BARNES & NOBLE EDUCATION, INC.

The business, in plain English

BARNES & NOBLE EDUCATION, INC. booked $1.6B of revenue in FY2026 in the Consumer Discretionary sector and kept 23.4% of it as gross profit — a moderate-margin business by that measure. After every other cost, 1.1% of each revenue dollar reached the bottom line.

Across the filed record, revenue shrank from $1.7B (FY2014) to $1.6B (FY2026) — about −0.9% a year compounded over 12 years.

It earned 10.4% on invested capital in the latest filed year, FY2026. Across the full 13-year measurable filed record, median ROIC was −5.0%. Over the v3 recent window (10 measurable filed years), median ROIC was −9.1%. The Returns on Capital filter above scores it 0/100.

BNED's latest filed year, FY2026, doesn't disclose total debt in a form the methodology can use, so current leverage is treated as unmeasured — never assumed to be zero.

Put together: Balance-Sheet Safety is the strongest of the five filters (100/100) and Returns on Capital the weakest (0/100), which is how BNED lands at 45/100 — a Shallow moat.

This breakdown is generated from the filed numbers and sub-scores above — no outside narrative, no estimates. Where a filing doesn’t disclose an input, the sentence that would need it is omitted instead of guessed.