John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE:WLY) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call September 7, 2022 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Brian Campbell – Vice President-Investor Relations

Brian Napack – President and Chief Executive Officer

Christina Van Tassell – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Daniel Moore – CJS Securities

Operator

Good morning, my name is Rob, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Wiley’s First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. [Operator Instructions].

Thank you, Brian Campbell, Wiley’s Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

Brian Campbell

Thank you, and hello, everyone. I’m joined by Brian Napack, Wiley’s President and CEO; and Christina Van Tassell, Executive Vice President and CFO.

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 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 the impact of currency.

After the call, a copy of the presentation and a transcript and playback of the webcast will be available on our Investor Relations web page at investors.wiley.com.

I’ll now turn the call over to Brian Napack.

Brian Napack

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Wiley’s Q1 earnings call. Before I get to our Q1 results, I want to touch on a couple of foundational topics. Wiley like all companies is operating today in an uncertain global economy and continues to pose a variety of interesting and novel challenges. Despite this, our underlying markets remain strong and opportunity rich, and we are successfully executing our focus strategy. The evidence is in our current momentum.

Wiley performs well through challenging economic cycles and periods of disruption. It does this for two primary reasons. First, scientific research is indispensable to economic progress and thus global spending on it continues through the cycles. Second, higher education enrollment tends to be countercyclical as workers react to soft labor markets by investing in themselves and their futures. Because of these factors, Wiley can take the long view and it is benefiting from this today.