Operator
Operator
Good morning. My name is Carol, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to The New York Times Company Q2 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. I would now like to turn the call over to Harlan Toplitzky, Executive Director of Financial Planning and Analysis. Harlan Toplitzky - Executive Director of Financial Planning & Analysis: Thank you and welcome to The New York Times Company's second 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 turn the call over to Mark Thompson. Mark J. T. Thompson - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Harlan, and good morning, everyone. We have a thesis that in an unpredictable and sometimes frightening world that the demand for truly exceptional journalism, which helps people make sense of what's happening, will only grow and that more and more people will be prepared to pay for it. We plan to meet that demand not just by continuing to invest in world-class reporting, analysis, and contextualization, but by aggressively innovating in the way we sell our stories, especially through new forms of visual and multimedia journalism, and by rapidly pivoting our products and our business model to address fast changing user behavior and market conditions. Now all of these things played out in the second quarter 2016. First, it's been a truly extraordinary period for news. I want to pay tribute to our Newsroom and Editorial departments led by Executive Editor, Dean Baquet; and our new Editorial Page Editor, James Bennet, respectively. From the Orlando massacre to Brexit, Dallas to Nice to the conventions, they and their colleagues are producing amazing reports day after day, a report that we believe sets The Times apart from even our closest competitors. Everything we do is built on that excellence. In the quarter, consistent with where we believe consumption is moving, we increased our efforts to make our report more visual with video, virtual reality, and live interactive journalism. In the quarter, we produced our 12th and 13th virtual reality films, and have done more than 400 live streams using Facebook Live. This platform allows for two-way communication between our journalists and Facebook users, and helps increase audience engagement. Popular live streams have reigned from breaking news stories to beautiful nature scenes to a truly riveting crack-of-dawn discussion of Brexit from our media commentator, Jim Rutenberg, and yours truly. What each Facebook Live video has in common is an active involvement with our audience. And we're being recognized for our achievements. This year, The Times won two significant prizes at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. We won the mobile Grand Prix for our VR app. In presenting this award, the mobile jury president said our VR efforts were "transforming the industry." We also won the Entertainment Grand Prix that displays our first virtual reality film produced in collaboration with Vrse.works. The jury called this a "real business driver" that helped catapult the Grey Lady 100 years forward? Just a few days ago we learned that we've been nominated for no fewer than nine news and documentary Emmys for the great strides we're making in video. So how does all this play out in business results? Let me start with the digital story before turning to print and then to costs. It was an excellent quarter for audience growth, engagement and our digital subscription business. In the month of June we attracted no fewer than 126 million unique users with engagement amongst non-subscribers up 20% year-over-year. Those numbers helped us add 51,000 net paid digital-only subscriptions to our news products in the quarter. That compares with 33,000 in the same quarter last year. We also added 16,000 net paid subscriptions to our Crossword product. Combined at the end of the quarter, we have 1,424,000 digital-only subscriptions, an increase of more than 25% year-over-year. The acceleration in the number of digital subscriptions makes this not just a growing but an accelerating revenue stream. Our consumer marketing team has made great progress in understanding and optimizing our conversion funnel. But both they and we believe there is potential for significant further advances in the coming quarters. Digital advertising was somewhat lower than we expected for the quarter, down 7% compared to Q2 2015. We continue to see large year-over-year increases in smartphone, branded content and programmatic, but these were not enough to offset declines in web homepage and other traditional display advertising. In our last earnings call, however, we predicted a much stronger second half to 2016 in digital advertising and we're indeed already seeing a marked turnaround in July with strong year-over-year growth. We expect Q3 as a whole to show double-digit year-over-year growth in digital advertising, as well as in digital subscription revenue. As we noted in our last earnings call, our digital advertising business is becoming more lumpy. But we're also now seeing a series of large-scale programs roll out. And we're confident that our strategy, which is to replace standard desktop display with larger canvas, more integrated formats and a focus on smartphone, branded content, programmatic video, VR and other new forms of storytelling, is now paying off. We continue to face fairly tough market conditions in print advertising during the quarter. Although our visibility into September, the most important month in Q3, is limited, we do not expect these print advertising headwinds to moderate in the present quarter. But it's worth pointing out that print advertising only accounted for 23% of total revenue in Q2 2016. We are, in other words, far less reliant on it than we once were. And when we put digital and print advertising revenue together, the substantial gains we expect in the first means that despite continued pressure on the second, we expect a marked improvement in total advertising in Q3. Jim will spell that out when he gives his guidance shortly. Revenues for the company as a whole were down 3%, while our adjusted operating profit of $54 million represents a 15% decline compared to the same quarter last year. This decline is due in part to that advertising revenue weakness, which as I said, we expect to see moderate in Q3, and in part to the investments we're making in our international business in visual journalism and in our digital products to deliver our path forward the strategic roadmap we unveiled last fall. However, we are continuing to bear down on costs. During the quarter, we announced the voluntary buyout program and various other cost-saving initiatives are now also underway. We'll have more to say about them and other initiatives in future quarters. And, now, I'll turn it over to Jim for a more detailed financial review. James M. Follo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Thanks, Mark, and good morning everyone. As Mark said, the second quarter reflects solid digital subscriber growth but a challenging advertising environment, both in print and traditional digital. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.11 in the second quarter compared to $0.13 in the prior year. We reported GAAP operating profit of about $9 million compared to an operating profit of $38 million for the same period in 2015. Overall, revenues is down 3% in the quarter, with weakness in advertising offsetting circulation and other revenue growth. Total circulation revenues increased by approximately 3% in the quarter, with digital-only subscription revenue growing strongly, up 15% to $56 million. As a reminder, beginning in the first quarter of this year, we include revenues from both our core news product and our Crossword product within digital-only subscription revenues. On the print circulation side, revenues are down less than 1%, driven by lower single copy revenues. Home delivery revenues increased slightly in the quarter as the home delivery price increase in early 2016 more than offset volume declines. Total daily circulation declined 6% in the quarter, while Sunday circulation declined 4%. Total advertising revenues are down 12% in the quarter, with print advertising declining 14%, and digital ad revenue declining 7%. As Mark noted earlier, the digital advertising results reflect the changing mix of advertising that we have been experiencing over the last several quarters. In the second quarter, we saw a strong growth in mobile, programmatic and creative services revenue, while traditional Web display advertising was weak. Mobile revenues continued to grow at a rapid rate versus 2015 and represented approximately 22% of total digital advertising revenue in the quarter. We did record a full quarter of digital advertising revenue from our February acquisition of HelloSociety. However, its contribution was immaterial to the results in the quarter. Lower print advertising revenue was due to declines in both The New York Times and The International New York Times. For The New York Times, luxury, entertainment and retail categories were particularly weak, while luxury category was primarily responsible for the decline in The International New York Times. On a monthly basis, overall advertising revenues were down 13% in April, down 6% in May, and down 15% in June. And finally on the revenue side, other revenues were up 4% in the quarter largely driven by our NYT Live business. GAAP operating costs decrease 1% in the quarter, while adjusted operating costs remained relatively flat. We continue to keep a sharp focus on our cost base while investing where necessary to support growth. To that end, our print products and – our print production and distribution costs were lower in the quarter, while cost grew in both advertising and technology. Non-operating retirement costs were lower, while severance, and depreciation and amortization was slightly lower as well. Non-operating retirement costs, which exclude special items, 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. To reiterate Mark's comments, we continue to focus efforts on our cost structure. And while we expect to experience an increase in operating costs in the second half of 2016 due to targeted investments, we will begin to accelerate reductions to our structural cost base thereafter. In the quarter, we recorded two charges which have been excluded from our pro forma results. First, we incurred a $12 million charge in connection with the streamlining of our international print operations, principally in Paris. We expect to achieve savings related to this effort in the latter part of this year, but more fully in 2017. Most of this charge was for severance. Second, we recorded a $12 million charge for a partial withdrawal obligation under a multi-employer pension plan (12:43-13:04) $11 million. Moving to the balance sheet, we grew our cash and marketable security balance during the quarter and ended the quarter at $915 million with debt and capital lease obligations of $434 million. We have a debt maturity due in December. And at that time, we expect to use approximately $190 million of cash on hand to retire that obligation. Now let me conclude with our outlook for the third quarter of 2016. Circulation revenues are expected to increase at a rate similar to the second quarter trend, driven by the continued benefit of our digital subscription revenue growth, partially offset by slightly lower print circulation revenues. We expect approximately 55,000 to 60,000 net additional subscriptions to our digital news products and approximately 15,000 net additional subscriptions to our digital Crossword product. Overall, advertising revenues are expected to decrease in the mid-single digits with double-digit growth in digital advertising. As Mark mentioned, it's worth noting that our visibility into September print advertising is limited, which is not unusual at this point in the quarter. However, since September's print advertising revenues typically represented disproportionate amount of the third quarter's advertising revenue, any change to that month will likely have an outsized impact on the quarter. Other revenues are expected to increase in the mid to high single digits. And on the cost side, operating costs are expected to increase in the mid-single digits, which will include severance of approximately $11 million, which I just mentioned. And third quarter adjusted operating costs are expected to increase in the low to mid-single digits. And finally, we expect non-operating retirement cost to be approximately $5 million in the third quarter. And with that, we'd be happy to open it up for questions.