Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL) Q2 2025 Earnings Conference Call December 19, 2024 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Jeffrey Mathews - Chief Growth Officer and Executive Vice President
Peter Warwick - President and Chief Executive Officer
Haji Glover - Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President

Conference Call Participants

Brendan McCarthy - Sidoti

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Scholastic Reports Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

Now, I will pass the call over to the Chief Growth Officer and Executive Vice President, Jeffrey Mathews. Please proceed.

Jeffrey Mathews

Hello, and welcome everyone to Scholastic Fiscal 2025 Second Quarter Earnings Call. Today on the call, I'm joined by Peter Warwick, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Haji Glover, our Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President.

As usual, we have 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 reconciliations of those measures to the most directly-comparable GAAP measures may 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 address investor_relations@scholastic.com.

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. Thank you for joining us. In the second quarter, Scholastic Book Fairs and Clubs continue delivering the joy and excitement of books and reading to millions of kids, while our global children's publishing and entertainment teams moved ahead with exciting plans for this fiscal year and next.

As we discussed at our earnings call in September, second quarter results came in lower than the prior year, primarily reflecting the timing of this year's publishing plan. During the back-to-school season, we pursued multiple opportunities to drive long-term growth in our core markets and expand beyond them with new models, channels and products, all leveraging Scholastic's trusted brand, iconic IP, global scale, and differentiated channels.