Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call December 14, 2023 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Jeffrey Mathews - EVP, Corporate Development and IR

Peter Warwick - President and CEO

Ken Cleary - CFO and Acting President

Conference Call Participants

Brendan McCarthy - Sidoti

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Scholastic Corporation Fiscal 2024 Second Quarter Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jeffrey Mathews.

Jeffrey Mathews

Thank you, Allen. Hello, and welcome, everyone, to Scholastic's fiscal 2024 second 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 and Acting President, International. 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'd 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'll be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G.

The reconciliations of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures may be found in the company's earnings release and the 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 email address, 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

Thanks, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us.

Scholastic executed solidly in our second quarter during the important back-to-school season in the Northern Hemisphere. Our School Reading Events and Education divisions while progressing their plans continued to demonstrate Scholastic's unique capabilities to get tens of millions of kids' access to engaging high quality books.

Scholastic's Trade Publishing and Entertainment teams continue to create and publish best-selling books and highly rated content and IP for the company's own channels, as well as retailers and third-party ones, fulfilling the second pillar of Scholastic's unique integrated publishing and distribution strategy. With kids back at school and parents and educators refocused on the importance of reading and learning, Scholastic's mission is as relevant as ever today, even in the more complex environment in U.S. schools in which we currently find ourselves operating this year.