WLYB

Wiley is past the worst of a multi-year revenue contraction ($2.08B in FY2022 down to $1.68B), and FY2026 is the year the decline stops: revenue was essentially flat (-0.1%) while the business got materially more profitable. Operating income rose 25% to $277M (16.5% margin), diluted EPS more than doubled to $4.16, and the MD&A backs the quality of that move — adjusted operating income +18%, adjusted EBITDA +10% to $440M, and adjusted EPS +15% to $4.19 at constant currency. The headline net-income jump (+163%) is flattered by a depressed prior year and the wind-down of the Held-for-Sale segment, but the adjusted figures show genuine operating leverage, not just an accounting bounce. ROE of 26.1% and $261M of operating cash flow against only $51M of capex (~$210M free cash) confirm this is a real cash machine, not a paper recovery.

The business is structurally better than the flat top line suggests: 85% of revenue is digital and 48% is recurring, anchored by peer-reviewed STM journals with high switching costs and a 78.5% gross margin. The emerging kicker is AI content licensing — $49.1M this year — where Wiley's proprietary, authoritative research corpus is exactly the scarce, clean training data that AI buyers need. Management is leaning in: the June 2026 Emerald Publishing acquisition ($452M, 480+ journals) extends Research scale and deepens that proprietary-content moat. Meanwhile capital return is generous and growing — $100M buybacks (+66%) shrinking the share count and $74.4M dividends (~3% yield) from a long-running dividend payer.