Strategic Education Inc. (NASDAQ:STRA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript July 27, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Terese Wilke - Director of Investor Relations

Karl McDonnell - President and Chief Executive Officer

Daniel Jackson - Executive VP and CFO

Robert Silberman - Chairman

Conference Call Participants

Jeff Silber - BMO Capital Markets

Jasper Bibb - Truist Securities

Alex Paris - Barrington Research

Heather Balsky - BofA

Operator

Welcome to Strategic Education's Second Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. I will now turn the call over to Terese Wilke, Director of Investor Relations for Strategic Education.

Ms. Wilke, please go ahead.

Terese Wilke

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Strategic Education's conference call in which we will discuss second quarter 2023 results. With us today are Robert Silberman, Chairman; Karl McDonnell, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Daniel Jackson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following today's remarks, we will open the call for questions.

Please note that this call may include forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements are based on current expectations and are subject to a number of assumptions, uncertainties and risks that Strategic Education has identified in today's press release that could cause actual results to differ materially. Further information about these and other relevant uncertainties may be found in Strategic Education's most recent annual report on Form 10-K, the 10-Q to be filed and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as Strategic Education's future 8-Ks, 10-Qs and 10-Ks. Copies of these filings and the full press release are available for viewing on the website at strategiceducation.com.

And now I'd like to turn the call over to Karl. Karl, please go ahead.

Karl McDonnell

Thank you, Terese, and good morning, everyone. SEI's second quarter reflects continued strong performance in U.S. Higher Education, another strong quarter from ETS and improving trends in Australia and New Zealand. But before I discuss our performance this morning, I just want to note that all financial figures that I reference in my prepared remarks are on a constant currency basis.

In the second quarter, SEI's revenue increased 7%. That's significantly better than our first quarter performance where our revenue was flat to the prior year. The revenue growth that we had is a product of strong U.S. Higher Education continued performance, significant revenue growth within ETS and strong revenue per student in Australia and New Zealand. Based on the current performance, we expect that second half 2023 revenue will be higher than the 7% that we had in the second quarter of this year.