The New York Times Company (NYT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Jason Bazinet. I'm the Media and Entertainment Analyst here at Citi. And we're super happy to have Meredith Kopit Levien, who is the CEO of the New York Times. And this is the first time that you've been at this conference.

It is, and you pronounced my name right. So we're off to a very good start, and I'm delighted to be here.

I didn't even have to ask Anthony. So I want to start with maybe just a big picture question because you're on a super interesting journey, I think. But maybe we can just level set for those that maybe aren't in the weeds, and just give us a high-level overview of your strategy. What is the mission that you're on?

Very happy to do that. And I'd like to talk about our strategy because I think it's pretty simple. We are aiming to be the essential subscription for every curious person who wants to understand and engage with the world. And there are 3 pillars to how we're trying to go about that. The first one is to be the world's best news destination. The second one is to build and advance market-leading lifestyle products that help people make the most of their lives and passions. And the third pillar is to put those 2 ideas together in an interconnected product experience and bundle that makes the New York Times indispensable in the daily lives of tens of millions of people no matter what is going on in the world, in the news, and the sports calendar and so forth. And it's just -- it's worth saying that, that strategy is rounded in a handful of principles that we established. I've been with the company 11 years that we established, I want to say, going back close to a decade that still really matter and they are that we're a destination or a set of destinations, meaning, we're a place people actually go to and ask for by name. We are worthy of and in pursuit of direct relationships with our customers. We are a subscription business first that is so obvious now. It wasn't when we started this journey many years ago, and that actually powers and enables success in the other revenue streams and advertising and affiliate and licensing. And last, we are making journalism and digital products that are fundamentally worth paying for because of their breadth and depth and differential quality and value. And I would say all of that really feels like it's working. We're at 10.8 million subscribers, I think, as of the most recent public reporting that puts us well on the path to the next milestone of $15 million. We've got now 45% of our subscribers on the bundle, and that matters because those subscribers, they retain better, they engage more generally. And obviously, they pay more over time. We're really proving out that being in sports and games and recipes and shopping advice, funnels to the bundle and news and the whole thing. And we're engaging people. We actually said in the last earnings call that we had hit another sort of multiyear high for subscriber engagement. So that all feels like it's going really, really well. And I think most importantly, it's being expressed in the economics and in our financial performance. We are -- we said in the last call that we are well on our way to another year of healthy revenue growth and profit growth and margin expansion and healthy free cash flow.

That's great. Can I ask one clarifying question? On the engagement, the record levels of engagement. Do you measure that just simply is how many hours -- or is it more nuanced.

It's a great question. We look at a lot of things. But when we talk about it publicly, what we're talking about is the percent of subscribers who are on site on a weekly basis. So you have to be with us for us to consider you engage. And there are lots of intricacies that go with that, and we look at it differently in different products. But very broadly, when we say multiyear high, it means -- and that's important, even as our subscriber base grows, a higher percentage of them are on-site every week.

Okay. So as buy-siders sort of follow your journey as you execute on your strategy, I think that it's natural for them to sort of look at what is going on with your ARPUs and what is going on with subscribers, right? So can we just dig a little bit deeper on those 2 sort of prongs. So on the ARPU side, you guys, I think, is part of your tactics, not your strategy, you've done promotional pricing. And if I'm sitting there as an investor, and I'm trying to come up with a forecast 2 years, 3 years down the road of where can those ARPUs go given there's some promotional activity sort of happening on the boundary layer for those new customers coming in. What advice would you give to your audience?

Yes. Great, great question. Let me just explain pricing strategy. We talk about it as being value-based pricing. And the idea is we bring the vast majority of people into becoming a subscriber at a promotional price. That's true for the bundle. It's true for the non -- the other products, the stand-alone products. And as they engage more over time, we get them to step up to interim and full prices, and we have now been at this for like 4 or 5 years. We're very good at it. We have very sophisticated data science that helps us make a decision at the individual subscriber level based on their engagement, when do we ask you to go up and how much do we ask you to go up to. So that's -- and the reality is, just to think about it from the consumer's perspective, as they are realizing more value, they're willing to pay more because they're engaging more and they pay more. And that's really working. What we -- you asked, what should investors be tracking. But we have a lot of conviction around what we're aiming for, and we believe investors should be watching and have conviction around is that we can grow ARPU on a year-on-year basis modestly, but year-on-year over time. And I would say there are 3 things giving us real confidence in that this year. So right now, one is we have a very large number of cohorts this year who came in on a promotional price for the bundle and have to step up in price. That's just going really well. So that's one. Two, that level of engagement, as I said, is really, really high for subscribers, and that is a leading indicator of retention and willingness to pay more over time. And three, and this is the one that I feel like we don't talk about enough. The products are fundamentally -- every single one of our products is fundamentally getting more valuable over time. And so there's just more there, like take Games, more there, there are more Games, there are more things that are worth paying for, but that's true in every single product.

So when you say there's more there in terms of your product, you're just saying that there's just more content there because the investments that you've made in years...

These there are more games you can play. There is more coverage and more formats of more new stories and the features around all the things we do, news journalism, sports journalism, recipe, shopping, and wise games that features are getting better as we go. So we just launched -- if you play connections, we just launched something called the Connections Companion, which now will tell you how do you do relative to everybody else and how might you play better tomorrow, every bit of the product set has features on a regular basis, they're getting better.

It's very interesting. So I think it was in '22, I think that was the year when you really began to focus on bundles right?

Yes. We've been building towards that for a very long time, but we sort of made a public assertion. I think at the beginning of '22 -- losing track of my years, that we were -- that, that was a really important part of the strategy.

Okay. I think I had this right. When I look at your disclosures, your bundled ARPUs have generally been falling, but the single product services that you have like News have generally been rising. Can you just talk...

Early news.

Okay. Can you just talk a little bit about what is causing this dichotomy to occur in the...

I'd say that's all kind of what we expect to happen. That's the strategy working. So on the bundle, we decided some time ago now, let's call it, it started in '22, but a year ago that we would make the bundle the product that most people were directed to buy and make it compelling to most people to buy. So we brought the bundle to a promotional price. And that, of course, had a very positive effect on getting people to buy the bundle, but was fundamentally and strategically dilutive to ARPU on the bundle. I'll just remind you, bundle subscribers ultimately overtime pay the most, engage best, retain best. The opposite has happened in News, again by design. We actually -- this doesn't get talked about very much. We stopped marketing News only. So it's very difficult if you just want to buy News, very difficult to do that. We don't actively market it. And we haven't actively marketed, I want to say, for roughly a year now. And so what that means is if you are a News subscriber, 2 things are true, one, you're very likely to be tenured, which means you've been subject to some number of price increases. And two, you're not on the wrong notion. So that sort of explains the difference. And I would just say, if you think about that across all of our products, you can regard us as sort of having an always on what can we do to tilt people into it as a more rational choice to buy the bundle because that is the product where we can get them to engage best, which translates into retention and better monetization for[indiscernible].

All sounds very sophisticated and deliberate. It's good.

Yes. There's something of real value to having a long-term strategy grounded in long-term principles and having a team and executive team that's been together for a long time.

Yes. So can we shift now from pricing and talk more about marketing and gross -- so on the marketing funnel, you've talked a lot about the marketing funnel. You've noted you have 150 million registered users. And what is -- is it 15 million e-mail accounts? Is that...

So let me clarify on both of those 150 million registrations and growing -- talk about how they're growing. And the 15 million number is now actually 17 million, and it's not people who get e-mail from us. That number is far larger. It is people who open and read. 17 million people open and read a New York Times e-mail every week. So not who get it, much bigger number, but open and read. And the biggest one in all that is the Morning, and that is a giant number of people who every day read the Morning. And I'll just say on that 17 million, we don't have 17 million subscribers yet, one day, but we don't have them yet. So there are a lot of prospects building habit with The New York Times in that pool.

So how do -- I mean, can you just describe sort of what you -- as you talk about these numbers in these various buckets, what is the process that's sort of going on -- as you look at those as a percentage...

Yes, let me talk about registered users. So we launched like an official registration model for the times. I think in '18 or '19, so like 5 years ago, maybe 6. And the idea was, can we get a manifestation of that direct relationship that we can call on again and again, and it has really worked for us. Let me say a few things about how and why. The first one is one of the things I've been talking about for 18 months, maybe 2 years now is there is enormous pressure for all content publishers on the Internet from the big platforms that control the information ecosystem and their traffic patterns. There's been enormous pressure on that for a long time. I've talked about that publicly for a long time. The fact that we have 150 million registrations and growing builds real resilience to that means we've got an audience that we can go and get and say, "Hey, come back, come back because we've got content that you don't know we have or a promotion or any number of reasons, we can bring you back to site that is really, really valuable, one. Two, we are still growing registered users. And I want to say we've got a news funnel where registered users are still growing. We've got a sports funnel that is -- we are just building and we are in the very early days of where we can grow registered users. Games has been a gangbusters part of the kind of grow new registered users. I think you have to be registered to follow those stats and streaks in our games, who doesn't want that? If you play and you play regularly, you're going follow your stats and streaks. So lots of examples like that and so forth, cooking, even Wirecutter all really valuable to growing registrations. Then once you've registered why does it matter? First, it matters because you have more access to content or features, like I just described in Games. Same is true across all the products. And you are, therefore, more likely to form a habit. Once you form that habit, you are, therefore, more likely to convert and a registered user converts much -- much more likely to convert to be a paying subscriber. So it gives us a real race to focus than a nonregistered user. And I'll give you 2 more. The bundle thesis and the expanded portfolio thesis is we're going to interest you in something, maybe we got you as a registered user in sports. But in fact, you want to follow what is happening in a really close range in the presidential election, we can call you to action around that. We can interest you around that. It's also really valuable to us because we have this giant base of registered users who've told us a lot about themselves whose first-party data, we can use for advertising in [privacy-forward ways]. And that's been a big kind of empowering feature of our ad business. It's all really working and growing.

That's great. When I was looking in your annual filings, you only give this number once a year. If I've done the math correctly, you spent about 5% of your revenues on external marketing, right?

Which you mean just paid media.

That's right.

That's specifically paid media.

That's right. And my question is, what is it when you spend money on that? Is it that you're trying to get more registered users -- is that more or further down in the conversion funnel.

It's a great question. I would -- I actually think the most important thing to say about that 5%, whatever the percent is, is the vast majority of subscription starts at the New York Times do not come from paid marketing. They do not come from paid media. They come from the product itself as the primary kind of engine of the business. And by that, I mean people who land on a story page because they come from search or social or a friend sent it to them, where they land on the home page or they go to one of our apps. So the product itself is the primary and the most important engine of demand, and we're constantly working to make that a better and better engine of demand. So that's the first thing to say. The second thing to say is the better that product works, some more efficient registration conversion engine, the better the marketing books, right? That's obvious. And then as it relates to paid media, specifically 2 things, we are incredibly focused on the ROI of paid media, and we take a very data-driven approach and you should imagine we're using very sophisticated data science to say, how do we find these customers where do we actually need or benefit from paying to get them. And then the third thing -- and by the way, that makes us generally more efficient over time. The third thing to say is the expansion of the portfolio, so big in sports now, big in games, big in cooking and so forth, that just gives us more ways to target people in that paid media and the bundle has brought a lot of efficiency to the paid media program. So I'd say those 3 things sort of product itself is the main engine of demand, very ROI-focused on the money we do spend. It is largely -- it's not entirely, but it is largely to drive starts, not registrations, to drive starts. Sometimes it ends up driving registrations or to move sentiment in a particular way on the brand. And then sort of -- I would basically think of all of that as a system that works together, product itself, ROI-driven bundle and expanded portfolio.

Okay. That's great. I can't prove this, I couldn't find anything in your old disclosures, but I would imagine when you were a print-only business, the vast, vast majority of your customers were in the tri-state area. Maybe you had a few sort of in L.A. or some in London or whatever.

Majority, yes. I don't know how vast, but definitely majority.

Definitely majority. But now as I look at some of the numbers you've given and maybe you can share these, it feels like when you think about where your customers are coming from, it is certainly the continental in the United States and even outside the United States. Is that fair?

Definitely. So I would say as we went from being a newspaper that reached probably its peak, 2 million paying customers, a couple of million to digital business that has 50 million to 100 million people every week; obviously, domestically and internationally, we've just gotten much more diverse. And we've gotten more international, and we've gotten kind of more diverse within that. And I would say the audience diversity to me is most interesting and this is true domestically and internationally. When you think about the fact that we are now operating in very big spaces, and we are aiming -- we have big ambitions in all of those spaces, and we see real growth potential for audience and for subscription in all of those spaces. So in news through format innovation and our sort of preparedness to cover the stories wherever they go. And every year, that means you're adding -- you're adding to particular beats or you're adding beats in full[indiscernible] because the stories are changing through that and through kind of relentless format innovation, making the journalism more video forward or so that you can listen to it or so that it can be translated into multiple languages, which we think Gen AI will be able to help us do. That gives us the potential to have that audience to be even more diverse to go back to your question. But then I would say we're aiming big in sports and games and cooking and shopping advice. And so think of diversity of audience of we're not just reaching a News consumer now or aiming to reach who's going to read, they might watch or listen or want to watch or listen or read in another language, right? We aren't just aiming for news consumers. We want NFL fans and primarily fans and so forth. And we are deeply interested in reaching people who want to make something of a high quality that is also simple for dinner every night and so on and so forth. So it's a much rounder pursuit in terms of who we're looking for in audience.

When we read about in the press cutbacks that let's say, local newspapers or making or reviewed about difficulties that maybe some of your competitors might be having that are perceived as competitors in the traditional newspaper business, is that relevant? I mean do you pay attention to those things? Or are you just -- you're on your mission, you're executing, and it doesn't really matter what the competition is doing?

Yes. That's a good question. Let me say 2 things about it. First, we are like absolutely rooting for the success of all quality original independent journalism out there. The[indiscernible] local newspapers, we are rooting for them. I want to say it is a better market, it is a better ecosystem. It is a better country, it is a better world. When there are driving independent news organizations, and I'll just give you the investor part of that, when more people are running into high-quality news making a habit for it -- more people are going to pay for it. So I want to say that, by the way, our publisher has a very important op-ed in the Washington Post today that everybody should read about sort of independent threats to -- political threats to independent journalism. But that's the first thing to say. And I want to say I'm local news, we are -- just been devastating to the country and the world, what has happened to local news. But to your point, our intense focus is on -- and we have been strategically at this now for more than a decade is to very deliberately build reasons to be essential in the lives of millions more people, tens of millions more people and to me as many news and life needs as we possibly can. And I would say, rather than think of like the demise of a competitor or local as a tailwind. We are intensely focused on building our own tailwind by investing into the breadth and depth and quality. And candidly, the sort of range of things our products can do in people's lives, and I think that's really working. And I think when you see the times kind of break away from competitors, and we also think building on that lead is really important. It is a result of that long-term strategy and very deliberate investment.

Okay. So you've been consistent about that point for a while. So I went back and looked, and in 2013, you had 1,300 employees focused on journalism. And in 2023, it was 2,700. So I guess I have a question here is, I'm assuming that this isn't a static number that 2,700, is that enough -- this is more sort of iterative or the more success you have, the more you invest, is that the right...

Yes. So let me say a few things about that. First, I've been in Times 11 years, the thing I'm most proud of is that we are building a larger and more profitable company and that we have twice as many journalists. And I want to say those 2 things are entirely connected, right? We have twice as many journalists and that is enabling us to build a larger and more profitable company. And I wanted to just say because some would look if this was a room full of reporters, they would say, but you bought The Athletic, that's a lot of sports journalists and a lot of product reviewers with Wirecutter. Even if you strip those out, the core news and opinion newsroom of The New York Times is much bigger than it was when I got there. And why does that matter, investing into the breadth, the depth, the quality of the differential value, the format innovation of our journalism is the most value-creating thing we can do hard stop. And I would say the track of our business over the last few years is the best evidence there is of that. And there are a couple of things to think about as it relates to that investment. One, because of our lead -- and by the way, we are trying to build on that lead, a little bit of money goes a long way. And because of the way the platform works and everything I just described to you about the sort of the efficiency we can bring new products onto the platform, we can bring new journalists and you don't have to invest a huge amount to see real benefit to revenue growth to profit...

That's helpful.

So I want to -- we're going to keep investing. I think it is the most value-creating thing we can do.

Understood. This is another sort of investment point, but I think a little bit different and candidly, as someone relatively new to the New York Times, I got a little bit confused. But when I was looking through your financials, in 2019, your product development costs were half the size of sales and marketing. Today, they're of the same size. What in the world is product development cost for a newspaper company.

We have a lot of people with product development. That is so by design and so deliberate. And if I were to give a theme to it, it's the idea that the product itself is the primary engine of the business. So again, you land on a story page, you come to Wordle, you are following the U.S. Open on The Athletic, -- what happens when you get there is the most important work we can do to get you to pay, stay longer, pay more, get your friends pay, right? That's the first thing. So what is product development and tech investment doing? I'll take it like down the funnel. First, it is helping us bring more of the right people into the ecosystem who may ultimately buy and it's helping us do that through format innovation, right? So you can now -- my favorite feature, we have launched this year is you can now -- because of Gen AI listen to the majority of Times journalism. I'm a runner, and I get up in morning now, and I like literally just listen to the most important articles on the homepage. So before my day starts, I have listened to it and that's being read by a Gen AI voice. It's an automated voice. And there are lots of examples. You know we are so much better now. And this is tech investment and as well as journalism investment, but helping you follow a live or developing a breaking news story, and I can give many other examples of a format innovation, but it's making a report far more accessible, one. Two, we're making a report for more engaging. We're making the whole thing for more engaging. So now Maggie Haberman has a big story to tell about what happened at the Trump campaign last night. She is going to -- you're going to get a written story, you might also get bits from her in a live and developing way, and you might get Maggie Haberman giving you a video that just teases that story or just gives you enough a bit like you may just want to watch it quickly and not read the whole thing. So I would say lot of that investment is going to subscriber engagement. I told you all the reasons that, that matters. And then lots of that tech investment is going into data science to make sure we know when we have you, what's the right time to ask you to pay and how do we do it, what message should we show you? When do we ask you to come up in price, once you come up in price, how do we make sure you stay engaged. So all of that is what that is happening.

That makes sense. I'm going to shift gears again on the advertising. On the digital side, I can't prove this, but I would suspect that most of your digital advertising revenue comes from the news product today. But how would you characterize what initiatives you're pursuing both on the bundled side or in the individual services like athletic or even games for that matter.

Yes, fair assumption. The majority of our ad revenue is still driven by things that happen in an and around -- and in and around news, and that's a big part of the proposition. I would say, generally, the thing we are doing in news, we are also now extending out across the whole portfolio, and that is -- we've been at this for years, premium ad campuses, not too many of them that have first-party data appended to them that I've described to you in privacy-forward ways. Those ads really work -- these marketers buy them again and again, because they work. And we are extending those ads across the whole every bit of the portfolio actually, even Cooking, Wirecutter, which are much smaller than Sports and Games. Wirecutter got adds this year. We are extending the products out across the portfolio. We are super optimistic about Sports and Games. There's just a lot of marketer interest in Sports. I think we've been very pleased to see that. Lots of marketer interest, and we're just at the beginning there. We actually are just this fall, bringing first-party data to athletic advertising. So that feels like a real potential growth lever in games. This one, I think, is stunning. We do not yet have ads in the Games. So we are bringing ads into the game app. We're obviously using that in very careful and deliberate ways given what a great subscription driver Games is, but we just -- we see running room in all directions there. And I'd say all that makes us -- the proposition to a marketer is very strong from The Times. We've got this wide product set that the touches culture in myriad ways and all that makes us optimistic and should be a growth driver.

It's an ad question, but I'm going to shift over to macro. So a lot of investors that I speak with today and even over the last few weeks are just a little bit skittish about macro -- and the things that I think that are making them nervous is we've seen some travel companies sort of come out and say, Oh, we're going to have softer numbers -- seeing something like low in retail, but to be candid with you, most of the sort of traditional media companies aren't sounding the alarm bells. And so it's -- I think it's a little bit of a confusing period that we're right now I don't know if you have any thoughts on the...

I would just add. I mean, we obviously have a guide out about Q3, which is -- that our digital ad business is going to grow. And overall, because we still have declining print business will be somewhere between flat[indiscernible]. I would just say that guide has some natural optimism in it, meaning it reflects where we think the order will be and things are okay. That said, I want to say 2 things, very -- advertising visibility is very difficult for any number of reasons, one. And two, we don't always track with the rest of the market. We have a very wide product set in terms of the spaces we play in and also the formats. And so we are not always like a bad market, not good for us. But beyond that, I would say we don't always track exactly like the rest of the market.

Okay. I want to go back to what you said about visibility. When you said low visibility, that's just endemic to that revenue stream, not a comment you're making about this particular moment in time.

I said that for 11 years. And some of that is you didn't like the newspaper. Folks really made it hard to see when it's going to happen.

Understood. Shifting gears. Uses of free cash flow. So you guys have no debt. It's amazing. You generate a lot of free cash flow. You returned about, I think, half of it, either in the form of dividends or buybacks. You've also said you have a very high bar for M&A. Is there anything else you can add to that? I mean, it's sort of...

Let me say a few things about that. First and most importantly, I'm going to say we feel very excited about the product portfolio we have. I've just described to you in many different ways, all the running room we see within it. We've got some public targets out there, and we're very confident about the current portfolio and its ability to help us get there. When we think about uses of free cash flow and capital allocation kind of more broadly, we think about 3 things in order: one, organic investment into everything I just described to you in the existing portfolio, starting with news, but kind of across the board in the portfolio, we think there's real opportunity to continue to do that in the ways I've described. Two, we do have a public target out there that we will return at least 50% of our free cash flow to investors in the form of dividends and buybacks, which we think are important and also show our confidence in both the opportunity and how the business is doing. And in my time at time that's gotten better. And then three, I would say, yes, we are open to things that come up over time from an M&A perspective. The bar, as you say, is really high from an ROI perspective. We've got a fair amount of experience now to with M&A. We're 2.5 years into owning The Athletic. We acquired Wirecutter, I think, 6 years ago. We are -- we have a sense of what works, how to do these things. Bar is really high. We are very committed to the portfolio we already have. And I would say, most importantly, having that healthy balance sheet gives us a lot of strategic flexibility and optionality in a time of real change coming...

So I have 2 last questions. And these might be a little bit far afield, but they seem interesting to me, so I'm going to ask them. The first is it seems like a relatively recent phenomena are some of the marquee riders that people know by name, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, are sort of unplugging from sort of traditional media and just going out and hanging out their shingle and doing their own thing. Does that matter to you if that trend continues? Is it not meaningful? Is it existential, like where does it sit on your continuum of importance?

Those are interesting examples. I won't speak to those specific examples. I'm going to take -- your point is made, and I could give you some others who -- but let me -- I think we have learned, I think 2 things that have to sort of travel together about The New York Times and our success formula. One is, we need the world's best journalistic talent hard stop. Some of those people are people whose names are household names, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, if you follow politics, they are household names,[indiscernible] 100% recognition in this room. And they are people who either were or became stars at The New York Times, and we are very, very prepared -- as reclined we are very, very prepared to support them. And they come and they stay for the second reason, which is this is an institution that does 2 things that I have yet to see the other media company that can do. One, it is an extraordinary -- 3 things, engine for audience, so we can bring the audience to your work. I will not say who, but a very famous journalist who came to The Times and left The Times one of the rare people who left. She will say -- it's women, I never saw an audience like I saw at The New York, and I came from other very big places. We bring audience, we bring the apparatus of support. So whether that's fact checking or you need to go to 25 countries to tell a story in a particular way? Or you need to be legally defended or have people filing for your brief to unlock information, we have an extraordinary apparatus to do that. And I would say the magical formula of The New York Times is the combination of those 2 things and that what's the special sauce on that is the authority that the brand gives, and I wouldn't trade that right...

Okay. Here's my last question. You have a minute and half to answer. In 2023, in your filings, you purchased or used, I don't know which one it is, 59,000 tons of newsprint. The interesting thing is that's half of what it was 10 years prior. And so my question is, if 10 years from now, there isn't a print version of The New York Times, what does that mean? Is that an unalloyed good for shareholders? Does it not matter and it will just be this, but a gradual transition and just disappears?

One of the things I have kind of religiously said since like got to The Times is we're not in the newspaper business, we're in the understanding business, and the understanding business should be because there's such a gaping need for it, and we do it so well, a very successful business. And that is the journey we're on, that is what we are trying to do. I would just say, it's no secret that print is in secular decline. We've been very descriptive about that. I do think, in all my time to time, people have called for its end much sooner than we believe will be the case for any number of reasons, including the people who get the products, still love it. The product is still awesome. And we have some control over it because we have a printing plant and so forth. But all of that said, we've got public targets out there that drag on profit growth is accounted for in those public targets from a business that we view as in secular decline. And we've spent looking at our CFO, he's been at the company -- new CFO, have been at the company for 20 years. I've been here 11 years. We have spent all of our time building a business that has not led to any format and the growth strategy for which has not led to any format and believe we are well on the journey to building a larger and more profitable company in any format.

Fantastic. Meredith, thank you for your time.

Now it says 0.

You did perfect. Great. Good job. Thank you Meredith.