Nathaniel Davis
Analyst · First Analysis
Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on the call today. It's always great to have an earnings call when our business is doing so well. Every executive love to talk about their business when it's growing, exceeding expectations and when your future prospects are so attractive. And that's the case for our core Managed Public School results for this quarter. Our fiscal year '19 count date enrollment and our new initiatives such as career readiness line of business, STEM Premier and Modern Teacher are all doing well. We're well into the implementation and integration of our strategic expansion efforts. Along with expansion yet to come, our goal is to efficiently use our strong balance sheet to deliver consistent revenue and profitability growth for the long term. So with that as a backdrop, I'll focus the remainder of my remarks today. On our fiscal year 2019 count date enrollments as well as our financial guidance for the year. At the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2019, enrollments in our Managed Public Schools business, or you may hear me refer to it as MPS, reached 118,800, a 6.9% increase year-over-year. Now this is a third year in a row of increasing year-over-year gains in MPS enrollment. In addition, I'm really proud to highlight that this is the strongest enrollment growth we've posted in six years. In addition, we saw an increased interest in our career readiness initiative. After initial enrollment in our Managed Public Schools, over 5,000 students we moved into career readiness programs as well. The growth we're seeing in enrollments is the result of a number of factors. First, the number of families that we registered for another year in a program increased year-over-year. In fact, it was our highest rate of reregistering students in more than seven years of this internal measure. Second, lead volume for new families increased by 13% year-over-year. The marketing team used a higher mix of direct online digital tactic to drive increased awareness for our school partners. Importantly, growth isn't driven just by opening 1 or 2 new schools or new states. We saw enrollment growth in nearly 85% of the states in which we operate in fiscal year '19. And in fact, the majority of the schools we support posted enrollment gain. More than half the schools increased enrollment by more than 5%, we say that again, more than half of the schools increased enrollment by more than 5%. I'm happy to tell you, this is an across-the-board success. The net of this that are based it's strong and growing, and at the same time, interest of parents and students in career readiness is also increasing. Our career readiness effort is now being led by 25-year veteran of career education, Dr. Shaun McAlmont. His team includes a dedicated executive for partnerships, another dedicated executive for designing curriculum and content and another for marketing and business planning. And each of these individuals has been successful in implementing innovative models of educations for schools of businesses around the nation, or they've been -- had experience in building relationships with external commercial partners. Team is building a broad national footprint of career-readiness courses, pathways to job and partnerships with industry in a higher education. They're also overlaying project-based learning to help students prepare for the challenging workplace. Our curriculum would be built using both internally developed and best-in-class externally available content, including content created by corporate partnerships to meet the specific hiring needs. We will also include a variety of third-party partnerships that allow students to have a hands-on of virtual business experience in the form of internships and mentorships. While we are still at the early stage of the business, we're moving fast to be the leader in career education at the high school level with the ability to serve many adult learners as well. We're very excited about the initial results. In the near term, as in FY '20, our career readiness schools and programs should be driving a major portion of this year's students -- those year's student enrollment growth for K12 partner schools. Overall, our enrollment performance was a result of multi-faceted efforts that resulted in the highest enrollment growths for our partner school we've had in years. That said, we haven't forgotten about serving new states like Missouri, which passed legislation this year to allow online school options statewide. Overall, the potential for blended and online enrollment growth looks bright for many years to come. Now based on the strength of this enrollment performance, our revenue guidance for the year is $1 billion to $1.01 billion. This will be a revenue increase of between 9% and 10% year-over-year. Much like enrollment, this is the highest revenue growth we will deliver in the past six years. In addition to the strong enrollment performance, some of this revenue growth is coming from improved revenue per enrollment. We are anticipating a revenue per enrollment growth of 46%, and this is primarily a result of increased enrollment in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, as well as other variables. In other words, school mix is driving much of our increased revenue per enrollment. Now turning to our institutional business, FuelEd, we're leveraging the Modern Teacher investment. That investment will allow us to shift from being a content center to a trusted adviser. As a trusted adviser, we will connect school districts to digital learning tools that help students and teachers. I discussed a plan on the fourth quarter call, so I'm going to repeat all the same information. But as noted on that call, we will see revenues decline during this transition. Already included in the guidance for total K12 revenues, increasing by $82 million to $92 million is a decline of 12% to 15% in institutional revenues. While we are disappointed in the institutional performance, it does not change our long-term view of the prospects of this business. Turning to overall company profitability. Adjusted operating income is expected to be in the range of $56 million to $60 million. It's an increase of more than 20% year-over-year. This income improvement comes from both revenue growth and proactive management of our cost structure. That means evaluating expenses and expenditures and reallocating funds to our career readiness initiatives, and to continue to fund programs that address student academics, including teacher tools and training. I'd also like to highlight that we're working closely with our new partners, STEM Premier, integrating newer platform into our career readiness program and into other partnerships we established. This is unique opportunity for K12. Over the next few years, we expect the number of students with access to the STEM Premier platform to more than double. Therefore, you should look to us to continue to invest in the career readiness business in fiscal '20 and beyond. Now with all these investments and growth plans already factored into adjusted operating income, we expect free cash flow to grow about 20% year-over-year as well. That means we will be a -- in a strong position to invest in organic growth of our business while also having a balance sheet to allow us to pursue M&A opportunities. Now regarding capital expenditures. Our investment this year will be in the range of $47 million to $50 million. The possible increase in capital over FY '18 CapEx levels will primarily be to innovate our career-ready content and will be somewhat offset by less licensing fees for courses we currently source externally. On closing, I want to be clear that our number one mission is to help students reach their full potential to inspire teaching and personalized learning. We are proud of the achievements of our partner schools, but we fully recognize there is more work to be done to improve student outcomes. Every student is unique. Our job is to find ways to work with each student and personalize their experience to maximize their growth. As we look forward, we're keenly focused on building a company that will deliver revenue and earnings growth for the long term. That strategy includes in maintaining the strong financial performance of our Managed Public Schools, and now building a robust career readiness business as well. Coupled with improvements in FuelEd and more investments like what we did with STEM Premier and Modern Teacher, we will have transitioned from just managing public schools to becoming a diverse, stronger and growing education services company for the broad portfolio of assets, growing assets. Thank you so much for your time today. Now I'd like to hand the call over to James Rhyu our CFO, and President of Products and Technology. James?