Ronald Packard
Analyst · Suzi Stein
Thank you, Christi. Good morning, and welcome to the K12's Fiscal Year 2012 Earnings Call. I am pleased to be speaking with you today about our accomplishments over the past year and provide some insight about our goals and commitments for the new school year. I would like to start the morning by first welcoming all our students and teachers back to school. Our mission is to deliver an outstanding individualized education program for each of our students that enables them to pursue their dreams. We could not do that without the tremendous support of our talented teachers and staff. I want to recognize and thank all of them.
Before we begin talking about our strong quarter and our review of the upcoming year, I would like to provide some additional information regarding the allegations in Florida. First, all teachers teaching Seminole County students were Florida certified, and in our internal review, we have only identified minor mistakes in matching the appropriate grade and course certifications with specific students and courses. Second, the emails at issue did not reflect our teacher-assignment policies, practices and controls. We believe the allegations resulted from both a mismatch of the timing of assignments with the reporting deadlines and more fundamentally, a misunderstanding by its author of the process used to generate the report in question in the Seminole materials. Third, we have shared and walked through all the internal supporting documentation for those teacher assignments with the IG's office and cooperated in every way. Beyond that, the results of our internal investigation concluded there's not evidence to support the conclusions drawn in the Seminole-submitted materials about teacher certification. It would be inappropriate for me to comment further, while the IG's office is still in the process of its investigation.
Given the unbelievable amount of rumor mongering and absurd extrapolations, assumption to be drawing from this isolated incident, I thought I would take a minute to elucidate our teacher-hiring process. When K12 hires a teacher or recommends to one of our customers or partners the hiring of a teacher, we have a 3-step process to ensure appropriate certification. First, when the position is posted, the applicant must check the appropriate certifications, and today they have. Second, for those recommended for potential hire, we retain a third-party vendor that conducts background checks, including verifying the current certification status with the relevant state and any other records related to that teacher with the Department of Education. Third, when a hire is finalized, the teacher must submit a current copy of his or her state certifications with the returned and signed offer letter. As for the ongoing assignment of teachers and students to courses, again, our policy and expectation is full compliance with all state certifications and NCLB laws. To accomplish this, we have a combination of staff and systems responsible for the actual course assignment to properly match teacher's courses and state certification. At the managed schools, this is accomplished at the school level and is also checked by the state as part of the audit process that all of our schools regularly go through and which has not raised any significant teacher certification issues in any state.
K12 as a culture aimed to comply with all regulations and laws and always do the right thing for children. It is our policy to comply with all applicable state regulations, including teacher certification laws. In fact, we have a dedicated school services compliance function with the sole responsibility of developing processes and testing the schools for compliance. Moreover, the schools K12 manage are regularly audited for a full array of financial and programmatic compliance. Despite the complexity of a system that now serves over 100,000 students must comply with federal laws and state laws in more than 30 states and employs over 4,000 teachers, our compliance over the past 12 years has been extraordinary. I am extremely proud of our employees and teachers and believe we have the finest workforce in the world and the nation's finest teacher core. While we have been an innovation engine in education and broken down barriers in order to help students, we have always gone to great lengths to comply with all regulations and always will, as it is part of our culture.
Now, getting back to the real business. We had an excellent year and a particularly strong fourth quarter. Not only were the financial results strong, but we had an excellent business development year as well. With regard to financial results, we grew net income significantly to $17.5 million, an increase of close to 34% year-over-year. We grew revenue to $708 million, an increase of more than 35% over the last year. At the same time, EBITDA also increased by close to 30% to $87 million. To put these results in perspective, over the past 5 years, K12 has evolved from a net loss of $24.9 million to net income of $17.5 million. Revenue has grown from $140.6 million to $708.4 million, and EBITDA has increased from $12 million to $87 million.
To sustain this growth for the long term, we devoted significant resources during the year to make improvements in our infrastructure and educational platforms. We completed the first phase of a company-wide Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning system, a second data center in Chicago that adds capacity and redundancy to our student-phasing applications and upgraded our Customer Relationship Management system to improve service levels. To improve operating efficiencies and the customer experience, we integrated our enrollment counseling organization more tightly into our recruiting organization.
With the benefits of our recent acquisitions, we strengthened our company and its growth prospects in our Institutional and International and Private Pay businesses. We accomplished all of this while facing significant pricing cuts, much of it unanticipated and also while being unjustly attacked by opponents of our efforts to bring greater choice to all students.
I thought it might be helpful to give you some better visibility into our plans for improving academic performance and to -- continuing to gain operating leverage. During our first 7 years, K12 focused primarily on the managed school business. The demand for a full-time public school online option was quite robust, and the business grew quite rapidly. In the process of developing a K-12 online learning program, we obtained a feedback from students' parents and teachers, which allowed us to build effective curriculum and learning platforms. We began to diversify our business model in 2 principal ways.
First, we introduced a private school model where we do not depend on government funding but instead is parent pay. Second, we began to sell our curriculum services to traditional schools looking to supplement their offerings with online solutions. We call this the Institutional business, and it requires scale as well as breadth of solutions to support this cost of sales. So starting in 2010, we completed a series of acquisitions, which were helpful to achieving that scale and which also leveraged our core competencies into the International and Private Pay business to reach a broader base of customers.
In conjunction with these acquisitions, we have significantly expanded our sales force, improved our sales management and acquired and developed more product capabilities. As a result of this business expansion, we now have achieved more scale in 2 related businesses that allow K12 to reach a larger number of children, and create additional growth vectors in what we believe are businesses with substantial growth opportunities.
In fiscal year 2012, our Institutional business revenues grew more than 56% year-over-year from $46.8 million to $73.2 million, while International and Private Pay business revenues increased in excess of 80% from $21.7 million to $39.1 million. At the same time, our Managed Public Schools business grew over 31% from $454 million to $596.1 million.
During the same period, we recognized that in support -- that in order to support our rapid growth and gain operating leverage in our business, we needed to make investments in our systems and infrastructure. These infrastructure investments, like our strategic acquisitions, will contribute to our long-term success. Obviously, they've also required significant amount of financial and operational resources. While much of the heavy lifting is behind us, we will continue to improve these systems and processes going forward.
Those investments have been made in an environment of significant state budget constraints and unanticipated funding recapture issues that have exerted significant pressure on K12's margins. We believe these factors have obfuscated the natural scaling power of the businesses and increasing efficiencies of K12. We are optimistic the budget environment is starting to stabilize and these investments are beginning to realize their benefits. So thus, we expect to improve margins going forward while continuing to grow rapidly.
We are pleased that we've been able to continue to deliver high-quality individualized education on a scale basis in the markets we serve. As we reflect upon our success in opening schools in new states, increasing enrollment caps, expanding educational liberty, integrating acquisitions, deploying infrastructure improvements and expanding our business lines, we indeed have accomplished a great deal but understand that we must continue to improve. We are committed to achieving operational efficiencies while maintaining our dedication to offering extraordinary educational experiences for the students we serve.
Delivering this high-quality education is the reason we are all here. To help us with this, we have expanded our management team by hiring Tim Murray, our President and Chief Operating Officer; as well as Jim Donley, our Chief Information Officer.
We are currently focused on concluding the integration process for the acquisitions we have made to date. In July 2011, we completed the purchase of certain K12 assets and Insight School management contracts of Kaplan Virtual Education. These assets were not fully integrated or optimized in fiscal year 2012, but they now have been absorbed into our operations, and we expect the Insight Schools to be a positive contributor to K12's top and bottom line in fiscal year 2013. We expect the general pace of acquisitions going forward to be slower than the past several years.
With regard to our investment in the Chinese-English language learning center company web, we have extended our option to acquire controlling interest in the company until December 31. In the meantime, we're continuing our extensive business due diligence process. If we choose not to exercise this option, we have the right to put our investment back to the company at 8% return.
Last year, we opened new schools in Louisiana and Tennessee. This fall, we opened new Managed Public Schools in Iowa and New Mexico, and we opened a Flex School in New Jersey. Additionally, enrollment caps were raised in several other states. Most importantly, it should be reiterated that while Michigan approved the significant expansion of the enrollment cap this year, it will not go into effect until the 2013-2014 school year. We will continue this year to work to add more states and expand caps into 2013-2014 school year so that all children that desire to attend K12 schools will have that opportunity.
In the past year, we successfully worked through another unfavorable state funding climate. For each of the last 4 years, state's cut education funding has declined. This year was particularly challenging as we faced unprecedented midyear formulaic adjustments in certain states. Fortunately, total average student enrollments in our Managed Public Schools increased by over 41%, which coupled with the natural scaling of our business and strong cost management, have allowed us to deliver solid financial results despite these significant funding reductions and adjustments. Overall, we expect to see approximately a 1% decrease in fiscal 2013 funding level across the portfolio of states. Additionally, I would like to add that last year's retention rate was not statistically different than that of the previous year.
As you are aware, we now also have curriculum, systems and services to school districts in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Our revenue growth of more than 56% year-over-year in the Institutional business was a result of strong organic growth and the synergies we have realized through the acquisitions of both KC Distance Learning, or KCDL, where we acquired among other things the Aventa curriculum portfolio and the American Education Corporation or AEC, where we acquired the A+ curriculum portfolio. As school districts and academic administrators accept online learning and seek cost-efficient, high-quality, integrated and flexible educational solutions, we believe a direct-to-district distribution channel offers further growth potential.
In addition to achieving cost efficiencies with these acquisitions, K12 has had success growing the revenue of acquired companies, and Aventa is a good example of this. Since we acquired the product line, revenues have grown 76% from $14 million in 2010 to $24.7 million in 2012. We are also excited about our recent launch of a new and innovative online learning solution called PEAK 12. This solution simplifies a district management of online learning assets by consolidating multiple solutions on a single platform. It allows administrators and teachers to manage enrollment, programs and performance tracking, alerts and reporting across the multiple online solutions from a single solution.
In addition to selling to school districts the past year, we launched a Pre-K program in several early childhood learning centers, in addition to the dozens of kindergarten programs we already have in place around the country. We're quite excited for this innovative new Pre-K offering and believe it has application in the direct-to-consumer channel as well.
Our International and Private Pay business, which now includes The Keystone School, the K12 International Academy and the George Washington University Online High School is growing rapidly, as revenues increase in excess of 80% year-over-year, as we served almost 30,000 students in 85 countries. The academic gains for the private school business are outstanding and show the power of the model when students are fully engaged.
As you may recall, as part of our acquisition of KCDL, we acquired The Keystone School, which hasn't grown revenue in 2 to 3 years prior to acquisition. In the past fiscal year, the first complete year of K12's ownership, revenue of the school has grown from $11 million to $14 million. We believe it is further testament to K12's ability to add value to the companies it has acquired.
We remain dedicated to improving the academic performance of the students we serve, and we'll continue to work so these schools are measured properly, and the performance of these students will be properly communicated. It is ironic and sad that the same groups who argue the state test scores and AYP are poor measures of most, if not, all schools, now selectively seek to use the same inaccurate measures of schools to attack virtual schools. Particularly, as the result of a high percentage of new students and students who enroll behind grade level, these inaccurate measures are significantly less appropriate to measure virtual schools than they are for most traditional schools. The hypocrisy is startling.
Later this fall, we will be issuing an annual academic report that will explain how we measure the academic performance of our students and the associated challenges in accuracies of applying traditional performance evaluation methods to virtual public schools given their high student growth rate and dynamic student population. We will also be hosting an academics and product day later in the year, where we encourage you to join us to experience firsthand the power of our products, curriculum and innovative learning applications and learn more about our academics.
An increasing number of students join our programs, significantly behind grade level. We are proud to be creating technology-based learning systems and curricula to help solve these educational challenges. These are students for whom the traditional school model has already failed them. To bolster both our internal and external advocacy efforts, we are actively searching for a Chief Academic Officer to help analyze and communicate our academic progress.
Our goal remains to provide children with an individualized education to prepare them to achieve and become whatever they want to be in life. We firmly believe that online instruction is an effective way to deliver students and individualized education where tools, such as adaptive learning, can tailor instruction to the personalized needs of each student.
We will continue to focus on learning efficiencies, academic outcome and remediation, so we can better serve the significant number of students who come to K12 behind grade level, as well as help school districts serve their children who need remediation or perhaps advanced instruction.
In the past year alone, we invested an additional $65 million in curriculum and online learning platforms, a cumulative $305 million to date. We will continue to invest in new curriculum and learning methodologies to ensure that we can provide new capabilities for our students and the schools and school districts we serve. I am excited by what technology now allows us to do, and I believe the new technological advances will allow us to transform education even more in the next decade than we have already done in the past decade.
Now I'd like to turn to the 2013 fiscal year. While we will issue our formal guidance the week of October 8 in a separate call dedicated entirely to this topic, we want to provide you with some visibility into our early 2013 outlook. First, our enrollment growth continues to be strong, and we are quite pleased with where we are at this time. Second, re-enrollment rates are similar to previous years. The cost of student acquisitions remain similar to last year. We believe our Institutional growth -- business and our International and Private Pay business will continue to grow rapidly. The business development environment for new states and existing state expansion looks similar to where it did a year ago. The business continues to scale nicely, and we have achieved significant cost reductions in the past fiscal year from both scaling and specific cost reduction efforts. We expect that margins will expand for the 2012-2013 school year. We expect that capital expenditures for fiscal year 2013 will grow less than 10%.
With that, I will now call -- turn the call over to Tim Murray to make a few comments.