Mike Huseby
Analyst · Needham. Please go ahead, your line is open
Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us today. Our fiscal 2020 first quarter results were consistent with our expectations for this quarter, a seasonally low sales activity for BNED. We continue to make important strides in our areas of strategic focus for the company. For example, we are investing and growing our bartleby learn digital study product. We're driving net new business wins in retail and we're strengthening our retail segment through important initiatives in both our general merchandise and course materials business.First, I will discuss the performance of bartleby in our DSS segment, which continue to build momentum as we improve and refine our offerings, invest in new solutions and leverage our unmatched insights in the student preferences and course materials consumption. It's been barely a year since our new digital study product bartleby learn soft launched, and we've accomplished a great deal in that time.Our product team has made continued enhancements to bartleby learn to ensure it is best serving students by providing them with academic assistance available anytime and anywhere. We continue to grow the number of titles and subjects covered on bartleby learn, and to increase the number of step-by-step solutions available in our content library. In this fall semester, we are approaching approximately 2 million solutions available for students, up from more than 1 million solutions we offered at the end of our last fiscal year just in April.With our first in footprint bartleby sales push in the spring, we acquired approximately 50,000 subscribers. Leveraging what we learned during the spring rush, we have now improved our sales strategies, enhanced bookseller training, increased in-store marketing and continue to incentivize our field sales force. Our thousands of student booksellers are hard at work offering this product to students to supplement their classroom learning and ensure as they're equipped for success.In addition to enhancements to the bartleby learn product, we also recently soft launched a new bartleby offering, branded bartleby write. Our goal is to provide an innovative suite of digital products and services that support the learning ecosystem and provide students with the tools they need to succeed, both in and out of the classroom. Bartleby learn marked the first offering in our planned suite of services. And just a few weeks ago, we launched the bartleby write as bartleby learn's companion.Bartleby write was developed on a foundation of a writing product we acquired through Student Brands in August 2018. Our teams have been working diligently to grow and enhance the offering into a best in class writing product. Bartleby write allows students to check grammar, detect plagiarism and receive an AI generated preliminary score, so they know if their paper may benefit from improvement before they submit it. We believe bartleby write solves multiple pain points for an even larger addressable market of students. We're excited to grow our suite of services and look forward to adding active bartleby users.Moving now to our retail segment and specifically new bookstore business. After just one quarter with our new go to market strategy and unified sales team in place, we've already started to post positive results. Currently, we have contracts to open in fiscal year '20, approximately $78 million of new business gross sales or $39 million net after store closings. This includes both full service and virtual store models. Of this $39 million, approximately $21 million is attributable to our virtual stores, demonstrating the strong value of the virtual operating capabilities provided to BNED by MBS.Our ability to adapt to the different needs of current and prospective partners is critical. The complexities of our industry are becoming increasingly challenging for institutions to manage on their own. That gives us the unique advantage to deliver the physical, virtual or custom store solutions best suited for them. A great example of the value we offer our college partners is our new BNC Adoption & Insights portal, or AIP.AIP is our innovative new platform for faculty and academic leadership to submit and monitor course material adoptions, enhanced affordability and drive student success. This platform has helped us win new accounts and to retain existing ones. AIP is now live at our first wave of schools, and we will continue to implement this platform for current and new partners on a rolling basis throughout this fiscal year. We're very excited about AIP, and think this is a significant differentiator for BNC in the marketplace. As we increase the penetration of digital packages and pricing models, the AIP platform coupled with our efforts to integrate it into the learning management systems and the student information systems of our campus partners, will be a critical tool that will make our relationships with campus partners even more valuable and therefore more sticky.We're seeing positive trends in our general merchandise business with comp GM sales increasing 4.9%. This increase was driven by strong consumer response to our enhanced product assortments in the apparel category and strong trends in our graduation business. While we are already successfully driving growth in general merchandise sales, we also have the opportunity and plans to significantly increase the growth rate of this high margin business.We're implementing key strategic initiatives, supported by targeted investments to accelerate our comp store and new store sales growth in our general merchandise business. Our goal is to provide customers with the best-in-class shopping experience, no matter which channel they shop through. Within our e-commerce offering, we have been focused on an important initiative to significantly expand our online product assortment. This quarter, we added new vendors and products that are available online only and therefore do not require stores to carry the inventory. This direct ship capability allows us to increase the product volume and assortment available to our customers without increasing inventory costs.We've also begun a key strategic initiative to greatly improve our e-commerce shopping and fulfillment experience with the design and development of a new next gen e-commerce platform, which we expect to invest in primarily during this fiscal year. This new platform will provide an improved customer experience and is expected to significantly benefit our general merchandise growth beginning next year. In fiscal 2019, our online GM sales grew 5.6%. We believe we should be able to grow this business at a much higher rate beginning next fiscal year with the experience that will be offered by our new e-commerce platform.In our physical stores, our competitive advantage lies in our location in the heart of campus. We remain a trusted source for all things college, as students and their families look to the campus store for everything they need for social and academic success. As discussed during our fiscal 2019 year-end earnings call, we are reimagining our brick and mortar space to create dynamic highly curated concept shops that are driving traffic and increase sales to our stores. After seeing positive sales trends from last quarter's pilot concept shops in four stores, we've now expanded across 70 locations with over 200 shops. The concept stores will change 4 times throughout the academic year, focusing on touch-points such as tailgating, holiday and graduation, including a dedicated champion shop with products found only on Barnes & Noble college campuses.Additionally, we're partnering with exciting brands that our students are not currently used to seeing in our stores, including AT&T and Urban Outfitters to be a part of the enhanced in-store experience. In two of our stores, we are piloting AT&T lounges where students can study, relax and interact with AT&T products. In August, we also launched an initial 10 UO on Campus concept shops in partnership with Urban Outfitters. These shops offer students Urban Outfitters' home décor and trend products right in the center of the campus store.We are encouraged by the very positive response from students as we bring a highly relevant gen-z brand right to the heart of campus. As retailers and brands are findings ways to edge closer to college campuses, our location on campus work as a powerful media channel. With over 67 million annual visitors to our e-commerce site and foot traffic across our 777 physical campus stores, including students parent and alumni, we offer a way for brands to meaningfully connect with the college audience by leveraging our physical and digital footprint. We currently partner with over 50 brands in this capacity and continue to grow this unique area of our business.Moving to course materials. Course material sales were down 11% on a comp basis for the quarter, driven by trends we have seen in previous quarters, including lower enrollments, lower average selling prices and students buying fewer course materials. To mitigate these trends, we have put a strong focus on programs such as inclusive access, which drive penetration in sell through rates and benefit the BNED, publishers and the institutions we serve. Inclusive access models, including our BNC FirstDay platform, continue to increase in popularity as institutions looks for ways to drive affordability and access on their campuses. In fact, the number of institutions using BNC FirstDay has grown more than 60% in the past year and inclusive access revenue has increased 46% year-over-year.To ensure we are offering our current and future partners with strongest possible inclusive access platform, we recently announced a new exclusive agreement with our long-standing partner, VitalSource. Under the agreement, VitalSource's technology will power the BNC FirstDay inclusive access platform, bringing together VitalSource's advanced technology and BNC's unparalleled campus and publisher relationships. Transitioning our platform to VitalSource's state-of-the-art technology allows us to accelerate and optimize BNC FirstDay implementations and focus even more BNED resources on our core strength, providing exceptional service and support to students, faculty, academic leaders and administration.This agreement drives cost savings related to development and maintenance of our platform technology, and will enhance value for our partners by offering new functionality and expanded content offerings. We're very excited about this partnership and we look forward to driving BNC FirstDay adoptions at an accelerated rate as we begin this transition in the coming months.So the first quarter is a relatively low sales activity for BNED, we have used this time to make important progress in enhancing our offerings and strengthening our value for the students, faculty and institutions we serve. We're taking important steps to actively manage and restructure our cost elements in response to the changing industry environment, and we continue to allocate capital and manage our cost structure to maintain an acceptable level of short-term profitability and strong free cash flow. Entering the Fall Rush, we are confident in our ability to drive sales, while delivering the exceptional service we are known for.We continue to make important investments for the sustainable long-term growth of BNED and expect to begin recognizing the results of these investments throughout this year and into fiscal 2021. All of our team members have been working tirelessly to execute our initiatives to make both our current Fall Rush and BNED's future as successful as possible. We've asked much of our people and I would like to thank all of them for their continued hard work and dedication to the success of our company, as well as the success of the students, faculty and institutions we serve.I'll now turn it over to Tom for the financial review.