Operator
Operator
Good morning. My name is Jessa, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to The New York Times Company First Quarter 2016 Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. Mr. Harlan Toplitzky, Executive Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, you may begin your conference. Harlan Toplitzky - Executive Director of Financial Planning & Analysis: Thank you and welcome to The New York Times Company's first quarter 2016 earnings conference call. On the call today, we have Mark Thompson, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jim Follo, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Meredith Kopit Levien, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that management will make forward-looking statements during the course of this call and our actual results could differ materially. Some of the risks and uncertainties that could impact our business are included in our 2015 10-K. In addition, our presentation will include non-GAAP financial measures and we have provided reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our website, at investors.nytco.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Mark Thompson. Mark J. T. Thompson - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Harlan, and good morning, everyone. 2016 is the first year of implementation of our path forward, our new strategic direction for The New York Times Company. As you know, the plan calls for the doubling of our digital revenue. To achieve that, we need to more than double our audience to deepen their engagement and to innovate and develop our digital advertising and subscription models while running our cash-generative print platforms effectively and managing cost tightly across the whole Company. Our big themes are innovation and creativity in storytelling and user experience backed by continued investment in great journalism, audience and digital subscription growth, driven by better use of data and clearer offers and customer journeys. Innovation in digital advertising, where we're seeing great success with branded content and smartphone. International, where we made some important recent announcements and tough mindedness about costs everywhere. The first quarter of 2016 saw all of these themes playing out in the real world. Our audience grew strongly at 113 million unique users in March, our global audience was the largest ever recorded for The Times. The balance of our audience is shifting too. According to comScore, we had 31 million U.S. Millennials consuming Times' journalism on digital in March, 11 million more than the March in the year previous. Audience engagement is growing steadily as well. It's not surprising, then, that this was a very strong quarter for our digital subscription business. We added 67,000 net new digital subscriptions to our news products, the highest number of quarterly adds, since Q4 2012, and a real achievement is our pay model reaches its fifth anniversary. The rate at which we're adding subscriptions is continuing to accelerate. Revenue for our digital news subscription business grew 13% year-over-year. Perhaps this is a good moment to celebrate our other digital subscription business, which is The Times Crossword product. This separate subscription count reached 196,000 in the quarter and since then has succeeded 200,000. Revenue from this business is of course much smaller than for the core, the quarterly total went past $2 million for the first time in Q1. But at 59% growth year-over-year, it too is building strongly. From now on, we will disclose both the separate subscription counts and revenue figures for news and Crossword and the combined totals. The combined digital-only subscription total for the quarter therefore was1,357,000 digital-only subscriptions. We expect this combined number to exceed 1.5 million by year's end. Digital advertising was a more uneven story. Our headline result of roughly flat was a blend of continued success with smartphone, branded content and programmatic. Smartphone, for instance, more than doubled compared to Q1 2015, with pressure on web homepage and other web display. We remain bullish about our strategy, however, and believe that our timely pivot from traditional digital advertising towards branded content and marketing services, video and more seamlessly integrated ad formats on both mobile and desktop will deliver growth in the second half of 2016. Late in the quarter, we bought HelloSociety, a social influencer network and the Company's first acquisition in eight years to add another element to the growing suite of content creation and distribution capabilities we can offer advertisers. Print advertising continues to experience strong secular headwinds and was down 9% in the quarter. Print circulation was down just under 1% year-over-year, though total circulation was up because of success on the digital side. Revenues for the Company as a whole were down 1% for the quarter, while adjusted operating profit was $52 million, down 13% compared to the same quarter last year due to the advertising revenue weakness and the initial impact of investments associated with our path forward. On that topic, during the quarter, we announced our intention to invest more than $50 million over the next three years on exploiting the international digital potential of The New York Times. We've also announced the significant reorganization of the editing and preparation of the International New York Times, our global physical newspaper, to ensure its continued contribution. These two announcements, demonstrating our willingness to invest substantially in digital growth, while applying rigor and realism to the economics of our mature print platforms, illustrate the approach we're taking everywhere. As I noted in our last earnings call, we are fully committed to restoring the Company to adjusted operating profit beyond 2016 and believe that we'll achieve that through a combination of growing digital revenue and a continued focus on costs. We believe there is considerable scope for further savings in the Company and we'll be going after it in the coming months. Encouraging and accelerating progress on digital subscriptions, exciting developments, but more to do on digital advertising, our commitment, not just to build digital revenue, but to manage our cost to defend and grow profitability, those are my headlines this morning, and now, over to Jim. James M. Follo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Thanks, Mark, and good morning, everyone. As Mark said, the first quarter reflects solid digital subscriber growth, but a challenging advertising environment in both print and digital. Adjusted operating profit declined 13% in the quarter to $52 million, while adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.10 in the first quarter compared to $0.11 in the prior year. We reported GAAP operating profit of $28 million compared to an operating loss of $11 million for the same period in 2015. Overall, revenues were down 1% in the quarter with weakness in advertising offsetting circulation and other revenue growth. Circulation revenues increased approximately 2% in the quarter with digital-only subscription revenue growth more than offsetting print declines. As Mark mentioned, beginning this quarter, we've begun to report digital subscription revenues from our Crossword product within circulation revenues. Previously, this revenue was recorded in other revenues. With this change, total digital-only subscription revenue accounted for 14% – grew 14% from the same quarter in 2015, to approximately $54 million. On the print circulation side, revenues were down 1% driven by lower single copy revenues. We again implemented a home-delivery price increase at the beginning of 2016, had a rate similar to recent annual increases, and we benefited from this, although higher revenue associated with the new rates were outweighed by overall print volume declines. Advertising revenues were down 7% in the quarter, with print advertising declining 9%, and digital revenue declining 1%. As Mark noted earlier, digital advertising reflected the changing mix of advertising that we've been experiencing over the past several quarters. In the quarter, we saw strong growth in mobile and creative services revenue, while traditional web display advertising was weak. Mobile revenues continue to grow at a rapid rate versus 2015, and now represent approximately 21% of total digital advertising revenues. We did record a small amount of digital advertising revenue in the quarter from our March acquisition of HelloSociety. The lower print advertising revenue was due to declines in The New York Times, while we experienced growth in the International New York Times. In The New York Times, luxury, technology and telecom, and media categories all performed well in the quarter, while entertainment and the financial categories were particularly weak. The growth in the International New York Times was driven mainly by an increase in the luxury category. As usual, we experienced significant month-to-month volatility in advertising revenues, as illustrated by the fact that overall advertising was down 1% in January, down 18% in February and down 1% in March. Both print and digital experienced this volatility. And finally on the revenue side, other revenues are up 1% in the quarter with NYT Live driving that growth. Operating costs remained relatively flat in the quarter, while adjusted operating costs increased 1%. The increase in adjusted operating costs was mainly due to higher spending in advertising, technology and newsroom, which were substantially offset by print production and distribution efficiencies. Non-operating retirement costs were lower, while severance and depreciation and amortization increased. Our focus on reducing legacy costs remains a top priority, while at the same time we'll continue to invest in growing our digital revenue. We continue to focus efforts on our cost structure and while we expect to experience increase in operating costs in 2016, we will begin to make reductions to our structural cost base thereafter. As I said, non-operating retirement costs were down in the quarter to $5 million from $9 million in the prior year, due to a change in the methodology of calculating the discount rate applied to retirement costs. In the quarter, we incurred a loss of $41 million or $20 million after-tax and net of non-controlling interest. This loss resulted from a decision to shut down a paper mill operated by Madison Paper Industries, in which the company has a 40% interest. This loss resulted from severance and other costs recorded in the first quarter by Madison Paper, of which we have recorded our proportionate share. We currently believe that Madison Paper has sufficient existing assets to settle all its obligations when taking into account proceeds from the expected sale of Madison Paper assets, which we anticipate to take place later in the year. Accordingly, we do not expect that we will be required to use any of our cash in the wind down of this investment. Moving to the balance sheet, our cash and marketable securities balance was $874 million at the end of the year – at the end of the quarter, and our debt and capital lease obligations were approximate $432 million. The HelloSociety acquisition was completed late in the quarter with a purchase price of approximately $12 million. The company has repurchased approximately 6.5 million Class A shares for $86 million to-date under our previously-announced $101 million share repurchase authorization. And now let me conclude with our outlook for the second quarter of 2016. Circulation revenues are expected to increase at a rate similar to the first quarter trend, driven by the benefit of our digital subscription revenue growth, partially offset by lower print circulation revenues, despite the impact of the home delivery price increase. We expect approximately 45,000 and 50,000 net digital subscription additions to our news product and approximately 10 million to 15 million net digital subscription additions to our Crossword product. Mark J. T. Thompson - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thousand, we should say. James M. Follo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: 10,000 to 15,000, all right. Overall advertising revenues were currently – are currently expected decrease at a rate similar to that in the first quarter, with digital advertising revenue expected to be about flat. Other revenues are expected to increase about 10%. And second quarter adjusted operating costs are expected to increase in the low-single digits, while operating costs are expected to increase in the mid-single digits, as we expect to record a restructuring charge of $15 million in the quarter related to the proposed streamlining of our international print operations. And finally, we expect non-operating retirement cost to be approximately $5 million in the second quarter. And with that, we'd be happy to open up for questions.