Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call March 23, 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

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Scholastic's Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.

I'd now like to hand the call over to Jeffrey Mathews, EVP, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Jeffrey Mathews

Hello and welcome, everyone, to Scholastic’s fiscal 2023 third quarter earnings call. Today on the call, I am joined by Peter Warwick, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Ken Cleary, our Chief Financial Officer. As usual, we posted the investor presentation on our IR website at investor.scholastic.com, which you may download now if you have 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. Thanks for joining us. In the fiscal 2023 third quarter, Scholastic recorded modest sales declines and higher losses as we continue to navigate short term market headwinds, whilst also increasing investment for the long term in blended learning programs and digital tools in our education solutions business. As a reminder, Scholastic's third quarter is seasonally smaller and typically loss making.

We have modestly lowered our financial guidance for FY '23 as a result of the ongoing softness we're seeing in the retail bookselling market and purchasing delays for educational materials on the part of schools and school districts, something that has impacted our quarter three results and we now expect to continue into quarter four.