Earnings of small publisher Wiley beat expectations amid AI push

Quotes of John Wiley & Sons, commonly known as Wiley, a small-cap publishing company that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials, soared 10% yesterday, June 17. The driver was the company's financial results for the fiscal-2025 fourth quarter and full year, which beat Wall Street forecasts. The company fingered its leveraging of AI as one of the reasons for the performance.

Wiley rose 10% to $40.70 yesterday. The company reported that its adjusted EPS for the fiscal-2025 fourth quarter, ended April 30, increased more than 13% year over year to $1.37. Revenue for the same period decreased 5.3% to $443 million. 

Both numbers came in above Wall Street expectations, notes the Motley Fool. The beat on revenue was about 2%, while EPS was around 5% higher than expected. 

«We met or exceeded our financial commitments, drove profitable growth in our core, expanded margins and free cash flow, and extended further into the corporate market through artificial intelligence (AI) licensing and partnership, science analytics, and knowledge services,» CEO Matthew Kissner was quoted as saying. 

Back in October, Wiley announced the launch of the today announced the launch of Wiley AI Partnerships, a program to develop new AI applications, assistants, and agents to «empower researchers and practitioners and help drive the pace, efficiency and accuracy of scientific discovery.» 

In March, the company announced it will provide access to a curated collection of Earth science research materials to Pi School, which is leading the development of the European Space Agency's Earth Virtual Expert LLM.

And in May, it announced it would become Perplexity's first education partner by integrating its content into Perplexity's generative AI search capabilities for educators and students.

A recent Wiley survey found that 69% of researchers want to keep up with or be ahead of the curve in AI adoption in their field. But they are said to require better tools to streamline their research and are looking for guidance and training about how to use AI responsibly and effectively. The Wiley AI Partnerships program is intended to help solve these challenges, the company says.

In the fiscal-2025 full year, Wiley's revenue increased 2.7% to $1.66 billion and EPS rose nearly 31% to $3.64. The publisher guides for single-digit revenue growth in 2026 and says EPS should grow at least 7%. 

Wiley is down about 7% year to date but up around 2% in the last 12 months. 

The stock has one Wall Street rating, a «buy,» according to data from MarketWatch. The $60 per share target price offers upside of more than 47% versus the last closing price.