”The third quarter was, as always, the high season for our learning business due to the start of the new school year, creating a peak in book deliveries and activation of digital licenses. We were very pleased to see the delayed Spanish sales from the earlier months coming in during the quarter. As this is the first implementation year of the major educational reform and curriculum renewal LOMLOE, demand in Spain is expected to continue to grow also in 2023, extending even into 2024. The related earnings improvement is typically not yet seen in full during the first year when the majority of the content and marketing investments related to the new materials takes place.
Across our Learning operating countries, the third quarter high season was successful for our content publishing businesses. We were successful in largely mitigating the impact of the higher-than-expected paper costs – one should note that learning content is typically sold only once a year, thus giving us only one opportunity to adjust our prices to the changing operating environment. However, the financial performance of the Dutch learning content distribution business was adversely impacted by increasing labour costs and supply chain issues, leading to slightly lower January−September earnings for the whole segment. Although we expect these issues to be temporary in nature, they may have an impact next year as well.
At the end of August, we completed the acquisition of Pearson Italy and Germany, and I am very happy to welcome these strong teams and businesses to Sanoma. We also saw these businesses contributing positively to our third quarter financial performance during September. The integration has started according to our plans and playbook – all-in-all the separation from Pearson and integration into Sanoma will be a sizable project taking some 18−24 months."