Pearson plc (PSON) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Pearson's 2025 9-month Trading Update. [Operator Instructions]. And with that, I'll hand over to Omar.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our 2025 9-month trading update. I'm here in London with our CFO, Sally Johnson. And as always, I appreciate your time and interest in Pearson's journey as we continue to renew this company by executing against the 3 key priorities that we set out at the start of the year. You'll have seen this morning's announcement already. So I'll just pick out a few points on our progress, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Firstly, on our financial performance. Sales growth accelerated to 4% in Q3, and I'm pleased with the broad-based execution across our teams that they're showing and in particular, the way that we're navigating the market headwinds that I outlined at our interim results. When we look at the business units, Virtual Learning delivered a really standout result in the back-to-school period with 17% sales growth, driven by excellent enrollment performance, reflecting improvements in our digital marketing approach, enrollment process and career offering. Assessment & Qualifications growth accelerated to 4% in Q3, with Pearson VUE returning to growth as expected, driven by new contract launches. These were offset in part by ongoing headwinds in federal hiring and spending that continues to affect PDRI. In Enterprise Learning & Skills, we continue to build our go-to-market for enterprise with growth accelerating in our Enterprise Solutions business and high-quality new customers coming on board. This is good progress, and I'll come back to it in just a minute. Higher Education delivered 2% growth in the 9-month period with a solid performance in core U.S. Higher Ed, which continues to deliver sustained growth. Q3 saw a decline due to challenging trading conditions in international Higher Ed and the transitioning period in our K-12 channel. And lastly, English Language Learning returned to growth in Q3, driven by the competitiveness and resilience of PTE despite difficult migration conditions in larger markets this year. Our Q3 performance is in line with our expectations, and we're on track for a stronger Q4, given the known business unit dynamics driving Assessments & Qualifications and English Language Learning in particular, alongside the excellent momentum in Virtual Learning. Naturally, visibility can vary across business units. First, we have a clear line of sight into virtual learning, where Q4 performance is primarily driven by academic year enrollments at the end of September, which are known to us. Second, within Pearson VUE, the customer landscape is certain and contracted, albeit volumes are forecast based on historical trends. So overall, visibility into Q4 is decent. And third, even in the businesses that are more content and software focused, we track detailed sales pipeline data to underpin our forecast. Taken all together, we therefore, have good confidence in a strong end to the year and delivering an annual result in line with market expectations. Our next priority for 2025 is to lead on the application of innovative technologies across our products and services. Since we last spoke, a lot has been written about the potential negative effects of AI on many sectors, including our own so I wanted to take a moment to address that. We are, of course, alert to the potential for disruptive forces, so I want to share with you how we think about this. We continue to invest to maintain the core strengths that distinguish us, including our brand, our very deep distribution and sales network, our broad and diversified scope and our leading expertise in assessment and verification. And as you know, we're renewing our products and services at pace with AI at the heart of the significant progress that we're making across the group. On this, I'm excited about the commercial opportunities new innovative technologies like AI bring to Pearson. Let me share 4 examples with you. Firstly, when AI is used effectively, it can personalize learning and deliver enhanced experiences and learning outcomes, in turn, driving demand for our products. We're seeing ever more tangible evidence of the benefits of using AI in our products, including our recent research that shows our AI study tools are meaningfully improving academic outcomes for our Connections Academy students. Our approach to leveraging innovative technologies is grounded in our data-backed learning science and our proprietary trusted IP, which are then deployed in the flow of study, which we believe is a special competitive advantage. Second, we're using AI to increase our speed to market. I've spoken to you before about the suite of content development tools available for our authoring and editorial teams that are powered by a range of leading LLMs. And these teams are now able to produce high-quality content in a fraction of the time, meaning we're able to shorten the product innovation cycle and expand our market presence faster and at a lower cost than before. A good example of this being in Brazil, where our team was able to localize 7,700 videos in a little over a month, facilitating a faster international rollout of our study prep tools. Thirdly, we are working with our hyperscaler partners on a set of products that leverage AI agents in combination with skilling and learning data sets to help employees learn in the flow of work, and you will hear more about these developments from us in the coming months. Finally, you'll recall that about 2/3 of Pearson's business is pure assessments, where we are literally the world leader. And here, we're seeing our customers engage more with our assessment products, as they recognize the growing importance of relevant verified skills in a world of increasing AI usage. Therefore, as you can see, we're evolving and renewing our businesses quickly to take advantage of these new technologies, which we believe will support long-term growth and provide increased resilience to the business. Before I pause for your questions, let me provide an update on our third priority for the year, growing our business across enterprise customers. Pearson VUE successfully launched a multiyear program with Salesforce, verifying in-demand skills across a diverse set of 80 exams. We were chosen for our global innovative exam delivery options that meet the needs of test takers around the world, and this deal extends our leadership in the technology vertical space. We've also continued to announce new wins delivered by our new enterprise sales teams, including a strategic partnership with Cognizant and a global strategic alliance with Deloitte to help enterprises implement AI-powered learning and build new AI capabilities. These updates build upon the momentum we've made throughout this year, and I want to take a moment to show examples of the range of services we're providing in this space. Firstly, with HCLTech, we will deploy curated Pearson learning paths in AI, cybersecurity, cloud and career success, both for their internal staff and their enterprise customers globally. Secondly, we're embedding our learning and assessment solutions into Cognizant's client programs across key growth markets, leveraging Cognizant's regional sales and delivery network to accelerate adoption across industries. And finally, in Saudi Arabia, Pearson has been chosen as a strategic vocational skilling partner for construction, leveraging our expertise in Vocational Training and English Language to support a PIF, the sovereign wealth fund led initiative to build a future-ready workforce in the Kingdom. I'm pleased with the steady progress our teams are making. It reinforces my confidence in our ability to capitalize on the large opportunity in this highly fragmented market, as we support enterprises to address their challenges in talent planning, sourcing and development. I look forward to updating you on our strategic progress with our full year results next year. And with that, Sally and I are pleased to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] First question goes to James Tate of Goldman Sachs.

It's James Tate from Goldman. So I've got 2 questions, please, and then a follow-up. I guess, firstly, please, could you just clarify the revenue model for the new contract wins in VUE or perhaps more generally the contracts in the industry for IT certification programs. Do you tend to receive any meaningful upfront implementation fees as part of the contract win? That's my first question. And then second, just to be clear, does get paid based on a per candidate fee, so revenues are directly correlated to candidate volumes? Or is there something else we should be thinking about here? And then I got a follow-up.

Okay. So the revenue model for VUE, in a lot of our businesses, we have a kind of 2-stage sales process. So the people that we call our customers are the people who we have a partnership with. So think about Microsoft in the technology space or the association of nurses in the nursing space, those sort of people. And they're our customer, and they give us the right to run that certification. And then the people who actually pay are the people who take the test or the people who go into our test center or who are online taking the test. And so the revenue model is effectively on a per candidate basis because it's the fee that they're paying for that particular test. So you'll know that from a kind of stats point of view, we share test volume. So the way of thinking of the kind of P times Q calculation for VUE is the volume for the candidate times the test charge for that test. And that can range quite a lot because you can have a very quick kind of half an hour certification. So I think, I don't know, U.K. driving theory test or you can have something like a medical exam, which is -- it can be over days, and that's an increased fee. In terms of the upfront piece, there isn't really an upfront fee at all. Part of the business -- but it's a quite small part of the business is where we actually provide kind of services around actually development of the exam. So I guess that will be slightly different to that volume-based piece. But predominantly, the business is about that volume and the per exam fee.

That's perfect. And I mean, James, I'm going to just add a couple of little points as well about why I like this business. So one is, obviously, we team with these organizations like the one Sally just mentioned, whether it's Microsoft or the Nursing Association to drive volume. So we collaborate with them on how they run promotions in their space. And so we have a lot of insight into those market dynamics, how they work. And the other thing I really love about what the VUE team are doing is they're making wins right now that we are totally aware of that we know are going to drive incremental revenue growth out into '26 and '27. So I love that forward visibility that, that business gives us as well. So thanks for your question.

And just the follow-up is, as you talked about -- you actually touched upon it there in terms of 2026. Should we expect that improved growth from the new contract wins that are ramping up through Q4, that should benefit the first 9 months or first 3 quarters of 2026 for Pearson VUE specifically. I appreciate you have some headwinds from PDRI, but also have easier comps from the contract pause for most of this year. So is it fair to say that you could grow high single digits for most of next year? Or is there something else I'm missing here?

Are we doing '26 guidance, Sally?

No, we are not, Omar. No, I'm not going to guide you on '26 now, James, that's a conversation for next year. But clearly, a good performance in Q4 is good for the future of this business. What we are guiding to in the medium term is mid-single-digit growth, and that's what we expect in the future.

Next question goes to Adam Berlin of UBS.

Maybe starting on Higher Ed. Can you -- first, I suppose there's a few questions there. So one is why -- what happened in international Higher Ed? It seems it's down like high double digits for the whole segment to be negative in the quarter. Can you just explain what happened there? And is that going to continue? And -- or is it just a difficult comp? Just anything you can explain there would be helpful. Second thing is your guidance does imply that the Higher Ed segment does improve in Q4 versus Q3. Can you just talk about if that's correct and what the drivers of that improvement in Higher Ed are? And then maybe I'll ask a third one on Higher Ed as well is, can you comment on what you think happened with adoption share into the -- into this selling season? Did you gain share as you were trying to do?

I take this. So in international, our business in the mature markets, so I think Canada, U.K., those sorts of markets, has been particularly challenging. And so you're right in the math that you quoted, Adam. Obviously, for international, that's on relatively small numbers compared to the segment. Strategically, we have shifted our strategy from those mature markets where we saw the fact that this was happening to emerging markets. and shifting the strategy to digital rather than print products using the digital products that we've been developing for the U.S. market, where you know now we're predominantly digital in terms of that business. And it's taken longer than we had hoped for that digital and emerging market strategy to make the difference in terms of what's been happening in the mature markets. We do see that, that will make a difference, that digital strategy. So next year, those digital products will be out across the important regions that we are looking at. We're not anticipating that the mature markets are going to become any easier, but that investment that we're making from a sales point of view in emerging markets should come through. In terms of the Higher Ed segment overall in Q4, yes, there will be a slight improvement to what we saw in Q3 in Q4. If I talk through what's happened in the other pieces outside of international, Higher Ed U.S. core has actually grown 2%. So that's another year of growth for Higher Ed U.S., which is great. That is actually 2 things that are happening in there. Good growth in our core business, offset by a decline in our K-12 business, which you'll remember has a transitionary year this year. At this point last year, we told you that we were bringing that sales team in-house. So the sales team that sell our products -- our Higher Ed products into the K-12 segment for things like AP. The reason for that is it's really strategically important for us, as we think about early careers to have our sales teams talking directly ourselves with those customers because they can also then sell our career and technical product. So that's why we did it. We knew that, that meant that this year would be a transitionary year because we've effectively hired a whole new sales team, who are coming up to speed with our product. And therefore, that's something that will be passed as we go into next year. From the Q4 point, K-12 is more of a Q3 from a phasing point of view. So K-12 doesn't impact Q4 so much, which is why you see a better performance for Higher Ed overall in Q4. And then adoption share, we don't have the data for yet so we'll talk about that at the full year.

I assume that means you don't have the enrollment data either?

No. And our understanding is these data sets are going to come out later this year than we're used to. So we're going to have to be patient.

The next question goes to Nick Dempsey of Barclays.

So first of all, on Virtual Learning, I mean, really strong growth there. Just the way this works, is there any reason why that strong growth shouldn't be broadly at that level through Q4, Q1 '26 and Q2 '26? Second question, in ELL Institutional, I think you were expecting decent-sized new contracts in LatAm in Q4. Do you now have the visibility on those coming in for sure? Or are you still -- is there any uncertainty on the timing of those? And the third question, how do you think about AI offerings like Gemini-guided learning and Claude for Education that we saw launched over the summer? Could there be opportunities for partnerships there? Or should we worry that these offerings could make textbooks less central to learning inside university courses?

Those are wonderful questions, Nick. Thank you very much. I'll take the first one. Sally, maybe you can pick up ELL and I'll come back to the AI one. So on Virtual Learning, as you know, Nick, what happened in the back-to-school season and particularly the enrollments that we kind of lock at the end of September, give you very good visibility for the school year. Now there are puts and takes because obviously, parents can choose to unenroll at some point in the year, and there may be some true-ups to do with state-based funding. But overall, we have really quite good visibility going forward. And so I think we feel very strong and good about virtual learning certainly going into Q4. ELL?

Yes, sure. So ELL and Institutional, in particular, will have a great Q4. That is I won't say predominantly, but a large part of that is in Latin America. And the way that we forecast and run this business from a sales point of view is we have a pipeline of things that we've got, of course, good visibility into at this stage of the year, and that's how we forecast for the quarter. So we're expecting a good quarter for Institutional.

Perfect. And then on what some of the AI labs are producing, I mean, I have to say that when we look at things like Gemini's learn mode, I mean, they're doing some great things. And we really like it. Our people are using it and leveraging it as well as part of our own tools. And I think, Nick, you can assume that we are deeply engaged in relevant conversations with the right companies to figure out business models and commercial approaches, but ultimately, solutions that really help learners into the future. So I feel good about the progress that we're seeing with those advances today.

The next question goes to Steve Liechti of Deutsche Numis.

Yes, I've got 3. First one, just in terms of the like-for-like numbers, I know you only go to one significant figure on your like-for-likes. But I'm just trying to sort of bring together your third quarter plus 4% against your 9-month figure of 2%, which is in line with the first half, 2%. It just seems a bit odd to me, given the third quarter is a relatively bigger quarter, but that didn't have an effect on the 9 months. Just any clarification you can give us there or one further decimal place would be helpful. And then second question, just clarify a bit on PDRI. I know it's a drag in this year, but you're saying it's going to extend into next year as well. Just any kind of quantification you can -- or help you can give there? And then the third question is on PTE, where I kind of had in my head that it was going to be down, and you're saying it's stronger given timings and stuff. Just clarification there and what you expect in the fourth quarter there, please?

Do you want to grab the first 2?

Yes, sure. So I'm not going to do numbers to one decimal place, but -- and don't question my math, the 4%, the 2% [indiscernible] right. But effectively, it is about decimal places. And it's a high 2% is the answer. And I hope when we did the math, it might even be 3%, but sometimes it doesn't work that way for you. And then for PDRI, it's been a really difficult year for PDRI this year with what has happened at a federal level. It's a fantastic business. And one of the things that we knew was an opportunity when we bought the business was what it could do in the enterprise space as well as in the federal space. So that's part of the things that they're concentrating on now is how that they -- we can use what they do in the recruitment assessment space across the wider Pearson business as well. So for example, they're working very closely with our TalentLens business, which is in ELS at the moment. And we're not anticipating given the kind of contract nature of that business, them having a big -- quick rebound next year. But strategically, we're pivoting to make sure that we're making the very best use of the assets that we've got in a fantastic business. And you wanted to take PTE...

Yes. On PTE, just very simply, Steve. So when we guided at the beginning of the year, obviously, we were alert to some of the migration discussions happening around the world. And so we wanted to be somewhat conservative. And also, we could see like the volumes were down in many of the big markets. Actually, the team have performed really well, including with the change in the nature of the test, for example, for Australia. And they've gone through that period with great results in the 9 months to date. And given that Sally has got great visibility into registrations for PTE in October and November as well, we felt that it was time to sort of say, okay, like this is going in a decent direction despite the market. And actually, we know that we're taking share. So that's what we're signaling.

We have no further audio questions. So I'll hand back to the team for any written questions.

So one question from Sami Kassab at BNP. Can you comment on the test prep business that you launched in April? Is it performing as expected?

Sami, I think my answer on the test prep business is it's a small thing at the moment. And what we're doing is we're pulling together different threads from across Pearson to say like we've got prep for language, prep for science, prep for workplace skills and pulling it together into a singular package. We launched something called the Pearson Skilling Suite, which is a sort of a software platform to help deliver some of that. And it's going to be an area that we will continue to invest and focus on. But in the scheme of Pearson today, it's a relatively small area. So it's not something that we're making too much of a fuss about.

No further questions.

Okay. Well, Sally, thank you. Team, thank you and for our investors and analysts on the line, thank you so much for your interest in Pearson. We appreciate you. We know you could be doing something else. So thanks for being with us.

Thank you. Have a great day.