Barnes & Noble Education Inc (BNED) 2018 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the Barnes & Noble Education Second Quarter Earnings 2018 Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn our conference over to Mr. Thomas Donohue. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you, and welcome to our second quarter 2018 earnings call. Joining us today are Mike Huseby, Chairman and CEO; Patrick Maloney, Chief Operating Officer, Barnes & Noble Education and President of Barnes & Noble College; Barry Brover, our CFO; Kanuj Malhotra, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Chief Risk Officer of Digital Education; as well as other members of our senior management team.

Before we begin, I would remind you that the statements we will make on today's call are covered by our safe harbor disclaimer contained in our press release and public documents. The contents of this call are for the property of Barnes & Noble Education and are not for rebroadcast or use by any other party without prior written consent of Barnes & Noble Education.

During this call, we'll be making forward-looking statements with predictions, projections and other statements about future events. These statements are based upon current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including those contained in our press release and public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements that may be made or discussed during this call.

At this time, I'll turn the call over to Mike Huseby.

Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. The higher-education market continues to evolve rapidly. Enrollments, particularly at 2-year colleges, continue to decline and we're experiencing rapid competitive changes. This fall, we experienced lower average selling prices on course materials for the first time in many years, driven by lower publisher prices and continued student migration to lower-cost Courseware alternatives, including digital offerings. All sectors that serve the higher education industry have market-driven pressure to change and adapt business models. This reality applies to the businesses that BNED operates with necessary changes being of both a short-term and longer-term nature.

Each of our businesses, BN College, including LoudCloud's and Student Brands' digital services, MBS, with its wholesale MBS Direct virtual stores and MBS systems customer base, are all executing on plans to respond to these changes taking place in the markets we serve, including changes related to the following well-publicized challenges. There's an increasing emphasis on affordability and measurable achievement by our college partners, students, faculty and many state governmental agencies. All are demanding a higher value to cost ratio from providers of services and content. Declining enrollment trends, particularly at locally -- local and state-wide community colleges that have shown highly elastic negative demand correlated to very low unemployment rates in the U.S. An accelerating shift to digital and other less costly formats of developing and delivering educational content, including declining physical textbook volumes whether sold or rented, new or used, which we expect to continue to decline as a percentage of total learning formats used. For the first time, average sale prices, as mentioned, on educational units offered by publishers declined this past rush as the mix of formats resulted in overall lower pricing.

Importantly, though, despite these trends, we believe that the opportunity in our industry has never been greater for BNED. We're well positioned to capture new market share and collaborate with an increasing number of schools and strategic partners. Given these dynamics, we're focused on actively transforming our business, which means successfully pivoting from our historically total reliance on a traditional bookstore management model to become a leading aggregator and distributor of both physical and digital educational content within, and importantly, also outside of the footprint of managed stores that we have. We've significantly expanded our addressable market by executing a strategy of organic growth, acquisitions, strategic partnerships and continued innovation. Our goal remains to offer the most comprehensive suite of quality educational products and services to our existing and future customers.

Before moving on to segment results, I'd like to briefly highlight our consolidated results for the quarter.

BNED consolidated sales of $886.9 million increased 15.1% as compared to the prior year period. Year-to-date consolidated sales of $1,242.6 million increased 23% versus last year. Consolidated second quarter GAAP net income was $48.4 million compared to $29.3 million in the prior year period. And year-to-date GAAP net income was $13.6 million compared to $1.4 million in the prior year period. Consolidated second quarter non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $102.4 million, an increase of $32 million compared to the prior year period. And year-to-date non-GAAP adjusted EBIDTA was $70 million, an increase of $36.1 million versus last year.

Moving to our Q2 financial results and the business priorities we are focusing on in each of our 2 segments. In our Barnes & Noble College segment, second quarter 2018 sales were approximately $9 million less than last year and $2 million higher for the 6 months of this fiscal year compared with last year. This is in line with our guidance and our expectations. The comparable store sales decline was $33.8 million or a decline of 4.4%, primarily driven by lower textbook sales, which were down 5% on a comparable store basis. The lower textbook sales reflect decreasing enrollments, as mentioned, especially at community colleges, which we believe declined in the mid-single digits again this fall compared to last year as well as the increases -- increased competitive factors mentioned earlier.

Approximately 30% of our comparable textbook sales decline relates to lower average textbook prices. Clearly, students have prioritized buying course materials not only by price, but also by ease of access. The lower course -- the lower cost of course materials and expanded customization options affected the mix of learning materials sold and rented in the quarter. We saw large increases in the sale of digital textbooks and smaller decreases in the sale of new physical textbooks, while sales and rentals of used textbooks decreased dramatically.

General merchandise sales in Q2 decreased by $3.4 million or 1.9% on a comp store basis, while year-to-date GM comps increased by 0.1%. General merchandise sales accounted for approximately 25% of total sales for BNC for the quarter. GM sales in the second quarter are driven by traditional back-to-school categories like school supplies, computers and computer products. These categories continue to decline a bit faster than the general retail trend, offset by emblematic clothing and gift, which continued to grow.

In response to these trends, we continue to develop and expand our multichannel retail experience ensuring that our customers have access to our products in our stores and increasingly online through our school-branded e-commerce sites and mobile apps. Our web orders for the quarter continued to grow, increasing 4.4% over last year, representing approximately 30% of BNC's total sales for the quarter. This channel not only provides our students with ease of access they are demanding, but highlights the value of our physical locations as more than 60% of those orders are picked up in the stores. We continue to capture new customers and sales through our True Spirit athletic and alumni-focused websites.

We operate 85 True Spirit sites, which is approximately double the number we operated a year ago, including sites for Penn State, University of South Carolina, Georgetown and Liberty University. We expect to continue growing the number of True Spirit websites given their positive impact on sales for both us and our partners, with an additional 30 sites expected to launch in the coming year.

We believe BNC has extremely -- has an extremely important industry role as it relates to inclusive access programs, which we brand as first day. Inclusive access programs effectively address the needs of students, the institutions and the publishers by providing authentic course materials to the whole class in a digital format at a discounted rate charged through the student's tuition on the first day of class. We have been investing in the systems necessary to integrate, aggregate and distribute publisher and other digital content and transact commerce through our payment system. We'll be live on campuses including Penn State, Texas Tech, FIU and USF in January of 2018 ready for the spring rush with the complete roll-out next fall. We expect to double the amount of first-day adoptions and using our scalability expect to substantially increase the sell-through of content by us and our publishing partners in a manner that is consistent with the students being benefited at the same time.

As we continue to roll our first day initiatives, we are continuing to re-enforce our contractual exclusivity with our school partners by enforcing our rights as a sole provider of course materials on those campuses that have such contractual rights. Approximately 90% of our contracts provide for such exclusivity rights.

The strength of our brands and our footprint enables us to reach our core college demographic, making BNED a strong partner of choice for many brand marketers. As we improve our sophistication and understanding behaviors and preferences of our customers through the data we collect, we continue to refine and better target our own marketing and are also better able to assist our brand partners in reaching their audiences with high-value offers.

This fall, we are excited to partner with Target on their back-to-school strategy. Our marketing partnership, which kicked off in the fourth quarter of 2017, leverages our unique access to students and parents to promote Target's college essentials to our college campuses across the country. We and Target are pleased with the results, so we have renewed the partnership for next fall. We also continue to pursue other new marketing partnerships with brands seeking to engage the college consumer and look to increase the value of renewals on other current partnerships that we have as well.

Just last week, we announced a very key strategic partnership with The Princeton Review. This demonstrates our commitment to building a comprehensive ecosystem of high-quality services that will support students throughout their academic journey. This partnership will enable us to offer The Princeton Review's test prep products and services to our network of more than 6 million students. As our partnership grows, we look forward to offering even more services that will support our students as they progress through their education.

We believe that providing our students with these enhanced services to empower them to accomplish their academic and career goals will be an important competitive differentiator for BNED and help position us for continued growth.

As we move forward, we'll continue to explore relationships with companies that enhance our educational services or distribution platforms or those that create compelling content offerings for our partners and our students.

Regarding Student Brands and our digital services, we continue to compete and win in a marketplace for our core bookstore business, while we also continue to grow those digital offerings. We have gained significant momentum in OER Courseware adoptions with a number of institutional clients, including community colleges, 4-year public universities and 4-year private universities. This past fall, we offered 10 OER courses serving more than 13,000 students. We also recently announced key strategic initiatives for our digital business as we continue to execute on our direct-to-student model and plans.

Our August acquisition of Student Brands gave us our first direct-to-student sales channel, expanding our digital footprint to include Student Brands' 20 million unique monthly visitors. As a leading direct-to-student subscription-based writing skills service business, Student Brands contributed $4.5 million of revenue and $2.4 million of adjusted EBITDA to BNC in its first full quarter of integration. Importantly, Student Brands brings us strong technology and business talent to help build our direct-to-student product base and new digital services.

Another exciting strategic initiative underway is the partnership with Portland State University to co-develop a degree planning solution. PSU is an active participant and leader in the Frontier Set convened by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with partnership from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and others. This agreement with PSU further broadens our suite of analytic solutions while allowing us to serve customers outside of BNC's historical managed stores footprint. Under this partnership, PSU and BNED will be able to help more students graduate on time, with better pathways to employment and provide longer-term planning tools to universities.

Looking ahead, we're to focus on providing an unmatched retail and digital learning experience by optimizing our physical and digital assets, together and separately.

Regarding MBS. Their total sales for the quarter were $134.9 million with $47.5 million attributable to MBS wholesale and $87.4 million attributable to MBS Direct. We're very pleased with the progress we have made integrating MBS and the business performance has met our expectations. MBS has significantly expanded our footprint, which now includes 6 million students served by nearly 1,500 physical and virtual stores and it's enhanced our financial flexibility and improved efficiency across the organization at the same time. We've integrated MBS and BNC's marketing teams that are pitching to prospective schools as one offering not only for virtual solutions through MBS Direct, but hybrid solutions with BNC operating in physical locations and MBS Direct fulfilling the course curriculum needs.

During the second quarter, we continued to realize synergies from inventory optimization, transferring underutilized inventory from BNC to MBS, which was unable to sell a large portion of that inventory. We also continue to benefit from the supply cost management and optimized textbook sourcing that MBS provides and increased efforts to monetize both our MBS and Student Brands' customer bases through brand partnerships.

Our key members in all of our businesses are relationship and service driven and they know their customers. They are adapting to changing service models that incorporate a higher percentage of digital services and products into our institutional offerings. We understand that our cost structure will need to adapt as our business does, but we'll endeavor to make our current talented workforce part of that change by empowering them as change agents in their respective college communities whether physical or virtual.

We believe that campus bookstores will continue to have an important role as a community hub and student service center for the foreseeable future, and it is our job as senior leadership to work closely with all of our customer-facing team members to constantly adapt to the changes in our business offerings and model. As we head to all-inclusive models that should have much higher sell-through for us, we need to leverage that increased penetration across our various offerings for the benefit of our college partners, students, our publishing partners and our company.

Before I turn the call over to Barry, I'd like to note that we greatly value the feedback we have received from the investment community around how we report. We're committed to continually improving and engaging with our shareholders and responding to your feedback. As always, we appreciate your continued support.

In closing, we continue to be energized by all of our team members working not just within each of their own business units, but also across all of our businesses together, to create and deliver what our customers are demanding: affordable and high-quality integrated educational services and content that will result in improved student and partner experiences and outcomes. We're strengthening our core business, while developing new ones such as direct-to-student digital services that will allow us to offer services outside our managed stores footprint, with margins that, when scaled, are much higher than our historical business. We're focused on executing our strategy for change to drive results and build long-term value.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Barry for the financial review. Thank you.

Thank you, Mike. Please note that the second quarter ended on October 28, 2017, and consisted of 13 weeks. All comparisons will be to the second quarter of fiscal 2017, which excludes MBS and Student Brands, both of which were acquired after last year's second quarter.

Total sales for the quarter were $886.9 million, compared with $770.7 million from the prior year. The increase of $116.2 million or 15.1% was primarily driven by revenue of $134.9 million from the MBS segment, partially offset by an $8.9 million decrease at the BNC segment, and intercompany sales eliminations of $9.8 million.

The sales at BNC decreased as the comparable store sales decline of $33.8 million exceeded the sales increase related to net new stores of $21.1 million and the increases of service revenue, which includes Student Brands revenue of $4.5 million.

Our service revenue includes high margin revenue from Student Brands, income from brand partnerships such as Target, along with Promoversity and LoudCloud. All of these allow us to derive new sources of revenue in and out of our footprints and further monetize our customer base, a strategic priority of the company, as Mike had mentioned.

Comparable store sales declined by 4.4% as compared to a decline of 3.2% in the prior year period. Comparable store sales were impacted by lower student enrollment, specifically in 2-year community colleges, increased consumer purchases directly from the publishers and other online providers, and other more general negative retail trends.

Textbook sales for the second quarter declined 5% compared to a prior year decline of 3.7%, impacted by the items previously mentioned and by lower average selling prices of course materials driven by lower publisher prices resulting from a shift to lower cost and more affordable solutions, including digital.

Sales for MBS in the second quarter were $134.9 million and in line with expectations. The second quarter is the highest sales quarter at MBS Direct due to the back-to-school sales for the higher ed accounts, while wholesale is primarily filling late orders for college bookstores.

Fiscal year-to-date sales at MBS were $274.9 million, compared with $302.6 million in the fiscal 2017 pro forma quarterly financials. The $27.9 million decline is in wholesale and primarily the result of a lower supply of bulk purchases of new textbooks from the 2 largest publishers, which has historically represented less than 10% of MBS wholesale supply and produces one of our lowest gross margins. MBS continues to expand existing sources of inventory as well as pursuing new sources of wholesale supply in order to replace the decreased supply from the publishers.

Our rental income for the quarter was $69 million, a decrease of $3.7 million or 5.9% as a result of more affordable publisher solutions, lower average selling prices and lower supply of used inventory in BNC stores as we continue to optimize the inventory between BNC and MBS.

Gross margins increased by 26.3% to $216.6 million or 24.4% of sales. The margin at BNC of 22.5% was 20 basis points higher than the previous period. The increase was primarily the result of including the high-margin Student Brands service revenue, higher rental margin rates and lower contract costs, partially offset by an unfavorable sales mix. The adjusted margin rate at MBS was 25.4%, excluding the incremental cost of sales related to the inventory step-up as part of the purchase accounting, which was fully amortized in the second quarter.

Selling and administrative expenses increased by $14 million or 13.9% due to the $15 million of expenses at MBS, including $1.7 million of expense allocation from BNC to MBS.

BNC's selling and administrative expenses decreased by $1 million or 1% to $100.1 million from $101.1 million. The decrease was primarily due to a $2.6 million decrease in comparable store payroll and operating expenses and $1.7 million of shared corporate overhead costs allocated to MBS. These decreases were partially offset by a $1.4 million increase in new store payroll and operating expenses net of closed stores as a result of a $21.1 million increase in net new store sales and a $1.9 million increase due to Student Brands and digital expenses. The intercompany elimination for sales and cost of sales are primarily related to the sales from MBS to BNC and wholesale commissions earned on textbooks sold to MBS from BNC. As expected, in the quarter, the gross profit elimination from the first quarter reversed and we realized $11.7 million of adjusted EBITDA as BNC sold through or returned the inventory purchased from MBS and on hand at the end of the first quarter.

The fiscal year-to-date adjusted EBITDA impact is $45,000. The fiscal second quarter net income of $48.1 million or $1.03 per diluted share compared with $29.3 million or $0.63 per diluted share in the prior year.

Due to the acquisition of MBS and Student Brands and their results, total adjusted EBITDA increased by $32 million to $102.4 million for the quarter compared to $70.4 million in the prior year. During the quarter, BNC contributed $71.6 million of adjusted EBITDA, while MBS contributed $19.2 million of adjusted EBITDA, and we received the $11.7 million benefit of the reversal of the gross profit elimination from the prior quarter.

Fiscal year-to-date BNC adjusted EBITDA was $34.7 million and increased by $0.8 million as the contribution of net new stores, the acquisition of Student Brands and the segment allocations to MBS exceeded the impact of the comp store sales decline. Fiscal year-to-date MBS adjusted EBITDA was $35.2 million and decreased $2.3 million as compared to the pro forma financials as the EBITDA impact of the lower sales and the BNC segment allocations exceeded the favorable margin and expense savings. The effective tax rate for the fiscal second quarter was 40.6% compared with 47.8% in the prior year. The lower tax rate compared with last year reflects the reduced impact of nondeductible expenses of our executive compensation program. The income tax provision for the current period also incorporates the reduced realization of deferred tax assets associated with divesting of certain equity awards.

Our cash balance at the end of the quarter was $17.5 million and we had $41.8 million in outstanding borrowings.

We remained out of the facility with no borrowings outstanding for approximately 7 weeks during the quarter. The lower cash and higher borrowings compared with last year are the results of the MBS and Student Brands acquisitions, and we expect the average debt to be approximately $150 million over the course of the year.

At the end of the fiscal second quarter, inventory increased by $114.2 million compared to the same period in fiscal 2017, primarily due to the inclusion of MBS, as BNC inventory decreased by $19.8 million as a result of continued improvements in purchasing and inventory management and BNC realizing the synergies related to inventory optimization by transferring underutilized inventory from BNC to MBS. Accounts payable was $19.1 million higher, also reflecting the inclusion of MBS. CapEx for the second quarter was $14.5 million compared with $11.3 million in the prior year. The increase of $3.2 million was primarily due to both new store contracts and renewals of existing stores as well as MBS. Cash flow from operating activities increased by $20.3 million due to our improvement in earnings, mostly as a result of our recent acquisitions.

Currently, our BNC store count is 777, opening 0 new stores and closing 4 in the quarter. We will be opening another 6 stores in fiscal 2018 based upon the new contracts signed to date, with an additional $18.3 million of annualized estimated sales, bringing the BNC total annualized new business to $70 million.

Our MBS Direct store count is 706, having signed 14 and closed 20 contracts during the fiscal year-to-date period. In addition, MBS has contracts to open an additional 4 stores, bringing the total to 18 new stores with estimated annual sales of $5.2 million.

Turning to our fiscal 2018 outlook. For fiscal 2018, the company expects sales at BNC to be relatively flat, while BNC comparable store sales are projected to decline in the low- to mid-single-digit percentage point range year-over-year.

In addition, the company expects consolidated sales to be in a range of $2.25 billion to $2.35 billion before intercompany eliminations. The company expects BNED's adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $105 million to $120 million. Capital expenditures are expected to be approximately $50 million, an increase from fiscal 2017 due to the new store growth at BNC.

With that, we will open the call for questions. Operator, please provide the instructions for those interested in asking a question.

(Operator Instructions) We will take our first question.

Great. This is Alex Fuhrman with Craig-Hallum. I wanted to ask about some of the partnerships that you've mentioned throughout the quarter, The Princeton Review partnership that was recently announced. Can you give us a sense of what exactly you'll be selling of The Princeton Review, as obviously they have a lot of physical materials, but certainly a lot of interesting services as well? Curious which exactly services you could be selling through your BNED stores and how that partnership could look. And then just more broadly thinking about the renewal of the Target partnership and just other efforts to leverage the really attractive position you guys are in physically on college campuses. Could there be a lot more kind of partnerships like this going forward, in which you leverage your student base? Or are these kind of the big, big ones for now?

Alex, it's Mike. Definitely, there could be more. I think that what we're trying to do and the objective of what we're trying to do and what we are doing is, we're building a suite of digital services so we can go direct-to-student. I'm talking to your first point and the first question at this right now. The Princeton Review is a highly respected source of test prep and other services. I'll let Kanuj Malhotra get into specifically what they are. But to be competitive, you have to either -- if you want to go direct-to-student and build a comprehensive product suite of services, you either have to built it yourself or you have to do a partnership. But we determined that we're going to do a combination of those. Student Brands was the first kind of step in going direct-to-students gave us great capabilities. And by adding different legs to the stool, we will end up with a comprehensive suite of digital services we can market, both across our footprint, as you point out, and then also outside of our footprint. I'll let Kanuj talk about The Princeton Review. He did this deal, worked hard on it and understands it intimately.

Alex, it's Kanuj. So, for -- in the test prep market, our thinking was that wasn't something we wanted to try to replicate. Just with the brand value and depth of experience that The Princeton Review had as a company, we felt that was something of a perfect opportunity for a partnership, and also a perfect opportunity from their perspective to access students with both our store base and our commerce base. So we think we can bring to bear a very unique and compelling value propositions jointly think of the things you can do to leverage in-store events for things like MCADs and GREs and different modalities online, whether it's synchronous or asynchronous learning. They are also a leader in the tutoring space. So we're talking and thinking through how to best integrate some of those services. We felt in conceiving those services and offering them to students, those were ones that we're ideally suited for partnership. So that's in a nutshell.

Now regarding the brand partnerships and the ability to do more and leverage, I'm going to -- Patrick's going to address that.

Alex, our partnership and offensive team was having ongoing conversations with numerous either current partners such as Target with the renewal, which they were so happy with the results that we produced jointly through the back-to-school rush that they've already renewed the relationship for another year. Our pipeline of new leads is very, very strong. We're getting a lot of coverage out in that market space. So we continue to grow this business. We see it as one of our key drivers in the future as we grow BNED into a multifaceted company.

Yes, I think one of the points to make about that too. And Joel's here, he runs our general merchandise business, but is that you see some of the -- there's a trade-off between some of these partnerships with what you do with a Target, for example, and some of the products like school supplies and those types of things that we sell inside the store. So we look at that in terms of its impact on our stores, where we offer it, where we can, I think, leverage a brand partnership the best versus how it might affect our business internally in our general merchandise business. So it's complementary, and we're not going to allow total access to all of our stores. We're going to do it in a way that's thoughtful and that balances the impact of the financial impacts as well as the strategic impact and the impact on each of our campuses that are important to us with a brand partnership versus doing it ourselves.

Great, that's very helpful. And then if I could switch gears and just ask a question about the accounting. I mean, it looks like the MBS intersegment elimination on the gross profit line from Q1 was more or less exactly reversed here in Q2. Is that basically the dynamic that we should expect to see going forward? Is that, whatever elimination you have in the first and third quarter, gets more or less equally reversed in the second and fourth quarter? And then, specifically just thinking Q2, I imagine it has the overwhelming majority of your fall rush incorporated within it. However, I'm sure you lose a little bit more of your spring rush into February, which is Q4. So is there anything about that kind of reversal that we saw between the first and second quarter that could look differently in the third and fourth quarter?

Alex, it's Barry. Yes, so as it relates to the elimination, as we had talked in Q1, during the first quarter, MBS' selling inventory to the BNC stores that at the end of Q1 the inventory is at a high point. During Q2, we sell through that inventory, and we'll return the unsold. So in essence, at the end of Q2, we have very little owned inventory from MBS in our stores. As we go into Q3, we will be buying inventory again in November and December, building that inventory. January, we will sell it down a bit. So the elimination will be less. As we move into the end of April and through Q4, again, we return unsold inventory. And the only inventory that we have on hand that came from MBS at the end of the fiscal year is a small amount of inventory that we've purchased for the summer season that we've essentially purchased in the last week or 2 of April. But otherwise the seasonality and the increase and decrease of the gross profit elimination, we would expect to be very consistent year-over-year.

(Operator Instructions) We'll move on to our next question.

It's Greg Pendy at Sidoti. I just wanted to, I guess, dive into -- correct me if I'm wrong, but are we cycling -- or all the stores right now, we're price matching this year versus maybe 50% last year? Is that correct?

Yes. This is Patrick, Greg. Yes, we are fully price matching at every one of our locations. And I think this is -- I think we were doing that also last year in the second half of the year. But it was the majority of our stores last year also, Greg.

Okay. And was that a factor in the gross margins? I know they were up 20 basis points and you called out some items. But did that have an offsetting impact at all?

It has a small impact on it, Greg, but what it's worth to us in the confidence of our student customers is far outweighed by any margin reduction. I think it was 40 basis points, Barry? So it was a very small amount to pay for the amount of goodwill and confidence that you generated amongst your core customer base.

Okay, that's helpful. And then I guess just one other question. This is probably the first time you guys have talked this much about the digital side of things. And I know in the past who had sort of a concentrated effort. Can you kind of speak to us just how LoudCloud plays into that market? And is there anything out there, is it may be the lowered price -- is it mainly price driven you think that's drawing people towards the digital offerings out there in the market that you're starting to see? It seems like it's accelerating a bit?

Well, I'll let Kanuj -- this is Mike, I'll let Kanuj answer that in more detail. But we -- it's important when you talk about digital to kind of define what you mean and even if it's in LoudCloud what their services are, Student Brands. Within LoudCloud you have an analytics-based product that, as we said during the prepared remarks, it's been adapted for different things that -- and we talked about Eastern Gateway, I think, last quarter. We talked about Portland State this quarter. There's a different -- there's a platform that LoudCloud's built that can be used to customize products for different needs institutionally. Within LoudCloud you also have OER products, which is content. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because it's important as you go to the inclusive access to realize that these digital projects can be folded into inclusive access product as well. We're working with our publishing partners, distributing their digital content and working hard to be part of their inclusive access integration and distribution. There are also things that we can do with LoudCloud's products in first day. But I'll let Kanju talk more directly to your question about what he is seeing in the market in terms of what -- where the demand is coming from, which is really your question.

Yes. I think for LoudCloud, especially on the OER content side and more broadly, as Mike referred to in his earlier comments, there's a general demand pull for more affordable solutions. So we look at it as a slot in LoudCloud products where there's need. So specifically in and around affordability and accessibility, there are some schools that OER is right for. Where those schools have shown an interest and it's right for and we've been very much in the mix and really getting some nice traction, especially our partnership in Eastern Gateway, that's driven that out very nicely. Otherwise, the broad need in and around analytics, which is less driven by affordability and price, but it's more solutions designed to improve outcomes and ultimately, retention. So we're seeing both strong demand for OER content Courseware as well as the analytics products and solutions, both the existing LoudSight, which is our retention solution, as well as one that's under development with Portland State. We're seeing a lot of clients showing interest in those as a broad suite of products, so.

If you think about affordability, one of the interesting things about what's going on at PSU that could be replicated elsewhere is the degree planning,. Many students don't graduate in 4 years. So if you think about affordability of textbooks and other forms of curriculum, well, if you're spending an extra year or a bit longer in school, because you haven't really focused in on the requirements or your major or how to get there as quickly as possible and do it in 4 years, I mean, there's a large affordability benefit in these products as well as benefits for outcome measurement. So it's all kind of coming together in these objectives in different ways. But it's very iterative in terms of what's going on in the market right now for digital. And I think, I'll give Kanuj, his team and everybody at the table a lot of credit, everybody in our stores. We have a lot of feedback on what -- and Lisa Malat has got 10,000 students every week that we talk to about what do you want? And we really listen and are trying to tailor our products to what will help both the students and the institutions. So, yes, there's an increased emphasis in this earnings call in digital, because digital is coming more rapidly than we've seen it in prior years and seasons, and we're right in the middle of it. We have work to do, but we're going to -- one of the reasons our EBITDA guidance range is as wide as it is, is because we want to make sure we have some flexibility to invest in the things we need to invest in to grow the company in the future as opposed to trying to hit an EBITDA number that may be within a couple of million dollars here or there that sacrifices our long-term growth and long-term value of the company. And that's a kind of a long-winded way of answering your question, or trying to. But, yes, you'll -- we'll start to figure out how to break out digital as we go forward and show more of the light on it. Obviously, it's important from a value perspective externally as well as internally.

(Operator Instructions) There appears to be no other questions at this time. At this time, I'd like to turn it back to Mr. Tom Donohue for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you. And thank you for joining today's call. Please note that our next scheduled financial release will be our fiscal 2018 third quarter earnings, which will be on or about March 6. Thank you. Have a good day.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect.