John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE:WLY) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 3 of 3

Christina Van Tassell: I’ll just say, as always, our capital allocation strategy is a balanced one. You’re not likely to see any M&A as I’m sure you’ve heard, very focused in the near term on divestitures and rightsizing. We will have opportunistic organic investments in research to scale publishing as well as our solutions. We’ll talk more about that in January. We’re always managing our debt. This is a really important one for us as Wiley, obviously, in the marketplace. We’re in really good shape financially. But the interest costs are higher and we’re looking to manage that. And yes, our dividend is the 30th consecutive year of increasing our dividend. It’s been at $77 million a year, that 2020. So we’ve been managing that with share repurchases, which, again, we’re actively managing as well. So those are our capital allocation elements. And we’re always looking a tweak before, after and during these portfolio moves. So we’ll talk more about that again in January.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Sami Kassab from BNP Paribas.

Sami Kassab: I have two questions, please. The first one is on academic learning. Could you share with us the share of revenues coming from Inclusive Access? And where do you see that number going to in the next few years? And the second question is on Research Publishing. Would you be able to comment on the revenue growth trends within the general subscription business versus the gold open access business for the quarter, and how you see general subscription revenue trends going forward midterm?

Jay Flynn: So as we mentioned in the in the first part of the call, we did see positive momentum with our Inclusive Access models, it’s a small percentage of the revenue. We don’t break it out publicly. But what I would say is it’s a sign of an increasing customer demand for that product. And we feel good about both the digital growth of our courseware program inside of academic learning but also about our ability to innovate around business models. And I think that this is a trend in academic for a variety of reasons and all benefit students and learners. And so we’re going to continue to participate in that. It’s a low base and it will continue to grow from that base in line with the market expectation. And in the context of your question about research publishing, let me just take a step back and reiterate that this is a very mixed market right now as Christina said.

We have some markets that are subscription only. We have many which are much further ahead on the OA transition. And then that can be cut by geography, for example, in Europe, we’ve got a much more OA centric market, whereas in, for example, the Asia Pacific region, it remains primarily a subscription market for us. And in the United States, it’s very, very mixed. And so for those reasons, we generally tend to think about it as a left pocket, right pocket and the movement of revenue between a pure subscription model and a transitional agreement for us is it’s really about business model and meeting the customer where they are, it’s about pricing models and meeting the customer where they are and it’s by responding to what I think is a good trend in the market to make sure that anybody can read the content that we’ve moved outside of the paywall with our open access publishing model.

So while we don’t break those two numbers out, I think it’s important to say that we continue to benefit from participation in this mixed model economy and that as we indicated earlier in the call, we expect performance to improve in H2 as volumes begin to improve, and we already talked about what those indicators look like on a go-forward basis with some submission volumes returning to historical norm.

Operator: And we have no further questions in our queue at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Kissner for closing remarks.

Matt Kissner: Thank you all for joining the call today. We look forward to sharing more at our January 25th Investor Update, and then again at our Q3 earnings call in March. Have a good day.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.

Follow John Wiley & Sons Inc. (NYSE:WLY, WLYB)

Page 3 of 3