John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE:WLY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Brian Napack: Yeah, as we exit ’23 and ’24.

Christina Van Tassell: ’24 to ’25, yes.

Brian Napack: We’re going to be gaining speed…

Daniel Moore: ’24 to ’25, yeah, that makes sense. And you mentioned $100 million in cost savings over a three year period, I believe. Is that incremental to the 60 plus that we’ve been talking about or is that included in that?

Christina Van Tassell: It is incremental to the 60 that we’ve talked about previously. And that is our best thinking as we sit today. And it’s over — we’re doing our best to operationalize as much as we can. But as you know, with divestitures, you can’t really predict the timing. But we are going aggressively against our infrastructure, and we’re going to give you some updates as we get them next quarter and into Investor Day.

Brian Napack: Yeah, Dan. We have a broad program outlined to identify the opportunities that will result from the new focusing, the alignment and the slimming down of the organization. We — it will take us a little bit of time for us to work through it. But as we work toward our October Investor Day, we will get significant clarity on it and expect to be given much more clarity, not just on the program at the time, but on our growth and profit trajectories in the future. I misspoke a minute ago so I want to clarify it. I jumped into clarify, but I said the wrong thing. As we go through fiscal ’24, we will be gaining steam, as we go on our way to fiscal ’25. I said ’23, and that was just a miss.

Daniel Moore: No worries. That’s great. Last one for me. I appreciate the patience. And I understand this year is a very challenging year from a cash flow perspective or at least from a clarity perspective given all the moving pieces. But just thinking about the algorithm or the core. If the new base of adjusted net income is $130 million this year, backing into that based on your EPS guide, and hopefully, growing significantly thereafter as you just described, how do we think about free cash flow conversion kind of beyond ’24 and looking beyond divestments, your priorities for capital allocation? Is M&A still part of the mix or is it more likely to be internal investments and more aggressively returning cash to shareholders? I know there was a lot for the last question, but I appreciate it.

Brian Napack: You want to jump on it.

Christina Van Tassell: [indiscernible]

Brian Napack: Yeah. So look, our business, as we have decided to focus and prune, Wiley (ph) has — and you can see it, Dan, already, with just what we’ve shared. Our cash flow characteristics will be increasing, not decreasing. The business that we are in are more profitable. You can see it in our EBITDA, even though we’re not providing cash flow characteristics. So on a go-forward basis, our conversion should be significantly good in proportion to our — proportional to our revenue growth as we go forward. So I feel very good about it. We will most certainly — we most certainly be gaining steam as we go through this year and into next year. So as we think about capital and capital allocation, our priorities are clear. We’re focusing on our Research and Publishing businesses and in the knowledge solutions business, our platform businesses that support and extend those businesses and our market position.

In addition, we’re focusing on the vertical markets where we have strength and we’ll continue to invest in those. So with those as our priorities, we don’t expect to be particularly active this year. In fact, we’ll be extremely conscious this year from an acquisition perspective. But we will keep our eyes out and we would align our investments against those priorities as we go forward.