Good morning, and welcome to Wiley’s Q2 Fiscal 2025 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, Brian Campbell. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and hello, everyone. I’m with Matt Kissner, Wiley’s President and CEO; Christopher Caridi, Interim CFO; and Jay Flynn, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Research and Learning. Note that our comments and responses reflect management’s views as of today and will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those statements. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update them to reflect subsequent events. 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 divested assets and the impact of currency. Additional information is included in our filings with the SEC. A copy of this presentation and transcript will be available on our Investor Relations webpage at investors.wiley.com. I’ll now turn the call over to Matt Kissner.

Thank you, Brian, and hello, everyone. At the midpoint of the year, we’re pleased with our continued progress. Our revenue and profit performance are in-line with our expectations, our investments are starting to pay off, and we remain confident in our full-year trajectory. We’re working to deliver compounding growth and material margin expansion over time. Our knowledge businesses remain recession tolerant, our balance sheet and cash flow remain core strengths, and we’re starting to see AI related tailwinds. I know you may have questions about the political environment in the U.S. It’s too early to speculate on any impact, positive or negative that a new administration could have. I’ll just say this, scientific exchange and global R&D investment have always risen above the changing political tides given their vital importance to economic growth and quality of life. Research and Learning remain the twin foundations of the global knowledge economy, and Wiley is enabling them through the creation of new knowledge and its application. We have become a most trusted source in an ever changing world that is overloaded with unsubstantiated information and skepticism. We remain confident as ever in our central role of ensuring the accuracy, trust, impact and application of knowledge. It’s getting more important by the day. Let me also welcome Chris Caridi to his first official earnings call. Chris has assumed the role of Interim Chief Financial Officer in September. He’s been our Controller for eight years and continues to be a trusted partner to me and our leadership team. I’ll give him a more proper introduction later in my presentation. Okay, let’s review the headlines of this quarter. Revenue growth was driven primarily by Learning, which saw favorable market conditions across both academic and professional. Research generated modest growth, driven by positive demand trends, partially offset…

Thank you, Matt, and hello, everyone. As Matt noted, our results are in-line with expectations and we remain confident in our full-year revenue, profit, and cash flow outlook, although there is some unusual quarterly phasing to discuss. Let’s start with Research performance. Second quarter and year-to-date revenue were up 1% and 2% respectively. For the quarter, Research Publishing growth of 1% was driven by growth in gold open access in our institutional models, offsetting an unusually large quarterly swing of $5 million in legacy print and licensing revenue. Legacy revenue includes many different smaller products such as backfiles, article pay per view, digital archives, and title-by-title sales to libraries. The vast majority of this revenue is non-recurring, and so it tends to be very uneven. Legacy performance this quarter was largely due to unfavorable comps, notably a one-time backfile deal in the prior year. Research Publishing is largely a recurring revenue business dominated by multi-year licenses to research institutions in the form of subscriptions and transformational agreements. We’re in the early stages of the calendar ‘25 renewal season, but we feel good about what we are seeing so far. We have already renewed several transformational agreements, including with one of our largest library consortia, and are making good progress on our overall goals here. The renewal season runs from now until March-April 2025. Research Solutions continued to improve this quarter, with revenue growth of 2%, driven by career centers, managed services, and databases. This offset softness in advertising. We anticipate continued improvement for this business in the second half driven by new products and our society business pipeline. Adjusted EBITDA for Research rose 1%, driven by revenue performance offset by reinvestment in the growth and productivity initiatives that Matt touched on earlier. Our Q2 margin was 31.3% compared to 31.6%…

Thank you, Chris. Let me briefly summarize. As I said last quarter, we’re off to a good start, but we’re not declaring victory. We have a lot more work to do to achieve our full revenue and margin potential, which will be a multi-year effort. Still we remain confident in core demand trends and other performance indicators, our execution and our alignment as an organization. We are making good progress in margin improvement with more to come. We are an early mover in AI. We are one of the first publishers to close a large licensing deal with LLM developers, and we are early to market on AI driven research fraud detection. We’re an early adopter of Salesforce’s Agentforce for our customer service optimization. They even cited our example on their recent earnings call. We’re working through various opportunities and feel good about the pipeline and our execution in this area. We have a leaner, more focused executive team now and we’re off and running. Our performance to date is as expected and we’re confident in achieving our outlook. Continuous improvement is our multi-year drumbeat. We are reinvesting where we have competitive advantage and operating leverage and we are continuously evaluating our cost structure. This is not a one or two year trajectory, it’s a continuum. I’ll finish by thanking our Wiley colleagues for everything they do to make Wiley, Wiley. An historically significant company at the forefront of change, a company doing good in the world. Thank you all for joining us today. I want to wish you and your families a safe and happy holiday season. I will now open the floor to any comments and questions.

[Operator Instructions]. We’ll take our first question from the line of Daniel Moore with CJS Securities. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Matthew. Good morning, Chris. Thanks for taking the questions and color. You covered a lot of ground, so I may have a few questions this morning as well, if that’s okay.

That’s fine, Dan. How are you?

Very well. Maybe start with the momentum that you’re seeing in the learning business. You talked about some of the drivers, but maybe elaborate a little bit as well as your confidence in the sustainability of that growth going forward.

Sure. We also have Jay with us. So, I’m going to ask Jay to comment on that.

Oh, great. Hey, how are you doing, Dan? Nice to talk to you again this morning and thanks for the continued interest in coverage. We feel, optimistic that we’re on track to achieve our guidance, driven in part by performance and learning. I want to focus for a second on the margin side. The team’s done a great job over the last 18 months to adjust our cost structure and continue to drive top line performance at the same time. And that has been a really strong effort by the part of the leadership there. We are seeing continued growth in our zyBooks platform in computer science, data science, AI, that is a core driver of performance learning, as well as a better recovery in our trade business, which as Chris noted in his prepared remarks, had been an underinvested area for us. We also feel very good about the progress that the team is making in new content acquisition, in particular in signings, which are a good forward looking indicator for us. So, all that taken together with, some added tailwinds from, AI revenue, which is always nice to see in that business. We feel like we’re on a good footing in learning. We’ve stabilized that business and the return to growth is exactly what we predicted when we started on this journey.

Very helpful. And then switching to research, maybe just talk a little bit more about trends that you’re seeing in article submissions, as well as your expectations for growth, overall that and then secondarily, maybe limited in what you can say at this point, but the new agreement in India is certainly interesting. When might you have more to say about the growth potential that as well as any margin impact that you see from that type of opportunity?

Great. Let me start with India just for a second and then we’ll kind of work backwards. We have been working with the Indian government, for multiple years to evaluate the potential for a one nation, one subscription agreement. And we’re very pleased. And we first of all, we want to congratulate the Indian government for getting this deal over the line. It’s been a priority for the Modi government for a number of years to get this done. So, we think this is going to have a huge impact for Indian research. This expands coverage of access to journal and database content to a tremendous number of Indian institutions. And we’re going to see it is a little early to talk about impact, but we’re going to see commensurate growth in our subscription revenue base. We’ve also through this process really developed close partnerships with some of the key Indian institutions. And India is the 6th largest market in the world for articles. So, those partnerships give us an opportunity to think about new ways to adjust our publishing approach in India. We feel like there’s great potential in the market in core areas that we all know about like engineering, but also increasingly as the government expands its priorities into core primary research in physics and life sciences and biosciences, it’s a very, it’s a market with a lot of potential and we’re glad to be in on the ground floor with the with the one nation one subscription agreement. In terms of overall, what we’re seeing in article submissions, the pattern holds the same. The markets in Asia are growing faster than markets in the West. But what I’d like to point out is that the markets in the West have recovered. So in fact, we’ve seen a return to growth in the kind of mid-single-digits in most of the Western markets and continued tailwinds from places like India, China, excitingly also Japan. So, we’re feeling really good about continued demand for our services. As we always like to point out a lot of these articles go to underpin the value of our subscription business. So, it’s not going to pop as incremental revenue, but it underlies that core engine for Wiley and continues to bolster that. And then as Chris said in his prepared remarks, we did see nice growth in the prior queue from our author paid revenue streams and in particular, author paid open access in the journals business and we expect that to continue throughout the year.

Yes. Dan, there’s also an important nuance to the volume, which is that even though the western markets have lower growth rates, because of the maturity of science in the western markets, those articles have higher approval rates. So, it’s both, it’s mix plus how many articles do we accept. It’s as we have talked about in the past, there’s some complex dynamics around the article pipeline.

No. That that’s probably intuitive, but a great reminder. Thank you. Maybe just you touched on additional cost rationalization, my word not yours, but cost reduction or management opportunities. Where do you see the most opportunity and do you expect to be in a position to quantify kind of a second leg of targeted cost reduction initiatives or do you expect additional savings to be more kind of incremental and ongoing?

Couple of perspectives, and then I’ll ask Chris to comment. We see opportunities across the board, particularly an area of focus for us is technology as we modernize our infrastructure. We have some substantial investment going on in infrastructure modernization and we are looking forward to seeing the benefits of that. It’s obviously probably in a year or two when those projects are completed. But I think the more important message is margin improvement is now a way of life here, and we don’t view it in as separate projects, but really a continuous effort to improve margins year-on-year. And the good news is that we all get it. It’s a shared goal among the team and we’re excited about it. So, we will give more visibility into what the next few years look like, later this year as we see how our landing point and how this year plays out. But we’re excited about the opportunity to continue to drive margin improvement as we reinvest in growth in the core business. Chris, anything you want to add to that?

No, I don’t necessarily have a lot more to add to that, Matt. I would say shared services in general is an area where we see the opportunities, and it’s just a bit premature to put specific numbers on anything at this point.

Makes sense. Any update on potential collections from sale of divested businesses?

At this point, we anticipate getting the funds that are owed us. We do not have timing necessarily on, the largest outstanding balance, which was related to our university services business. We continue to watch that business closely and it’s performing and we anticipate that we will see some funds in the future, but not on a date or a schedule that we can articulate at this point. The due date on that note is substantially in the future, but we would hope that they will be able to secure some rounds of funding before that due date.

Makes sense. Appreciate the color. From a capital allocation perspective, obviously, cash flow much heavier in the back half of the year as is typical, but you continue to return cash to shareholders including $25 million for buybacks. Just talk about priorities going forward. As that cash comes in, would you be content to further reduce leverage? You do have internal investments, but or would you continue to be aggressive in terms of returning cash to shareholders, or are there other areas of investment should be thinking about?

We’ve had a traditionally a very balanced approach and we would look to continue that as that cash came in, we are always evaluating opportunities to deploy it for future growth but, and have solid returns to shareholders, would look for anything unique to come out of that, it would most likely be initially used to pay down debt but be able to secure our ability to make investments into the future.

Understood. Last one for me, we’ve made a ton of progress. The portfolio has been reshaped. You’re getting further down the path in terms of your restructuring activities, pivoting to growth. Any plans for more aggressive Investor Relations outreach? It’s been a while since we did an Analyst Investor Day. Obviously, tons changed since then. So just wondering what you’re thinking is on that front as we head into maybe fiscal ‘26. Thank you again for all the color.

Yes. I agree with you. We have a different leadership team in place. We’ve become more focused. So, we’re evaluating when is the best time to do this. It’ll be sometime in the next calendar year, but we do want to do an Investor Day and because we have a really a lot of good things going on that we want to share. So, the question is when is the best time to do that? But I would expect one in the new calendar year.

Very good. Chris, look forward to working with you. Thank you again for all the color.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, Dan.

And that will conclude our question-and-answer session. And I’ll now turn the call back over to Matt Kissner for any closing remarks.

Well, thanks for joining us on this journey. Wishing you and your families a happy and healthy holiday season and we look forward to sharing more in our Q3 earnings in March.

Thank you all for joining today’s call. You may now disconnect.