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 the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today. Wiley is Vice President of Investor Relations, Brian Capital, please go ahead.

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us. I see reminders to start. The call is being recorded and may include forward-looking statements. You should not 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 obligation to update or revise Forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. Also, why we provide non-GAAP measures as a supplement to evaluate underlying profitability and performance trends. These numbers 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 used as alternatives to measures under GAAP. Unless otherwise noted, we will refer to non-GAAP metrics on the call and variances on a year-over-year basis and will exclude the impact of currency. After the call, a copy of this presentation and playback of the webcast will be available on our Investor Relations web page. I will now turn the call over to wireless President and CEO, Brian Nathan.

Good morning. Welcome to our Q2 earnings call. Wiley team has delivered another quarter of solid performance underscoring loudly leading position in the knowledge business and our strong performance in serving the ever-increasing demand for scientific research and for career-connected education. As you know, Wiley drives impact in 3 areas. We enable scientific discovery, we power career-connected education, and we shape work forces. 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. Jammie (phon) will touch on our first-half results, but I will say upfront 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 towards openly, 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 continued to see a strong post lockdown recovery and professional learning, which more than offset a decline in education publishing, which was driven by softness in U.S. fall enrollment and easing of last year's COVID related tailwind along with the disposition of our world languages content portfolio. Meanwhile, accelerated growth and 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 8 critical years, John has been an exceptional leader for Wiley. Public to drive our strategic direction, expand our growth profile, and strengthen our financial position. We built an expanding finance organization and leaves us well-positioned for a bright future. On behalf of the Board of Directors and an all colleagues worldwide, I want to thank John for his strong principal leadership. John, we all wish you the very best in all there is to come.

Thank you, Brian.

Also, on the call today with us is Christina Van Tassell our new Chief Financial Officer. Christina, joins us from Dow Jones where she served as CFO and helped to grow leading digital information businesses like the World 3 Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, and Factiva. Before that she was CFO of access of WPPCompany. She brings to Wiley over 30 years of broad financial leadership, strategic insight, and a proven ability to drive operational excellence. I am looking forward to partnering with her on our next phase of growth. Welcome, Christina.

Thanks, Brian and hello, everyone. It's great to be here. I have long admired Wiley for its remarkable legacy, its financial strength, and meaningful contributions to societies. I believe our deep network of partnerships with the world's leading universities and corporations and our unique position as an advocate for researchers and learners will allow us to win. To win in the dynamic global market, which continues to rapidly evolve. And also want to take this opportunity to thank John, for example, and for building a terrific finance organization. I look forward to working with the Wiley team to further accelerate growth, to drive innovation, and to consistently deliver strong results and shareholder value. I also look forward to meeting all of you. Thanks.

Well, it’s just great to have you on the team Christina. I want to start today by talking briefly about the large corporate opportunities that we are now tapping into across Wiley. As you know, at its core Wiley is a knowledge and a learning Company. And in a world where new information, new discoveries and new capabilities are the engines that power innovation and growth Wiley is very well-positioned, which you can see in our year-over-year growth of 17% for research corporate solutions, 15% for professional learning and 67% for corporate talent development. Corporations need our research content, our platforms and our databases to achieve their commercial objectives. Wiley provides the cutting-edge knowledge that companies need to develop new products and our platforms and services help those companies to achieve their marketing goals. For example, we just kicked off an ambitious project with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to build 4 educational resource hubs in critical disease areas. This helps them to educate and activate their healthcare community, and increase their brand engagement. Through the Wiley online library, our proprietary research content platform. We can provide direct access to over 15 million scientific, medical and technical researchers. This results in a 179 million extremely valuable impressions per month. So, targeting media and advertising will be an increasingly attractive business for us as the Wiley network of partners grows. Wiley's expanding portfolio of partner solutions also includes digital career centers that help employers to fill their critical jobs with qualified candidates. For example, we just renewed an important partnership with our partner Pfizer to manage its career center. Of course, any CEO will tell you that building a winning workforce with the right skills and capabilities is now both their biggest pain point and their biggest opportunity. For this reason, Wiley…

Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As Brian noted, the Wiley team continues to execute on our growth strategies and drive operational improvements throughout the business. I'd like to briefly recap our first-half performance, which clearly demonstrates that we are tracking well to our full-year outlook. Revenue was up 9% to $1.02 billion, or 6% organically, with research of 10%, APL up 5%, and Ed Services up 14 Adjusted EBITDA was up 9% to $222 million driven by first-half profit contributions from research and APL, offsetting investment in ED services growth initiatives. Our 6 months adjusted EBITDA margin was 22% right in line with prior year. And adjusted EPS rose 10% to $2.14. As a reminder, our adjusted EPS metric now excludes the non-cash amortization of intangible assets recorded in connection with our acquisitions. I would also, again note that all variances on the slide are shown at constant currency. Foreign exchange movement favorably contributed to our first half results by $19 million in revenue, two million dollars in adjusted EBITDA, and $0.03 in adjusted EPS. Given our first half performance in leading indicators, we are reaffirming our fiscal '22 guidance, which includes revenue growth of mid to high single-digits to a range of $2.07 billion to $2.1 billion. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to range between $415 and $435 million with profit gains on higher revenue, tempered by investments to accelerate growth. Adjusted EPS is the anticipated to range between four dollars and $4.25, and free cash flow is expected to range between 200 and $220 million dollars. As a reminder, while cash earnings are again expected to be strong in fiscal '22, we see certain headwinds compared to fiscal '21, including higher Capex, higher net cash taxes due to the Cares Act related tax refunds received in fiscal…

Thanks very much John. Out of core in everything we do, Wiley is driving positive impacts. Whether it's delivering more cutting-edge knowledge to the world faster and more openly, or unlocking career potential for millions of learners and workers. As I've said before, the more researches and learners that we help, the greater depositive societal impact. And with Wiley revenue in our recent performance, positive impact is Very good for business. Our colleagues are highly motivated by our ability to drive impact both within our walls and out in the world through our products and services. We are widely recognized for our impact and have been deemed a very low risk Company from an ESG perspective. In fact, we are rated in the fourth percentile globally for ESG risks by Sustainalytics and Morningstar Company. We're very proud of this rating, but we also know that there is always more room for improvement. Improving the price value equation education is one of our long-standing objectives. And as an education service provider, transparency about education outcomes is critical. To this end, we recently published a transparency report that highlights the affordability, accessibility, and outcomes of our partner degree programs. The data is clear and it shows that graduation and retention rate at our partner institutions are materially higher than a comparable not for profit online schools. The data also shows that the cost to earn a degree at our partner programs is lower. For instance, on average, an online MBA cost $25,000 in one of our programs, which is $6,000 or less than the market average. Our Nurse Practitioner, MS, Is $4,000 less than average. Across Wiley, we're always looking for ways to lower the cost of education while improving career outcomes. Today, Wiley is a digital Company with 83% of our…

At this time, [Operator Instructions] Your first question is from the line of Daniel Moore a with CJS Securities.

Thank you. Good morning and thanks for taking the questions. I'll start quickly, John, just first off, thank you for your candor and transparency over the last eight years. Been great working with you, and certainly look forward to working with Christina. I want to start with the research. The obviously article submissions benefited to integrate from the pandemic. And we're seeing that tough comp now. When do you expect to get through those comps and maybe get back, and then we're normalized mid-single-digit growth trajectory in terms of research article output?

It's obviously a very important question, Dan, we feel very good about the long-term trends in the business. We've always felt good about them. They are working their way that all of our businesses and I think all CEOs are seeing this this year. Last year was a particularly unusual year. This year is equally unusual, if often in the reverse direction. It's difficult to sort through all the tea leaves, but we're seeing trends in all of our data that tells us that we're reverting to back to norm. We feel very good about a 9% 2-year average, as we highlighted. And that underscores what we've been saying for a long time about the long-term investment in research leading to long-term output. Also, it's important to know that our OA businesses are growing very significantly, more than 80% year-on-year. And that's critical for the financial dynamic as we go forward. So, you're going to see this stuff sort itself out over the balance of this year. It's not -- in the long run where we're reverting to the norm, if not more than the norm, has increased investment occurs. And as we take an increasing share, which we have been doing for the last 4 or 5 years.

Very helpful. Shift gears to academic and professional. Start with that publishing. Do you expect that we're back on sort of moderate decline trajectory in terms of overall revenue or with this quarter? Is it more of a 1, 2, 3 quarter phenomenon given just enrollment rates and what we saw across the board, most universities this fall?

Yeah. Look again, it's the same comment I can make for any of our businesses, which again, any CEO is going to make these days. Last year was very unusual. This year was unusual. In academic and professional, particularly in Ed pub, which is what I think you're focusing on, what we're -- what we're seeing is that yes, the long-term trends from printed digital continue. The business is now 60% digital. So, we feel really good about that. We feel really good about the trajectory. We feel really good about the fact that universities continue after all of the transition to use gold standard published product like ours in their classrooms and in their online settings. So, we feel very good about all of that. And so, in the long run, I don't see any reversion. I see a continuation of that and continuation of these things washing out over a set of quarters, not a set of years. Again, I feel very good about the business and continues to be an extremely good and profitable business for us. And we'll see -- we'll see as we do, going forward. But I think the story hasn't changed. So, I think that's underlying your question. Has the story changed? No. The story is the same.

Perfect. And professional learning, obviously really nice bounce back here. And that business frankly held up better than maybe some of the thoughts to the pandemic. But where are we relative to pre -pandemic levels for those underlying businesses and professional learning and how the variance or risk to the recovery or do you think we've sort of learned to work hybrid or remote enough that we continue to trudge along and continue to recover from here?

Yeah. Look, we're still below the levels that we were before the pandemic because in-person training certainly hasn't -- hasn't returned at its levels because we're not back in the office and people are behaving differently. So, we are currently trending at about 10% or 15% below where we were pre -COVID. But there are some really good developments in that business. And the developments are as we've talked about in prior quarters, during this pandemic, we actually turned a business that was primarily about in-person training into one that is now primarily about, or I should say, balance between online and in-person training. So that will allow us to have digital relationships, not just with our companies and our managers, but with the people that go through the training, allowing us to, A, do a better job because training isn't just episodic, but B, have a long meeting, I do train and then maybe 2 years from now and do another training. But we got to have never relationship on an ongoing basis and we get it to us because of the longer-term relationship, have a longer lifetime value. So, we're still below, but we're trending back very nicely. We expect we fully recovered by the end of this physics Fiscal year, and that full recovery would be would be with a business that, in our opinion, is way healthier with a lot more growth potential than we had going into the pandemic. Look in short, Dan, what happened is COVID forced the digital transition where there should have been one, but people before, because it's better just as we say across many of our businesses. But -- so it forced that transition. And now when we catch up to demand as we get back to a more normalized situation, we will have both the healthy in-person and unhealthy online business. So, we feel again, we feel good about.

Very helpful. Maybe shift gears well, on a roll here, but at services, can you maybe give a little more delineation in terms of profitability between OPM and talent development? Just trying to understand where we are in the trajectory for each given the upfront investments. I think you mentioned was more on the OPM side.

Yeah.

If you want to give specific numbers, but there would be helpful.

Sure. Well, we're not breaking out the individual margins of those divisions. But as we have said in the past, these are growth businesses and we're investing in them. We're running in three around a break-even trying to get it to grow and take advantage that huge opportunity that obviously spoke a lot about today. As we are across many of our businesses, is that corporate opportunity. And in the service's side, we're certainly investing. We're investing in marketing to help our partners grow. We're investing in new partners and we do expect in the mid, in the long term as we've said many times, that 15% margin completely achievable and we continue to run that business very profitably which you know is a big accomplishment in this segment. So, no change there, running both of the businesses as growth businesses, and we're investing significantly in both of them, and ending the segment overall. So yes, I think we're -- John, would you add anything to my comments there?

No, Brian, I think you described it well. We're roughly, you mentioned profit margin, so just to be clear, we're talking about adjusted EBITDA margin on these businesses. Again, we're running the talent development business for growth and not trying to drive improvements in profitability there it's close to neutral on an adjusted EBITDA basis, but we're running for growth there and you can see that in this quarter's results with 67% revenue growth. And again, on the university services side, that business is geared up for long-term adjusted EBITDA margin of 15% or higher and we're going to keep it their overtime, that's the plan

Got it. Just in terms of performance year-to-date, both top and bottom line, it's been ahead of our projections. Just curious if you see the higher end of the guidance as being maybe being more likely or is it you described it as basically in line with your internal forecast to-date?

Dan I would describe the results year-to-date as roughly in line to either our expectations, year-to-date. Clearly, we're trending a bit ahead or you would think that we're trending towards the higher end of the range, hence your question. But I would say that we do expect to see a bit of the investment that we called out when we issued our guidance to be in the back half of the year versus the front as we ramp up on some of our initiatives. So, I wouldn't start to get precise about where we land in those guidance ranges. I would point out that we've got some investments on the back-end and we feel very confident about where we're trending at this point in the year.

Excellent. Last one, the bought back 10 million of shares in the quarter clearly continue to ramp up cash returned to shareholders. Is that a reasonable run rate going forward? Obviously, you get a super strong Balance Sheet and cash generation. Is there anything precluding you from maybe being even more aggressive here? And thanks for the [Indiscernible] on everything.

Yeah, I would say that you should expect us to roughly stay the course now, we don't have any particular changes that our plan. We continue to drive a balanced between investing in the business, both organically and with acquisitions and returning cash to shareholders in the form of dividends. And so, we're going to likely stay the course and near-term continuing to maintain that balance as we seek longer-term capital allocation, investing for growth.

Very good. Thank you both. And thank you for all the [Indiscernible].

Thank you very much, Dan.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Napack for closing remarks.

I want to thank everyone for joining the call today. And again, wish everybody a very, very happy holiday, a healthy New Year. And I look forward to sharing out our third quarter results with you in March.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.