WLYBJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Is it safe?
Nothing alarming, nothing pristine: comfortable debt (BBB) and typical volatility.
Investment-grade balance sheet. A rule of thumb on leverage, not a credit rating.
Moderate price swings, typical volatility. Worst drawdown -53% · now 8% below its 52-week high.
Where this answer is blind. Altman sits structurally low for utilities and pipelines; Beneish runs high for fast growers, since sales growth alone lifts it; banks and REITs are excluded.
Can WLYB take a bad year?
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. carries $1.18B of net debt at 3.01× EBITDA: a load its earnings can carry.
Net debt · as at Q1 2027 · between two and four years of EBITDA, normal for a stable business
- Net debt / EBITDA
- 3.01×
Net debt / EBITDA · 2.02× a year ago · the load is going up
- Interest cover
- 5.32×
Interest cover · operating profit covers the interest bill several times over
- Annualised volatility
- 41%
Annualised volatility · roughly twice as jumpy as the market
Details›
- Total debtQ1 2027
- $1.29B
- Cash and short-term investments
- $106M
- Net debt
- $1.18B
- EBITDA, trailing twelve months
- $393M
- Operating profit, trailing twelve months
- $249M
- Debt / equity
- 1.62×
- Total debt / EBITDA
- 3.28×
- Annualised volatilitytwo years of daily moves
- 41%
- Worst drawdown on file
- −53%
- Below its 52-week high
- 8.1%
Balance sheet from SEC filings; drawdown and volatility from end-of-day closes; Altman Z from the filed statements.