of new knowledge and its application in critical areas of the global knowledge economy in science, medicine, technology, and engineering, in business, economics, and finance. Our high-quality knowledge content and solutions remain as relevant as ever. Now that fiscal 24 is behind us, I just want to briefly level set and remind everyone what we're focused on. Excluding our held to sale or sold segment, we're now organized into two operating segments, research and learning. The businesses complement one another with high value publishing and solutions in related markets and verticals. Our competitive advantage in both include our content libraries, brands, author relationships, category leadership, and reputation. In research, Wiley has one of the world's leading journal portfolios and the industry's most widely used content platform. Research publishing models include both read-only subscriptions read and publish hybrid licenses for institutions and corporations, and author-funded open access, where a peer-reviewed article is made freely available for a publishing fee. Research Solutions includes publishing and audience solutions for societies and corporations. The research segment has a large recurring revenue base that's 96% digital. Learning is academic publishing and courseware for higher ed students and professional publishing and assessments for professionals. Learning, which is particularly strong across STEM and business categories, is seeing an accelerating shift to digital and institutional formats. As noted, learning content is increasingly valued for Gen AI training models. Let's talk about the quarter. As expected, we're seeing a strong recovery in growth and research, driven by favorable demand trends and execution. I can't emphasize enough the great work our research team has done to get us back on track and delivering very solid results. Learning benefited from a second GenAI content rights project and delivered courseware growth in a seasonally light quarter. At the same time, the learning team continues to drive margin expansion reflected in strong adjusted EBITDA growth this quarter. We've essentially executed our full value creation plan ahead of schedule. Just last week, we closed our third and final divestiture, and during the quarter, actioned the remaining 40 million of the $130 million cost savings program. In June, we raised our dividend for the 31st consecutive year. Not many companies of any size can say something like that. We also increased share repurchases again this quarter. Finally, Wiley recently saw a marked elevation in our colleague engagement and satisfaction scores. which are critical to our ongoing success. I just got back from a trip to Asia where I visited our offices in China and Japan. As with my earlier trip to India and Sri Lanka, I found our teams in Asia re-energized and highly motivated by the many improvements we've made. Our colleagues across the globe are all aligned and rowing in the same direction. Let's talk about how we delivered on our key objectives this quarter. First is to drive recovery and growth and research. We experienced an unprecedented year in fiscal 24, but remain fully confident in a recovery given the essential nature of what we do, the enduring draw of our journal brands, and the momentum we saw exiting the year. I'm happy to say that our recovery is playing out as expected, if not better, both in our financial performance and leading indicators. Our second objective is to move decisively on near-term AI opportunities. We executed a second content rights project with a large tech company this quarter, with 17 of the 21 million total value recognized in the quarter. Nearly all of it is in learning. We are seeing interest from other large tech companies and R&D-centric corporates. Our third objective is to continue to drive performance and profit improvement through our value creation plan. As noted, we've closed all of our divestitures and actioned the $130 million cost savings program. Let me turn to our first quarter performance. Note I'll be excluding our held for sale or sold assets in my commentary unless otherwise noted. As discussed, we're off to a good start with adjusted revenue up 6% to 390 million. Performance was driven by 3% growth in research and 14% growth in learning, notably the 17 million contribution from the content rights project. Excluding the large AI contribution, revenue rose 2%. Adjusted EBITDA rose 22% to 73 million, driven by revenue performance and run rate cost savings. These savings were partially offset by investments in marketing and technology. Our adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter was 18.6% up from 16.3%. Adjusted EPS was up 74% due to higher adjusted operating income and accrued interest income from our divestitures. A few words about our GAAP performance. The GAAP revenue decline was largely impacted by foregone revenue from sold businesses, while the GAAP EPS loss was primarily due to a gap income tax adjustment related to our university services divestiture. Our adjusted effective tax rate is not impacted. Now onto our strong recovery and research. As a reminder, we saw our leading indicators rise significantly in the back half of fiscal 24, giving us confidence heading into the first quarter. That's because the attributes that make this business great haven't changed. Research is tightly correlated with global R&D spend, which is ever increasing. Getting published is essential to a researcher's career, so demand is resilient. Wiley is one of the world's leading research publishers with a very large catalog of high-impact journals, which form our competitive moat And finally, the evolving open access publishing model allows more researchers around the world to publish and therefore expands our total addressable market. Our research team is making it happen. They're delivering better than expected numbers in submissions, output, and open access growth. We've increased the top of the funnel by significantly enhancing our marketing capabilities streamlining our sales efforts, and increasing our editorial capacity. They've increased publishing output by investing in peer review and refer and transfer. They're focused on the right markets and investing in the right journal brands while continuing to optimize our journal portfolio. And we're just getting started. Here are some metrics to pay attention to. Global R&D spend is up around 8% since 2022 to an estimated $2.53 trillion. This number is expected to continue to grow at 4% to 6% annually over the long term. Growth in R&D drives research submissions. Wiley is capitalizing on this trend in Q1 submissions grew by 18%. We continue to operate more effectively and take advantage of favorable demand dynamics. Q1 output growth, which is a lagging indicator flowing from submissions, was up a very solid 6%. As noted, we've seen normal healthy growth patterns return to the US, EMEA, and Japan, and strong demand continue in high-growth markets like China and India. A year ago, we said that output would lag submissions by six to nine months, and it's playing out as expected. Our multi-year institutional models, combining subscriptions and institutional open access, grew nicely in the quarter, and gold open access continues to grow at double-digit rates. We continue to build on our position as a top-ranked journal publisher with 22% of our listed journals receiving an increased impact factor in the annual journal citation reports. The reports are one of the most widely used sources of citation metrics to analyze the performance of peer-reviewed journals. Wiley journals make up nearly 11% of all citations in the JCR index. Finally, our research end-to-end platform development is proceeding on plan, and we expect to fully launch it by the beginning of fiscal year 26. We're very excited about what this platform will enable to stand up new content offerings and improve article referring transfer, reduce article turnaround times and cost per article, and detect research fraud through the use of AI. As always, there's more to be done, but a good start to the year for research and a confident outlook. I'd like to spend a few minutes discussing AI. As a reminder, our high-quality content in science, learning, and innovation is foundational for training large language models and building applications. AI developers and R&D-intensive corporates can use it to improve accuracy, safety, and impact. Demand therefore remains robust. This quarter, as previously discussed, we executed a $21 million licensing project with a large tech company for previously published content, our second such deal in consecutive quarters. 17 million of the 21 million was recorded in Q1 The remainder to be realized during the year. Nearly all of it is in learning as LLM training demand is currently higher for book content than research journal content. The emerging demand for research content is more for LLM application development in specific disciplines and verticals. It's important to note that both of these projects involve backlist content, in most cases, three years or older. The contracts are of limited duration with limited rights and use, notably model training purposes. They are non-exclusive, subject to extension, and do not constrain us from pursuing further opportunities. These projects are incremental They do not cannibalize our core. We see the content licensing opportunity in two stages. The first, as discussed, is participating in the near-term development of foundational models. The second is in recurring licensing arrangements over the medium to long term as these models and applications come online and as information-centric corporates bring our content into their AI environments. Let me say a few words about how we're approaching AI from a licensing perspective. First, content licensing is not a new or AI-specific activity for us. It's really core to our mission and part of our day-to-day work to maximize the reach, readership and revenue of our books and journals. We believe we have a responsibility to engage with AI developers. Our content is critical to ensuring scientific accuracy and impact and delivering optimal learning outcomes. Therefore, AI models should be trained on high-quality, authoritative content like Wiley's. At the same time, we're being very selective about choosing when and how to partner with AI companies. We are careful to pick the right partners and to adhere to a strict set of principles around AI. The rights of authors and other copyright holders must be protected. Our job as a knowledge company is to ensure it. Copyright holders should receive fair compensation for their intellectual property consistent with contractual arrangements. All in, we aim to be the most trusted partner to authors, societies, and associations. They will continue to be our North Star as we assess and execute on opportunities in this ever-changing digital landscape. all to say Wiley remains highly valued and well-positioned in the evolution of AI. I'll pass the call over to Christina.

Thank you, Matt. I'm pleased to start by saying that we've largely executed on our multi-year value creation plan ahead of schedule. At this point, we've closed all divestitures and actioned the $130 million run rate savings program, enabling us to reinvest while driving continued margin improvements. Just last week, we closed on our final divestiture, cross-knowledge. As we discussed previously, this is an immaterial transaction, but frees up capital and with our previous divestitures allows us to focus on our core. This quarter, we actioned the remaining $40 million of the $130 million savings plan. The executed savings were largely in our corporate functions. Stepping back, we finished fiscal 24 with $90 million action and $60 million realized in-year. We've now actioned the full $130 million and anticipate realizing $120 million of that by the end of fiscal 25 for an incremental in-year savings benefit of $60 million. As noted, around half of that total run rate savings is being reinvested. Let's talk about where we're investing. We're focused on driving incremental growth in research, where we have clear competitive advantage and demands. This includes scaling our journal portfolio and article transfer capabilities, optimizing go-to-market to attract and retain authors, and extending our flagship journal brands into additional verticals. Second, we're investing in AI growth and productivity initiatives, including optimizing our content for large language model deployment, incorporating AI into our publishing platforms and workflows, and investing in productivity tools for our colleagues. Third, we're modernizing our systems to improve speed and productivity. We've talked about two specific areas, our research publishing platform and back office modernization. Let's turn to our research performance. Q1 revenue was up 3% due to strong demand in execution and research publishing. Research publishing delivered 4% top line growth, driven by exceptional demand in gold open access and steady growth in our combined institutional multi-year models. As a reminder, our institutional models include both subscriptions for research libraries and institutional open access agreements with our library consortia. We expect to remain in this mixed model environment for a long time to come. We also continue to make good progress on our end-to-end research publishing platform, reducing our publishing turnaround time this quarter and enabling the submission growth we've been seeing. Research Solutions was down modestly due to continued soft market conditions for recruiting, offsetting moderate growth in our publishing solutions business for societies. We're doing some very interesting things on the solutions side, but they'll take a little time to materialize. For example, we're expanding the reach for our medical education programs by nearly 3 million healthcare providers thanks to a new partnership. Wiley's medical education program allows healthcare professionals to do their jobs better, giving them access to information on the latest scientific outcomes, diseases, and treatments. The end goal is to improve patient outcomes. Another important opportunity for us is in spectral data. As a leading chemistry publisher, Wiley is one of the most comprehensive spectral database collections in the world. In layperson's terms, Wiley's spectral database libraries allow end users to identify molecules and molecular compounds based on their unique chemical signature. Wiley has just released two new database collections using advanced AI techniques to significantly expand the number of compounds available for analysis from food-related compounds to industrial compounds. The end goal here is to help scientists reach better conclusions faster. In Q1, adjusted EBITDA for research rose 1%, driven by revenue performance offset by reinvestment in the growth and optimization issues I touched on earlier. Our Q1 margin was 29.3% compared to 29.8% in the prior year period. In summary, we're confident in our continued growth and recovery and in the investments we're making to ensure our long-term success. Let's talk about learning. Revenue rose 14% in the quarter driven by the GEN-AI project and continued growth in academic, namely digital courseware. Excluding the GEN-AI project, revenue declined 1% in the seasonally small quarter mainly due to softness in professional publishing and assessments. As Matt noted, our backlist content learning is in demand for training GEN-AI models and we'll continue to take advantage of this opportunity. We have two projects under our belt and continue to evaluate AI licensing opportunities that complement our business strategies. In the business itself, academics saw underlying growth again, although Q1 is our smallest quarter for this business. Q2 is our largest and has only increased over time due to changing fault ordering patterns and shifting business models. Our STEM digital courseware product remains a consistent success story with top line growth above 30% again this quarter. We continue to see strong trends there in terms of winning new institutional agreements and expanding outward into new subject areas like data science. Institutions continue to gravitate towards inclusive access models where the cost of digital course content is added to a student's tuition and fees. This remains a nice tailwind for us. All to say, academia continues to benefit from favorable trends and sharp focus. Professional revenue rose 5% in the quarter, but was down, excluding the Gen EI project. The new authors and titles we signed up in the second half of last year will begin to benefit us later in this year, but then mostly in fiscal 26. Finally, assessments was down modestly this quarter due to moderately reduced corporate spending on training and development. In Q1, adjusted EBITDA's learning was up 60%, driven mainly by revenue performance. Our Q1 margin was 27.2% compared to 19.4% in the prior year period. In summary, learning remains on track with expectations. Let me turn from our segments to our corporate expenses. For the quarter, we saw a modest year-over-year increase, driven mainly by higher tech expenses related to our enterprise modernization investment and expense growth driven by inflation. moderately offsetting VCP savings. Important to note that corporate expenses here pertain to our unallocated expenses only. Enterprise costs are not specifically assigned to a business unit. Moving on to our full year outlook. We are reaffirming our guidance. We will have more visibility in Q2 as we make our way through the all-important fall semester in learning and the early part of the calendar 25 library budget season in research. To refresh, we're projecting full-year revenue of $1.65 to $1.69 billion for a top-line growth rate of 2% to 4%. This is driven by an expectation of low to mid-single-digit growth in research and low single-digit growth in learning. The two AI projects already executed, one in Q4 and one in the first half of this year, largely offset each other in year-on-year comparisons. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in a range of 385 to 410 million for a growth of 4 to 11%. This reflects a margin target of 23 to 24%. Performance is expected to be driven by a combination of revenue growth and continued cost savings partially offset by investments in research, gen AI, and enterprise modernization, as well as the impact of inflation on our expenses. Adjusted EPS is expected to be in a range of 325 to 360 for a growth of 17 to 29%. The primary drivers are higher expected adjusted operating income and accrued interest income from the divestitures offsetting higher interest and tax expense. Free cash flow is anticipated to be approximately 125 million up from 114 million. This is due to improved working capital and lower restructuring payments offsetting higher CapEx and higher incentive compensation payments compared to the prior year period. Note that annual cash incentive payouts are made in Q1 for the prior year's performance. Over 90% of our colleagues are in the annual incentive plan. As noted, although CapEx in the first quarter is tracking behind prior year, we anticipated to ramp up in the remaining three quarters of the year. As a reminder, our full year CapEx projection is 130 million. Let's turn to our financial position. Free cash flow for the quarter was a use of 107 million in line with the prior year period. As a reminder, free cash flow is historically a use of cash in Q1 and Q2 due to the timing of annual journal subscription receipts, which are concentrated in Q3 and Q4. Lower CapEx due to timing was offset by higher incentive compensation payments related to fiscal 24 performance. We pay out our annual incentive compensation in Q1 of the following year. For the quarter, we allocated $32 million towards dividends and share repurchases, up from $29 million in the prior year. Over $12 million of that was used to acquire 295,000 shares at an average cost per share of $42.34. Our dividend payout is approximately 3%. Finally, net debt to EBITDA ratio was 2.0 at the end of July compared to 1.9 in the prior year period. And with that, I'll pass it back to Matt.