Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (NASDAQ:LEE) Q4 2023 Results Conference Call December 7, 2023 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Josh Rinehults - Vice President, Finance
Kevin Mowbray - President and Chief Executive Officer
Tim Millage - Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer
Nathan Bekke - Vice President, Audience Strategy
Conference Call Participants
Daniel Harriman - Sidoti
Operator
Welcome to the Lee Enterprises 2023 Fourth Quarter Webcast and Conference Call. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay at investors.lee.net [Operator Instructions]. A link to the live webcast can be found at investors.lee net. Now I will turn the call over to your host, Josh Rinehults, Vice President, Finance. Please go ahead.
Josh Rinehults
Good morning. Thank you for joining us. In addition to myself, speaking on this morning's call are Kevin Mowbray, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Tim Millage, Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Also with us today and available for questions is Nathan Bekke, Vice President, Audience Strategy. Earlier today, we issued a news release with preliminary results for our fourth fiscal quarter of 2023. It is available at lee.net as well as the major financial Web sites. Please also refer to our earnings presentation found at investors.lee.net that includes supplemental information.
As a reminder, this morning's discussion will include forward-looking statements based on our current expectations. These statements are subject to certain risks, trends and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such factors are described in this morning's news release and also in our SEC filings. During the call, we refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, cash costs and same store revenues, which are defined in our news release. We will also refer to digital direct costs, which is defined in the earnings presentation. For each of these non-GAAP measures, reconciliations to the relevant GAAP measures are included in tables accompanying the release. And now to open the discussion is our President and Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Mowbray.
Kevin Mowbray
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm excited to share with you all of the many reasons why we're optimistic about the future of Lee. We'll begin this morning with an overview of our fiscal year 2023 operating results, including our industry leading digital performance. We'll also provide an update to our digital transformation strategy. And given the strong execution of the three pillars, I'm excited to share increases to our long term outlook. The Lee team delivered another strong quarter with continued execution on our three filler digital growth strategy, and I'm very encouraged at the pace by which we're transforming Lee into a vibrant digitally centric company. Our fourth quarter results helped us to achieve all of our full year guidance. Our ability to exceed expectation and produce industry leading results in this challenging environment demonstrates the success of our strategy, the resiliency of our business model to support these investment thesis and increases our conviction in achieving our long term goals. We grew digital only subscribers 36% for the year, leading us to substantially exceed our initial guidance with 721,000 digital subscribers by the end of the fiscal year. And we're also encouraged that we grew average rates for our digital only subscriptions, driving fourth quarter digital subscription revenue up 68% year-over-year and up 51% for the full year.