JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.
WLY · Materials · FY2026 filings · Shallow moat ·
Price verdict withheld — owner-earnings floor unreliable
The five investor questions
2022–2026 (latest 5 aligned FYs; v3 window cap 5): revenue $2.1B to $1.7B, decreasing; diluted EPS 2.62 to 4.16, increasing.
Median gross margin 69.1% over 10y, very stable.
Median ROIC 9.2%, above the 12% hurdle in 20% of years.
Net debt/EBITDA 1.4x, interest coverage 6x.
Owner earnings +7.4%/yr, share count n/a.
Price vs. conservative owner-earnings floor
A cautious baseline, not a price target: what the shares may support if normalized owner earnings simply hold steady.
- Owner earnings (normalized)
- $170M
- Owner-earnings floor / share
- Unavailable — insufficient owner-earnings data
- Capped-growth comparison / share
- Unavailable — insufficient growth-model data
- Recent price
- $49.55
- Price vs. owner-earnings floor
- No price data
This floor assumes trailing owner earnings persist — unreliable for declining businesses. WLY revenue fell in each of the three most recent year-over-year FY comparisons, so this floor is flagged as unreliable for this company.
Among the current top-score group, the median current price is 239% above the floor across 48 of the current top 50 companies by Moat Score with both values.
Score records captured Jul 26, 2026.
Exactly which 50 companies?
FTNT, META, MEDP, IBEX, MSFT, GOOGL, LULU, ANF, IDXX, TXRH, FHI, QLYS, FFIV, ADBE, LLY, MANH, VEEV, GRMN, SSD, MNST, DOCS, MCO, CPRT, NTAP, LRCX, NVDA, CORT, SFM, MPTI, ULTA, SN, RMD, ROL, PAYC, IRMD, INTU, DECK, MORN, LGCY, DAL, GWW, ISRG, MPWR, CTAS, LOPE, MRK, CMG, FAST, BKNG, ORLY
Missing a usable price or floor: ANF, BKNG.
Model details under moat-index@3.0.0: zero-growth floor 11.1×, capped-growth comparison at no more than 18×; 9% discount rate; high-end growth 0% (capped at 4%) using min(5y revenue CAGR, 5y diluted-EPS CAGR), clamped to 0%–4%; maintenance capex uses min(capex, D&A); abstain when D&A is unavailable. This is a disclosed model range, not intrinsic value as fact.
19 years of fundamentals
The business, in plain English
JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. booked $1.7B of revenue in FY2026 in the Materials sector and kept 74.3% of it as gross profit — a high-margin business by that measure. After every other cost, 13.2% of each revenue dollar reached the bottom line.
Across the filed record, revenue grew from $1.6B (FY2009) to $1.7B (FY2026) — about 0.2% a year compounded over 17 years.
It earned 19.0% on invested capital in the latest filed year, FY2026. Across the full 18-year measurable filed record, median ROIC was 11.9%. Over the v3 recent window (10 measurable filed years), median ROIC was 9.2%. The Returns on Capital filter above scores it 25/100.
The balance sheet carried $683M of total debt in FY2026 against $314M of owner earnings — roughly 2.2 years of owner earnings to retire it all. Balance-Sheet Safety scores it 46/100.
Put together: Pricing Power is the strongest of the five filters (98/100) and Returns on Capital the weakest (25/100), which is how WLY lands at 57/100 — 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.
Gaps in a line mean that item isn’t in WLY’s filings for that year — the series is never interpolated or estimated. The Table view lists every filed value, including operating and net margins, total debt, and share count.
Moat Score history
Breaks in the line mark methodology or normalizer upgrades — readings across versions aren’t compared, so a level shift there isn’t a change in the business.
Tier changesSame-methodology and same-normalizer crossings of the Wide / Narrow / Shallow bars
- Normalizer upgraded unstamped (version unknown)tomoat-xbrl-normalizer@1.1.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 26, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@2.0.0tomoat-index@3.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 23, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@1.2.0tomoat-index@2.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 20, 2026
Scores are logged append-only and never overwritten — this record cannot be reconstructed retroactively, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping.
Track record
How JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.’s moat rated in each of the years we can reconstruct from its filings — scored only on what was knowable at the time — and what its price and returns did afterward. The score never saw a price; the two are joined only in hindsight, for education, not as a signal.
How to read this: each dot is what the engine would have scored WLY on that December 31; the line below is its total-return price path (dividends reinvested) in the years since.
Two tracks, one timeline: the score has its own 0–100 scale (top), the price its own 100-based scale (bottom) — never a shared axis. The price path is a total-return (dividends reinvested) index built from the same data the forward returns use; gaps in the score line are years with no reconstructed rating (see the table for why). The Table view carries every value.
What followed, in the years it rated Wide
In the 2 years WLY rated Wide-moat (2011 and 2012), the median forward total return that followed — measured only after each year’s filings were public — was:
- 1 year 14% vs the S&P 500’s 20% (price basis) · median over 2 years
- 3 years 28% vs the S&P 500’s 49% (price basis) · median over 2 years
- 5 years 61% vs the S&P 500’s 81% (price basis) · median over 2 years
These are medians computed from the data, not a claim about any one year. The company figures are total returns (dividends reinvested); the S&P 500 is the price-only ^GSPC index, which excludes dividends and so understates the index — the gap flatters the company. A quality rating is not a return forecast, and past returns don’t predict future ones. Educational only, not investment advice.
Materials context
#71 of 309 scored Materials companies, ranked by Moat Score.
Nearest peers by Moat Score
- #69CBT Cabot Corporation56.8 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #70SGI SOMNIGROUP INTERNATIONAL INC.56.7 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #72ATR AptarGroup, Inc56.3 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #73AMPY AMPLIFY ENERGY CORP.55.9 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
Compare WLY with its nearest peers →All Materials companies on the Index →
Common questions about WLY
- Does JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. have an economic moat?
- Based on its FY2026 SEC filings, the Moat Index scores JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. (WLY) 56.6 out of 100 — a Shallow moat. The five questions behind that score begin at 20% each; if exactly one genuinely lacks data, the other four weights are renormalized and disclosed. revenue and EPS trend 50, pricing power 98, returns on capital 25, balance-sheet safety 46, capital discipline 64.
- How has WLY's Moat Score changed over time?
- The record logs 16 readings since Jul 17, 2026; the latest reads 56.6 out of 100 (shallow moat). No tier changes on record yet. (Methodology or normalizer upgrades on Jul 20, 2026, Jul 23, 2026, Jul 26, 2026 re-based the score; readings across versions aren't compared.) The history is append-only — readings are only ever added, never rewritten.