Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript July 20, 2023 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Jeffrey Mathews - Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and IR

Peter Warwick - President and CEO

Ken Cleary - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Brendan McCarthy - Sidoti

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to today's program entitled Scholastic Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's program is being recorded.

And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Mr. Jeffrey Mathews, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Jeffrey Mathews

Hello, and welcome everyone to Scholastic's fiscal 2023 fourth quarter earnings call. Today on the call, I'm joined by Peter Warwick, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Ken Cleary, our Chief Financial Officer. As usual, we posted the accompanying investor presentation on our IR website at investor.scholastic.com, which you may download now if you've not already done so.

We would like to point out that certain statements made today will be forward-looking. These forward-looking statements, by their nature, are subject to various risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated.

In addition, we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G. The reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the company’s earnings release and accompanying financial tables filed this afternoon on a Form 8-K. This earnings release has also been posted to our Investor Relations website. We encourage you to review the disclaimers in the release and investor presentation and to review the risk factors disclosed in the company’s annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC. Should you have any questions after today’s call, please send them directly to our IR e-mail, investor_relations@scholastic.com.

And now, I’d like to turn the call over to Peter Warwick to begin this afternoon’s presentation.

Peter Warwick

Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Scholastic finished fiscal 2023 strongly with fourth quarter operating income up 40% from the prior year quarter's record level on modest revenue growth. Full year results met or exceeded our revised guidance. I’m especially proud of the excellent performance management achieved across Scholastic last quarter. In response to the cost and the selling headwinds that we've experienced this year and which caused us to revise our guidance in March. Thanks to quick actions to align spending with the revised revenue outlook and to unlock sales, including delayed opportunities in our Education Solutions division, margins and profits rose across all business segments in quarter four.