Peter Warwick
Analyst · Sidoti. Please proceed
Thanks, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. In the second quarter, Scholastic Book Fairs and Clubs continue delivering the joy and excitement of books and reading to millions of kids, while our global children's publishing and entertainment teams moved ahead with exciting plans for this fiscal year and next. As we discussed at our earnings call in September, second quarter results came in lower than the prior year, primarily reflecting the timing of this year's publishing plan. During the back-to-school season, we pursued multiple opportunities to drive long-term growth in our core markets and expand beyond them with new models, channels and products, all leveraging Scholastic's trusted brand, iconic IP, global scale, and differentiated channels. We built upon Scholastic's unique capability to give kids access to engaging high-quality books year-after-year through our school reading events and education businesses. We advanced our strategy as a global children's media and content company through our trade and entertainment divisions, preparing best-selling books and award-winning media for distribution through our own channels as well as through third-party retailers, sellers and platforms. To support this growth, we successfully upsized our unsecured revolving credit facility to $400 million last month. With our strong balance sheet and history of robust free-cash flow conversion, we remain committed to investing in our future while returning excess cash to enhance shareholder returns. We've reaffirmed our fiscal 2025 guidance. This reflects our results in the first-half of the year and confidence in the outlook for the second-half. Haji and I will both discuss this further shortly. I'd like to start by discussing our market outlook and how after significant preparations over the past several years, Scholastic is positioned to navigate potential changes in U.S. policy as the administration changes. First, we're closely monitoring U.S. trade policy, including towards China, Mexico and Canada. With respect to our outlook for the second-half of fiscal 2025, we forecast little exposure, as we've already purchased almost all of our inventory needs. We similarly see little impact on our inventory costs in the first-half of fiscal 2026, given those purchases will be mostly sitting in our warehouses by early summer. Scholastic's global scale and highly optimized supply-chain has long provided substantial product cost advantages, especially for our school channels. The global pandemic four years ago presented an opportunity to diversify our supplier relationships and make sourcing processes more flexible. As a result, today, we're better able to mitigate and hedge against tariff, shipping, out-of-stock and other risks. Longer-term, we remain confident that our supply-chain team can mitigate exposure to potential tariffs just as they navigated the disruptions of the pandemic. Second, with respect to education policy, we're monitoring potential changes in legislation and funding. The vast majority of educational publisher sales occur at the state and local district level with money from a combination of funding from local, state and federal sources. Consequently, policy and funding trends at the state and local level are most relevant to students, families and classrooms and to our business. Among these trends, we remain focused on school choice and voucher programs, which are driving enrollment in charter, parochial and independent schools in many states. New educational savings account programs, which give families funds to pay for tuition, home schooling, enrichment and remediation activities in a growing number of states and the shift to science-based approaches to literacy instructions, which we've seen adopted across the country over the past two to three years. All three of these trends may accelerate over the next four years. We don't expect this to materially impact our outlook for fiscal 2025 or in the near-term. But over the longer-term, we believe Scholastic is uniquely positioned to meet the growing markets and needs created by these trends and to support families and kids wherever they are. Five ways we are doing this already are as follows. First, we're tapping into new sources of state, corporate and philanthropic funding, all independent of federal funding and policy to provide kids and families access to books and literacy. Second, we're designing new go-to-market strategies and offerings in our school reading events and education solutions divisions to serve charter, independent and parochial schools, where we have significant growth opportunities. Third, we're developing new supplemental instructional programs aligned with the science of reading and the growing nationwide consensus on how best to teach literacy. Fourth, we're testing new direct-to-family offerings to support parents and kids with reading and learning at home as we explore the larger direct-to-consumer opportunity for our brand and IP. And lastly, we continue to lean into the importance of literacy, something that people and politicians across the country can whole heartedly agree on, especially in the face of declining reading stores in the U.S. Enabling kids to read is something that Scholastic is uniquely known for. Indeed, it lies at the core of our purpose. With respect to the impact of these potential policy changes and others, we're confident in our ability to operate nimbly and navigate changes that may occur in the future. But we're also proactively taking steps to target cost actions and ensure our investments and resources are aligned with our growth priorities, which Haji will elaborate on further. With that, I'll turn to the highlights across our business segments. In the Children's Book Publishing and Distribution segment, execution was solid. However, results declined, primarily reflecting year-over-year timing factors in our Trade Publishing and School Reading events divisions. In School Reading events or SRE, schools booked the largest number of fall fairs since the pandemic and we remain on-track to achieve our target of 90,000 fairs in fiscal 2025. Looking ahead, the investments we're making in Book Fairs to grow our fair count and implement new merchandising and sales initiatives, as I have discussed on prior calls, are having a positive impact and should contribute to our performance this year and beyond, including modest growth in fiscal 2025. Also, within SRE, updated offerings in our school book clubs business drove higher student participation and revenue per sponsor. As the business continues to re-build a profitable core, we are re-engaging loyal customers and revitalizing this strategic channel to teachers and families. Turning to our Trade Publishing division within the Children's Books segment. Revenues were down in the second quarter, in-line with expectations based on this year's publishing schedule relative to a year-ago when we recorded strong sales of multiple new titles from major Scholastic authors and franchises. In quarter two, new Scholastic releases maintained our presence on best-seller lists. Top-selling titles last quarter included Christmas at Hogwarts by J.K. Rowling, which debuted number one on the New York Times Picture Book Bestseller list and held a spot for seven straight weeks. The Christmas Pig in paperback also by J.K. Rowling, which debuted number one on the New York Times Paperback Bestseller list. And the final title in Aaron Blabey's Bad Guys series, The Bad Guys in One Last Thing. New titles in our long-time bestselling global franchises, including the Harry Potter Interactive Edition, a Special Edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Hunger Games: Illustrated Edition, which was USA Today bestseller, they also performed strongly. Earlier this month, as we began our third quarter, Scholastic published the 13th book in Dav Pilkey's global bestselling series, Dog Man: Big Jim Begins, which instantly became the number-one bestselling book overall in the U.S. and Canada, beating out every other adult and children's title on sale and the number-one best-selling children's book in the U.K. and Australia. The global excitement behind Big Jim Begins is a testament to the prodigious creativity of Dav Pilkey, the unmatched editorial, marketing, sales, distribution and supply-chain expertise of Scholastic employees around the globe and the enduring power of a great story to engage and capture the imagination of kids of all ages. We're optimistic that the title's incredible popularity will also contribute to backlist sales as new readers discover earlier Dog Man titles and Dav's other series, Cat Kid Comic Club and Captain Underpants. The release of the Dog Man movie in January 2025 supported by extensive media and a worldwide author tour should also support excitement and the virtuous circle from page to screen and back to page. Looking ahead, we're excited about our spring publishing schedule, which includes the highly-anticipated fifth book in Suzanne Collins' worldwide bestselling Hunger Games series, Sunrise on the Reaping. Next March, the title will be released simultaneously in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and New Zealand. Turning to the Entertainment segment, revenue and adjusted EBITDA rose from the strategic acquisition of 9 Story Media Group in June, as we continued to make progress on our integration and a promising joint development and production slate of major projects. As we've discussed previously, after the glut of spending on content production from approximately 2020 to 2022, the major streaming platforms and studios pulled back on production budgets and delayed green lights for series, feature films and longer form content in general. This is temporarily slowed, but not stopped demand for production service work as well as green light for multiple promising projects on our shared development slate. Nevertheless, last quarter, we were able to go-to-market with a new Magic School Bus series for preschool, Mighty Explorers and updated Clifford animated series as well as others. These shows were met with great excitement among broadcasters and streamers. We also look-forward to the second season of the animated kids series Eva the Outlet based on the best-selling Scholastic book series Owl Diaries by Rebecca Elliott, premiering on Apple TV+ next month. The show was produced by Scholastic Entertainment with production services and animation by 9 Story. There's also great enthusiasm externally in the industry around the second season of our Goosebumps live action series airing on Disney+ on January 10th, 2025. Based upon R.L. Stine's worldwide best-selling Scholastic book series and co-produced by Scholastic Entertainment, this core Scholastic brand has significant upside for us. We continue to publish new titles in the franchise, including the first Goosebumps graphics title, The Haunted Mask, which debuted earlier this fall. We're especially proud that earlier this month, Scholastic Entertainment and 9 Story received a total of 16 Children's and Family Emmy nominations, including nine nominations for Goosebumps. These nominations bring well-deserved recognition to the high-quality and engaging content that our talented creators and teams create for children everywhere. YouTube continues to grow as the leading platform to reach kids with short-form content. To meet this demand, we're accelerating our digital-first production and development growth opportunities with multiple new projects-based on Scholastic IP. We also continue to expand our reach and monetization on YouTube and other advertising supported platforms, leveraging 9 Story's distribution capabilities. Last quarter, we added to our content available on digital platforms, including classic Scholastic franchises such as Goosebumps, which is driving increased viewership and revenues. In summary, we remain very optimistic about Scholastic's long-term opportunity to build and grow beloved Children's franchises on page and on-screen, supported by our integrated Scholastic Entertainment team, which is nimbly navigating a dynamic entertainment sector. Turning to Education Solutions. Second quarter sales declined year-over-year. This was in-line with the expectations we outlined on our last two earnings calls and reflected lower curriculum and book collection sales. Lower spending on supplemental curriculum products continues to be a headwind for this business. In anticipation of a recovery in supplemental curriculum spending in fiscal 2026, we continue to move forward with the development of updated and new literacy programs that leverage Scholastic's content and align with the shift to the science of reading. We're very excited about Explore ELA, a new digital supplemental research-based program for grade 6 through 8, that gives middle-school educators instant access to the highest-quality standards aligned content and instructional materials. With exciting units and more than 1,000 engaging text and multimedia resources, which leverage content from our classroom magazines, Explore ELA develops the knowledge and literacy students need to read grade level and increasingly complex texts. Also in final stages of development, the new Scholastic Knowledge Library is a small group solution that integrates knowledge acquisition with instruction in essential literacy skills to build strong readers in grades K through 5. The evidence-based program boosts vocabulary and knowledge to enable students to read complex text across disciplines with differentiated instruction for teachers to ensure all students can access grade level texts. Both programs will be in the market for the 2025-26 school year and are expected to contribute to next fiscal year results. We continue to be optimistic about our state and community literacy partner business in the second-half of fiscal 2025, driven by expanded participation in state-sponsored programs as our partners continue investing to improve kids access to books outside of school. Overall, we remain positive about the opportunity for Scholastic's uniquely differentiated education business, as we move forward with our investments in new products and partnerships, as I just discussed. In the International segment, revenues were in line with prior year. We continue to make progress optimizing the business to drive growth. Last quarter, we took steps to reorganize and re-align our international education portfolio to improve coordination and decision-making across our various growth markets. We've now consolidated our product and marketing teams, so we can better leverage our on-the-ground market knowledge and go-to-market capabilities. We continue to expect modest growth in major markets relative to fiscal 2024. As I laid out at the start of this year, Scholastic is focused on execution and achieving modest growth in fiscal 2025, as we navigate near-term headwinds in some of our markets. At the same time, we're continuing our investments to grow in our core and adjoining markets where favorable trends in Scholastic's brand, IP and channels present compelling opportunities. The appointment last quarter of Jeff Mathews as our first Chief Growth Officer is helping to accelerate these cross-company growth initiatives, as we prioritize three key areas. First, developing direct-to-consumer offerings and channels that leverage our brand and IP. Second, expanding our partnerships with public and private funders to increase kids and families access to books. And third, creating stories and characters that leverage Scholastic's unique editorial, book distribution and entertainment capabilities to engage more kids and create more valuable global franchises. We're already seeing more momentum in these areas and I look-forward to providing continued updates. And now, I'll turn the call over to Haji to review our fiscal 2025 second quarter results and outlook for the remainder of the year.