IDP Education Limited (IEL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the 2023 AGM of IDP Education Limited. My name is Peter Polson, and I'm the Chair of your company. It is now 10 a.m. and there is a quorum present, the meeting is now open. On behalf of the Board, I would like to welcome all shareholders, guests and other visitors attending in person or via our online platform. Shareholders participating in the AGM in person or through the online platform will have the opportunity to submit questions to the Board management and IDP's external auditors during the AGM. Details on how shareholders can participate are set out in the notice of meeting and online virtual AGM guide, which have been made available. Both documents are also available to view online and download at the bottom of your screen alongside the "Get a Voting Card" and "Ask a question" buttons. While we will endeavor to answer all questions today, if there are similar questions, we will answer one from the group. Also, if we run out of time, additional questions will be followed up after the meeting. I will now formally open the poll on all resolutions. All polls will remain open until the conclusion of today's meeting. As we move through the items of business, I will respond to questions from shareholders and proxy holders. I will take questions from the room first and then from the online platform. Joining me today, we have nonexecutive directors Michelle Tredenick; Ariane Barker; Professor Collins Stirling, Greg West; Chris Leptos; Tracey Horton and Andrew Barkla. We also have Tennealle O'Shannessy, our Chief Executive Officer; Murray Walton, our Chief Financial Officer; and Ashley Warmbrand, our Company Secretary and General Counsel, are all present. You can find copies of the Chair's and Chief Executive Officer's speeches on our website as they have been released to the ASX this morning. Once again, thank you for joining us here today at our AGM. As a company with operations in many countries around the world. We are always respectful of our local customs and traditions. I begin today by acknowledging the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung people, traditional custodians of the land on which we are meeting today and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Islander people who may be here today. The 2023 financial year was a very successful one for your company. In fact, it was a record year across all of our key operational and financial metrics. It was one in which we welcomed a new CEO and Managing Director Tennealle O'Shannessy. It was also a time during which the world continued to open up following the pandemic. Increasingly, we have seen our customers pursuing their lifelong aspirations to study and work abroad. In financial '23, we assisted more students and test takers than ever before. Our strong performance reflects our position as a leader in the international education services sector. We achieved record revenue of $982 million a 24% increase on financial year '22, driven primarily our student placement business. From a profitability perspective, we recorded $228 million in adjusted earnings before interest and tax this year, a 40% increase on financial year '22. Our adjusted net profit after tax reached $154 million, a new company record and 45% higher than previous year. As we declared total -- and we declared total dividends for the year of $0.41 per share, up 52% on the previous year. The business has a long track record of delivering strong earnings and generating strong free cash flow supported by balance sheet flexibility to fund disciplined reinvestment while delivering ongoing shareholder returns. We have a leading market position in large and structurally growing markets, where positive macro drivers continue to underpin long-term growth. There remains ongoing demand for international study and migration and a generally supportive policy environment. Our diversified business model across both business lines and geographies support sustainable performance through the cycle. We remain focused on executing a compelling strategy that is delivering results with an extensive runway for continued growth. Over the past 10 years, we've delivered 16% CAGR in revenue and a 22% CAGR for EBIT, a track record of strong, long-term growth. These results demonstrate that our strategy is compelling and that are executing against the strategy well. At IDP, we open doors to life-changing opportunities, helping people get into their ideal course, improve their English skills or learn English in our schools. We aim to transfer the global education services industry for our customers. Clients and teams. We pride ourselves on delivering exceptional experiences and providing fair and equitable access to our products and services. It is important to us that our operations have a positive impact on the people we do business with and the communities that we serve. We have been evolving our corporate responsibility activities for several years now. In the past 12 months, we've established a sustainability framework that integrates our strategy and actions across our network and addresses the most significant topics for our business, meeting stakeholder expectations and contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. IDP has made significant progress in its commitment to gender equality and was delighted to be recognized by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency as an Employer of Choice for Gender Equality in Australia. This citation recognizes employers who are committed to making positive, measurable improvements in this area. Furthermore, we are proud to be officially recognized as a Great Place to Work in Australia, India and Sri Lanka by the, Great Place to Work organization recognizing our outstanding workplace culture. Our strategy has been working for us, and it is one that we will continue to deliver against, under the leadership of IDP's new CEO and Managing Director, Tennealle O'Shannessy, this is Tennealle's first AGM for IDP, and I would like you to give her a warm welcome. As I said last year, Tennealle was chosen for this role to build on our vision and empower our global teams to help more people achieve their lifelong learning and career goals. Tennealle is an influential leader in global education with a proven track record of building successful digital businesses with a customer-centric approach. Tennealle has spent her first 8 months getting to know and understand IDP's business, meeting with key clients and stakeholders, customers, and of course, the IDP staff across the world. Before I hand Tennealle to take us through the company's operating performance, I would like to acknowledge the work of Murray Walton who acted as interim CEO between Andrew Barkla's departure as CEO; and Tennealle's commencement. Thank you, Murray, for expanding your responsibilities and leading the company during this period. During the year, Professor David Battersby decided to retire as a director. And on behalf of the Board, I would like to thank David for his contribution to IDP over a period of significant growth for the company. David's insight and experience in education was highly valued by the Board. Andrew Barkla joins us here today and is standing for election as a Director of the Board. We're very pleased that Andrew has agreed to join us and that we can continue to benefit from his wisdom and years of experience in international education. We would like to take this time to thank and acknowledge our teams for rising to the challenge and delivering on our commitments to make every opportunity a success at IDP. To our shareholders, we appreciate your ongoing commitment as we continue to transfer IDP into the world's leading provider of international education services. We still have many more ambitious goals to achieve, and we welcome your ongoing support. I'd now like to hand over Tennealle to address you.

Thank you, Peter. I'm delighted to be here today to share with you IDP's continued strong progress, executing on our corporate strategy. For the past 50 years, IDP has been committed to putting our customers first. At the heart of our approach lies a trusted human connection. Today, IDP is leading the transformation of our industry, leveraging our digital capabilities and unique data assets to enhance this human connection. This enables us to offer more tailored recommendations to fast track the student application process and to deliver a high-quality experience for test takers, all at an unmatched scale. We continue to execute strongly on this strategy, and it is delivering results. In FY '23, we helped enroll students into 84,600 courses, a 53% increase on FY '22. Australia remained our largest bucket with Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.A. all growing to their highest ever volumes. Even with our growing scale and volume, our customers are increasingly pleased with our service. This is reflected in an increase in our Net Promoter Score of 13 points over the past 4 years. IDP administered 1.93 million IELTS tests, a company record and a 1% increase on the previous year. Our English Language teaching schools in Cambodia and Vietnam conducted more than 94,000 courses, and we saw the revenue for our Digital Marketing and Events business line increased by 10%. Our highly trusted brands built over decades through local human connections is now powered by our global scale and digital capabilities to deliver an experience that is simply life changing for our customers. Looking now at the strategic pillars for each of our business lines. I'll start with IELTS. In IELTS, we are focused on building an unmatched physical and digital footprint and providing the widest choice of flexible test delay options. IDP now administers IELTS across more than 80 countries. We provide choice of paper-based computer-based and online formats of the test. In FY '23, we rolled out IELTS online, which is now available in more than 50 countries. In FY '23, we also continue to scale our IELTS by IDP app, delivering 815,000 downloads. We continue to build the credible most trusted brand, now recognized by over 11,500 organizations. We are leveraging our industry best brand awareness and are investing to build engagement and conversion through our strategic brand campaigns. IELTS is underpinned by a scalable and flexible technology platform. We are undertaking a complete modernization of the underlying technology infrastructure that supports both test creation and delivery. The new platform will enable us to deliver significant enhancements to our customer experience. We also continue to focus on customer-centric product innovation. An example of this is One Skill Retake, a new product that allows a candidate to retake one of the four skills where improvement is needed in just one area. This represents a very strong value proposition for candidates as they were able to retake a component of the test without jeopardizing their scores in the other three skills. Moving now to student placement. Our student placement strategy is focused on delivering differentiated customer experiences on an unmatched digital and physical scale. We're doing this by leveraging our unique customer insights and digital capabilities to create services that allow us to both delight our customers and to increase our productivity. In November, we completed the acquisition of Intake Education, expanding and strengthening our student placement operations in the African nations of Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. It also strengthened our presence in Taiwan, Thailand, India and the Philippines. In FY '23, we added 46 new student placement offices. We now have over 200 student placement offices in 35 countries. Secondly, we continue to build out the most comprehensive data set to international education globally. Today, we leverage data to power proprietary algorithms to drive realtime lead scoring and prioritization to improve conversion as well as next best action recommendations to enhance the productivity of our counselors. We also provide sophisticated course and content recommendations to enhance the experience for our students. Our comprehensive data set and our data science capabilities ensures we are well placed to exploit emerging technologies. We also continue to focus on driving productivity and efficiency to ensure our counselors can spend as much time as possible speaking with our students. And we are relentlessly focused on transforming the customer experience. A great example of this on the next slide is FastLane. We accelerated the scale-up of this service during the year with 4,200 courses live by June 30 and over 17,500 students receiving formal offers after using FastLane in FY '23. This was up from 3,000 in the prior year. The ability to provide realtime in-principle offers from leading institutions is transformative and provides unique value to both our students and clients. However, it's important to say here, we're just getting started, with a future pipeline of functionality planned as we build out our student placement ecosystem. An example of this is the acquisition of the Ambassador Platform in May of this year. a technology platform that aligns with our strategic vision to build out digital peer communities. This acquisition is just one of the many ways we are investing in new technologies and digital innovation to deliver beyond expectations and help students achieve global success. It's also another important point of difference that we can offer to our student customers and our university clients. Trust is at the heart of our relationships. It is our ambition to be the trusted partner that people want to work with and for. For over 50 years, we have been committed to putting students first by providing unbiased advice. At the heart of our approach lies the trusted relationship between our counselors, students and their families. I, too, would also like to extend my sincere thanks to our 6,800 global team members who work so passionately to provide excellent service to our customers. As the world reopens and global mobility is rebounding, new challenges and opportunities will arise. We at IDP are very confident that our people, customers and industry are ready to embrace these changes. I will now hand back to Peter.

Thank you, Tennealle. We will now turn to the formal business of today's meeting. The Notice of Meeting was sent to shareholders and a copy is available online on the ASX website. I would like to summarize the proxy and voting procedures for this meeting. Shareholders and proxy holders have the opportunity to consider and submit their vote on each resolution, up to the end of the meeting. Following discussion on each item, the proxy results will be displayed on the screen. Where undirected proxies have been given in favor of the chair, I will be voting those proxies in favor of all items. Please note, only shareholders and proxy holders may ask questions. Online questions will be required to be entered on the virtual meeting platform using the instructions on the platform or in the online meeting guide. All online questions will be moderated to ensure they are appropriate to be put to the meeting. We will now move on to the items of business as set out in the meeting. The first item of business is to receive the financial report for the year ended 30th of June 2023. Our auditor for 2023 financial year, Travis Simkin from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu is available to take questions relevant to the conduct of the audit and the preparation of content of the independent audit report. Please direct any questions that you have for our auditor through me. Are there any questions in the room? If not, I'll move to ask, are there any questions through the online platform?

Yes, Peter, there are some questions with the online platform. The first question, when Lachlan Murdoch announced that he wanted Tony Abbott to join the Fox Corp. Board, you review that the Board will be nominating for election at the AGM. Could the Chair explain why IDP didn't use this model as opposed to bringing in the CEO with a casual vacancy? Could this have waited another 4 weeks?

Just to say, we are delighted to have Andrew join the Board as a Nonexecutive Director. As part of Andrew's stepping down as CEO and MD a year ago, we indicated that Andrew would rejoin the Board after 12 months. This was formally approved by the Board at the September meeting last year. And we certainly felt that this process was totally appropriate for IDP.

Next question is around succession. When is Peter Polson planning to retire? And is the intention to appoint Andrew as a new Chair? And how is Andrew found serving as a Director since rejoining the Board?

The Board continually reviews the Board composition and succession planning. As you know, in 2022, we appointed two new directors and have appointed a new CEO this year. In this context, a stable chair is very important. As I've previously said, I will stay on as Chair of IDP as long as the Board and shareholders want me to stay.

The next question, how many attendees are there at the AGM in person and online?

I think 10 at the -- are present here, and I think 70 are online, if I can see the response.

That's correct.

That's correct.

The next question relates to universities. Now that the university is no longer control IDP, how are we managing our various university shareholders and how much of the business do we believe is still owned by the universities? Do we have special road shows and forums with universities? Or are they treated like regular institutional shareholders?

I can ask Tennealle to add to it. My understanding very clearly, they are treated like shareholders with the respect that we give to all shareholders, but many of the universities who are both shareholders and sit outside that sort of [ring] our clients of IDP, and we spend an enormous amount of time making sure that we have close communications with our clients and that we service them as well as we can. But Tennealle, you might want to just add a bit of color to that.

Peter, that was very well answered. I think from a shareholder perspective, we treat them in the same way we treat any other shareholder, but it is important to call out that our client services team work very closely with the universities in Australia really acting as a strategic partner to help them achieve their international student recruitment objectives. So we have a team that work with them in that capacity also.

The next question is around the capital raising in 2020. IDP announced a capital replacement at $10.65 in 2020, and then it lifted this to $225 million whilst retaining the cap on its subsequent share purchase plan at just $15 million. With the stock now at $22.31, do we agree that this placement unfairly dilutes nonparticipating shareholders, including universities and thousands of retail shareholders who didn't anticipate in the SPP or scale back? And do we support a make good discounted SPP for retail shareholders later this year?

Thanks, Ashley. The capital raising was undertaken at the peak of the pandemic and funding certainty was required. We were very early out of the blocks. The Board decided that it was very important that we had sufficient working capital to see through a very difficult environment. The capital was very -- the capital raising was very successful and secured the capital value for all shareholders from concerns about our liquidity and uncertainty. We are, therefore, comfortable with the structure and the outcome that we achieved for all shareholders. I think the circumstances at the time were quite difficult and I do believe that IDP made the right decision.