Good afternoon and welcome to the Graham Holdings 2025 Investor Day. Please note the presentations at this Investor Day may contain forward-looking statements that are based on the company's current expectations. All public statements by the company and its representatives that are not statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements are based on expectations, forecasts, and assumptions by the company's management and involve a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated, including, but not limited to, the company's business strategies and objectives, the prospects for growth in our various business operations, future financial performance, and the risks and uncertainties described in Item 1A of the company's annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30, 2025.
Any forward-looking statement made at this Investor Day speaks only as of the date on which it is made. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement after the date on which such statement is made, even if new information subsequently becomes available unless required by law. A full disclaimer is posted on the Graham Holdings Company's website along with the meeting presentations. Please let me introduce Timothy J. O'Shaughnessy, CEO of Graham Holdings.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 2025 Graham Holdings Company Virtual Investor Day. We are delighted you've chosen to spend an hour or two with us to learn more about the business. I'm Tim O'Shaughnessy, the CEO of Graham Holdings, and I will be your Master of Ceremonies for the day. My colleagues, Andy Rosen, the CEO of Kaplan, and Catherine Badalamente, the CEO of Graham Media Group, will be on the line as well and available for questions. I will walk through a slide presentation with corresponding remarks, and then we'll open it up for a Q&A session, which will last until about 2:30 Eastern Time or until there are no more additional questions. 2025 has been a very good year for the company. Our biggest businesses have performed at or above our expectations, and our largest investment-stage business has started to gather steam.
We continue to manage the business with a focus on driving cash flow on a per-share basis over the long term, inclusive of non-consolidated investments. We do this while always maintaining a balance sheet that lets us sleep well at night, knowing the unforeseeable is always a possibility. We think about driving free cash flow per share in a few primary ways. One, owners' earnings growth. This reflects an increase in the underlying earnings power of our businesses. Two, share repurchases. We care deeply about the price we pay. We will not repurchase shares under a blind philosophy to shrink the share count. However, when our shares trade at a meaningful discount to our view of intrinsic value, we can purchase shares from time to time to increase our free cash flow per share in an efficient manner. Three, pension. Replacing expenses funded from our corporate treasury with pension-eligible expenses.
An example of this is replacing a corporate match of a 401(k) plan with a pension benefit for employees. While this reduces GAAP net income, our cash flow grows by the amount a 401(k) match our corporate treasury no longer funds. And fourth, acquisitions. Over time, we can add to free cash flow per share by acquiring businesses. This occurs in two ways. We may occasionally add a new platform business, but most of our acquisition capital is likely to go to bolt-on acquisitions that help us grow our existing segments. Many of you likely know something about the company already. Some may be new. In either case, you'll be pleased to know that the above formula, when combined with a focus on providing reliable products and services to our customers, has stood the test of time and will continue to be our playbook moving forward.
Let's talk about a few key updates from the year. In February, we spent a little over $200 million to redeem the majority of the mandatorily redeemable non-controlling interest, or MRNCI. In layman's terms, this means we spent quite a bit of money buying shares from a group of minority shareholders of CSI, our specialty pharmacy home infusion business. This past July, we acquired the since-renamed Hoover Architectural Solutions business as a carve-out from Arconic. This is a leading aluminum cladding manufacturer for North American non-residential architecture and retail markets. In October, we acquired a Honda dealership directly adjacent to two dealerships we already owned in Woodbridge, Virginia. Last month, we completed a refinancing of our $400 million notes that were due in June of 2026, along with our revolving credit facility. Finally, a few key personnel updates.
Spiro Roiniotis joined our corporate staff this summer as Chief Technology Officer. Spiro has worked at different units of the company since 2009. I asked him to consider joining our corporate office as CTO to help our organizations think through their technology strategies and specifically to help some of our businesses accelerate their leveraging of AI to drive improved results in their operations. Last week, Dee Grein started as the new Graham Healthcare Group CEO, leading our Home Health and Hospice operations. We are thrilled to have Dee join the business. Most recently at Optum, Dee had a long tenure helping to grow healthcare services operations and shaping the strategy that allows for long-term success. We could not be more thrilled with her appointment. Results year- to- date have shown how the business has evolved to be less impacted by the cyclicality of election cycles at Graham Media Group.
Through Q3, our adjusted operating cash flow has increased by $3 million, from $307 million to $310 million. This is despite a $45 million year-to-date reduction at Graham Media Group. These improved results have been driven by Kaplan, Healthcare, and Manufacturing. While we have managed to stay ahead of last year through three quarters, we are unlikely to end the year ahead in adjusted operating cash flow. The election spending in 2024, peaking in October and early November, makes the comps a hill just a bit too big to climb. Kaplan has had an excellent year, navigating visa complexity at Kaplan International to minimize impacts on both students and financial results, and continuing to strengthen our product offerings at KNA. Revenue has increased 4% year to date. Adjusted operating cash flow has increased 18%. I'd like to speak for a moment about the Kaplan Supplemental business.
You can see from the financials that revenue is up 9% through Q3, and adjusted operating cash flow is up 21% over the same time period. This business is an excellent example of how a model that includes patience, focus on serving customers, and a long-term time horizon can lead to an excellent result. It wasn't that long ago that the majority of revenue in this segment came from physical, in-person Kaplan Test Prep Centers. This was a leaky bucket that largely went away by the end of the 2010s. The team has spent much of the last five years repurposing our skill sets and capabilities to become the online leader in test preparation and professional certifications. While the team was brilliant at carefully managing costs, unfortunately, the revenue was leaking faster than new revenue was coming into the bucket. That will end this year.
For the first time in many years, this segment has organically grown its top line. The team at Kaplan has spent the better part of a decade creating a unified management structure, a centralized technology system, and a centralized marketing function to execute upon a sources, extensions, and connection strategy that allows us to provide services to a student throughout many phases of their academic and learning journey. Every dollar of revenue is hard-fought. Every new product is not guaranteed to be successful. It's very, very hard to turn around and reshape a business at scale while maintaining a reasonable level of profitability throughout the turnaround. Greg Marino, Steve Marietti, Lee Weiss, and the rest of the team have really done something remarkable. Graham Media Group continues to manage the changing landscape. In 2025, the anticipated decline in cash flow due largely to reduced political spend has materialized.
In addition, other challenges remain. In preparation for this event, I reviewed last year's remarks and noted we discussed several negative trends challenging the business, primarily around the erosion of the linear ecosystem and the fragmentation of audiences. With the passage of another year, those trends have not improved. We also spoke about the possibility of deregulation providing a new opportunity to compete. In 2025, it appears regulators may be more open to exploring those conversations, but only time will tell. The local broadcast industry is quickly approaching the point of no return, where the diminished audience and economics could make many markets non-viable under the current regulatory framework.
Society and regulators should ask, would we rather have one or two news operations in a market that have a fighting chance to continue to serve their local communities for the foreseeable future? Or would we rather have four that may be destined to fail? The current top four rule and the traditional definitions of market share make zero sense in today's world. If that's not enough, the industry's network relationships have evolved to one where stations pay more for less. Out is the spirit of partnership that defined network affiliations for decades. In is an approach for networks to maximize leverage in such a way that many stations have no choice but to cut news operations in order to pay network affiliation fees. To add insult to injury, networks use those fees to help pay for content that they make unavailable to their local station partners.
Local stations have a legal obligation to serve the public good. The current dynamic makes it increasingly challenging to do so. Within a few years, all but the largest markets may no longer have an economically viable model, and those markets could ultimately be on the same path as well. No matter how this plays out over the next few years, Graham Holdings will be okay. We've grown our business in a way that ensures we have a strong balance sheet and cash flow coming in from a variety of operations. In most scenarios, our total company earning power will increase over the coming years. While we used to own The Washington Post, we've seen the erosion that can quickly take place in a local news industry. Foolish cross-ownership rules that stayed in place far too long accelerated the decline of the newspaper industry not too long ago.
The inflection point for the industry is upon us. Absent substantial regulatory changes occurring in short order with timely subsequent transaction approvals, the industry will enter into a managed decline. In this scenario, Graham Media Group will continue to generate cash in the short to medium term, but the long-term prospects are challenged. Our healthcare segment has continued its admirable growth rate year to date, with revenue increasing 36% and adjusted operating cash flow increasing 46%. JV income has been flat. As mentioned previously, we're thrilled Dee Grein has joined to lead Graham Healthcare Group, our home health and hospice business, comprised of both wholly owned units and joint venture operations. She takes over a business that has continued to perform well with both census growth, strong patient outcomes, and good financial results.
While the rate environment remains challenged, the team is doing an excellent job of driving indirect cost efficiency to maintain good results. James Sheets and the CSI team have continued the excellent patient care, service to doctors, and strong financial results. Specialty pharmacy is hard. Providing care in the home is hard. Doing both of these things well is challenging and requires great operations both clinically and pharmacologically. We are still relatively early in our CSI journey. Many of our more recent areas of geographical expansion are still underpenetrated relative to some of our more mature markets. We recently entered California in the last few months, which represents 12% of the U.S. population, although our operations are very early stage. Our share of the IVIG home infusion market remains relatively small, but we believe we can continue to gain share of a growing market over the coming years.
We'll continue to invest through the P&L to achieve this future opportunity. In 2026, we will expand our team to handle higher patient census. Additionally, we will build out several new pharmacies that will allow us to increase future patient volume. With those elevated levels of investment, we still expect we will be able to meaningfully grow profitability in 2026. Our manufacturing operations have improved, with adjusted operating cash flow increasing year to date from $30 million-$40 million. Capital expenditures have also come down meaningfully as our facility expansion at Joyce was completed. Our general trends have been improving with the exception of Hoover, which continues to be in a cyclical downturn due to the persistent down cycle in multifamily housing construction. The automotive operations continue to perform well. Adjusted operating cash flow decreased from $34 million to $28 million through Q3.
As expected, we are below peak earnings achieved in the early years of the decade and corresponding supply chain disruptions. The results are also down this year due to weak operating results at the Jeep dealership that was closed in September 2025, transaction costs associated with the purchase of a Honda dealership, and incremental investment in Roda, our valet service operations. Our other businesses continue to be a mix of profitable, unprofitable, and investment stage businesses. As always, the mix within this segment evolves over time. Year to date, the segment has been roughly flat on both revenue and adjusted operating cash flow. However, what's going on under the hood is more encouraging and puts the segment on the cusp of revenue growth and improved adjusted operating cash flow. Let me provide a bit more insight.
Earlier this year, we divested the World of Good Brands media operations and wound down the remaining infrastructure. By Q4, the remaining costs associated with this were modest. World of Good had seen declining revenue and meaningful losses that will no longer burden the P&L. Society6 is in the midst of the last stage of its cost structure evolution, which, when completed, will result in a business where the downside has been minimized. We expect 2026 results will show sizable improvements. Clyde's Restaurant Group has a large presence in downtown D.C., and extended government shutdowns have historically temporarily depressed sales. This shutdown was no different. While I'm sure this isn't the last shutdown we will experience, we do not think it is standard. Framebridge continues to be the largest investment within the segment. The news is largely good. Here are some details.
The core metrics at Framebridge are mostly headed in the right direction. Revenue is up both online and in retail due to new locations and positive comps at existing stores. Gross margin has expanded. Customer NPS remains near or at all-time highs. We increased our store count by about 40% in 2025. Overall operating margin is on track to improve by several thousand basis points from 2024 to 2025. As a reminder, Framebridge, as we have been building it, is a business that requires scale. There are three main areas where investments have been required to support the scale we envision with the business. The first is the corporate function. This covers SG&A costs such as technology, marketing, merchandising, finance, and other related areas.
While these costs will continue to grow somewhat from here, they are now scaling at rates substantially below the growth rates of both revenue and gross profit. The second is our footprint of production studios where the framing occurs. As we grow our retail footprint, we need to expand our studio footprint to support the increased volume. For example, we were unable to practically support retail expansion into California or the southwest United States until we had a production studio in place. We recently opened a studio in Nevada that supports this expansion. While we anticipate opening additional production studios over the coming years, including an additional facility in 2026, these costs are also now scaling at rates substantially below our revenue and gross profit growth rates. The third is our retail footprint.
We have the opportunity to open many, many more stores than the 44 we expect to have open by year-end. These stores require capital to build out as well as investment to support pre-opening expenses and training. In 2025, we will have opened 13 new stores, short of our target of 20-25. We are disappointed that we did not achieve our targeted store expansion. Delays in store openings increase our total investment required to get to positive cash flow. However, the 4-wall model for our stores continues to show very strong results, and as we get more experience, we are incrementally improving results with new openings. We are once again targeting 20-25 store openings in 2026, and our retail expansion costs are now scaling at rates substantially below our revenue and gross profit growth rates.
Let me spend a bit more time about why I'm optimistic about the long-term economic profile of Framebridge. First, as a reminder, we believe we provide a superior customer experience. We can win on quality, price, speed, and convenience. The customer value proposition is compelling, and repeat rates and NPS scores validate that belief. When a customer uses Framebridge, we tend to become their exclusive solution, and they also begin to frame things they had not previously thought to frame, growing the overall market opportunity. Second, we are investing capital for expansion by opening up new regional pods. A regional pod is composed of a production studio and a set of retail stores that will leverage that studio. There is an upfront capital expenditure investment required to build the studio and those stores.
Our investment case is based on a belief we can achieve attractive cash on cash returns on the upfront capital investment once a pod has been fully built out. Here is a map of where Framebridge has stores today. If you notice what I notice, there's a lot of empty space. What do Miami, Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, Tampa, Detroit, and Orlando have in common? They are all top 15 DMAs that currently have zero Framebridge retail locations. In fact, New York and the D.C. area are the only metro areas with more than four locations in the market. If we could snap our fingers and have 10 more regional pods tomorrow, we would. Unfortunately, not quite that easy. On the retail front, location, location, location remains as critical as ever. Finding the right stores at acceptable lease terms remains essential.
With the production studio, we need to find the right space with the right labor pool acceptably close to the retail stores it will service, and we need to do those two things in concert with each other so underabsorption at the production studios does not persist for an unacceptable duration. We have not been investing or building Framebridge to be a small business. If we thought the realistic annual revenue for Framebridge at maturity would be in the low or even mid-hundreds of millions, we would have taken a different approach. As we enter 2026, we expect Framebridge to continue to drive operating leverage in its business, and the overall investment level should decrease. Now that we've covered operations, let's spend a bit of time on the balance sheet.
As of September 30th, we had $1.236 billion in cash and securities against $732 million in debt, leaving us with a net cash and securities position of $504 million. In short, we feel very comfortable with our current liquidity. We also recently did something we don't do very often: access the credit markets. In November, we closed on a new $500 million bond offering and a $400 million revolving credit facility, the proceeds of which were used to pay off $400 million in notes due in June of 2026, as well as pay off our Term Loan A obligation. The new notes mature in December of 2033, and we are pleased the credit markets were so receptive to our offering. I'd like to thank Wally Cooney, Matt Greisler, Elaine Wolff, and the rest of the team for their efforts.
The specific primary terms are listed in the presentation, and I will let you peruse at your will. Earlier, I referenced the acquisition of what we now call Hoover Architectural Solutions. We love this type of transaction. We acquired a complementary business to one of our existing operations, and the majority of the purchase price was funded by the assumption of approximately $107 million in pension liabilities. Those pensioners whose liabilities came with the transaction are now in a much better spot than they were previously. Post-transaction, our pension plan funding ratio was not materially changed, but the cash flow profile and earnings power of Hoover certainly was. To put a finer point on it, you can see our estimated funding ratio and estimated absolute funding levels as of September 30th post the transaction.
With that, this will conclude the prepared remarks portion of the event, and we'll now open it up for the question and answer session. Those following along, you'll see that there's a Q&A box that you can submit any questions, and we'll start with some questions that were sent in in advance. First question is, "I'm curious about the recent addition of Cable ONE shares as revealed in the 13F. Value of the company is a fraction of what it once was. Has management considered acquiring Cable ONE at full?" So first, and we got a couple of questions on this, so that came in advance. No, we have no interest in acquiring all of Cable ONE. In general, we aren't going to comment extensively on securities because of the history here. I'll maybe give a bit more than I normally would.
Business we followed for a very long time, and so know well, know the people well. And at a very high level, for a business that we feel like we know well, I think both maximum balance sheet concern and maximum competitive threat pressure have both been priced in by the market, and we thought in a way that wasn't particularly rational. So it is a straight investment calculus, and there's not much more to it than that. The next question is, "During 2025, the company acquired two businesses, one in education and one in manufacturing for $19.9 million in cash and the assumption of $107.4 million in net pension obligations. The assets and liabilities of the companies acquired were recorded at their estimated fair values at the date of the acquisition.
In the case of the Arconic, a significant portion of the purchase price was funded by the company's assumption of certain pension obligations. How financially meaningful is this new business in the context of GHC and the manufacturing division? And this is the largest such transaction using GHC's overfunded pension. I know you're always looking for such opportunities. Are there more such companies out there? So I guess on the first portion of that question, the business is not, it's meaningful to Hoover. It's important to the manufacturing line, and it doesn't reach a level of materiality to Graham Holdings on the whole. So maybe that's a little bit of a helpful context for people. On the second side, are there other opportunities out there? I hope so. We would love to do more transactions like this.
It can be a bit challenging because you need somebody that has an underfunded pension and views that as an issue in the seriousness that they should. There needs to be a business that we want to own over an extended period of time as part of a transaction, and we have to know about it, and the third is often the hardest. If it's a company that's a public company, we can run screens, but there are many private companies that have had pensions, and there are lots of private companies out there, and that's much more challenging to understand, and actually, the carve-out transaction that we did here, Arconic was a private business, so it came to us through an advisor channel, and so that is something that the private world is harder to ascertain what's available out there.
So if people know things, have suggestions for us, we're always open. We would love to do more transactions like this. All right, the next one is the education division. Why has adjusted cash flow improved so significantly year to date for supplemental education and higher education? Maybe I'll give a quick answer and then turn it over to Andy here. Some of what I mentioned in my remarks is the reason. It's a lot of the bringing together to create KNA really created an operating structure where we've been able to kind of accelerate product development and improve margins. And then the higher ed side, the Purdue relationship, our ability to book the full fee has started to occur more recently. But Andy, you might have more to add on that.
Yeah, thanks, Tim. That's actually an excellent summary of the reasons.
It's nothing very unusual, but rather an example, as you say, that's a product of intentionality and discipline, I would say. KNA supplemental business is a portfolio of businesses and products, which each have their own market dynamics and cycles, but we pulled together a shared service function that is able to deliver real excellence on some of the core functions: product development, sales, marketing, and so on, at a lower cost per unit than the individual businesses. And that's helping on the expense side, and it's helping on the revenue side. And that combination is a good one. And we're in markets where we think we can grow for some time to come. So that's a good story.
On higher ed, as you say, Tim, Purdue Global has been growing and improving, and it's profitable enough to fund our full fee and, in fact, some repayment of accrued fees. So we currently, over the course of the first three quarters, we averaged 37,000 students, which is about 5% more than the same period last year. And we're currently standing at about 38,500. So it's the basics: growth and expense discipline that's leading to more cash. Nothing more dramatic than that.
Okay. Thank you, Andy. The next question is, "I was a bit surprised by the amount of Graham Media Group deleveraging in Q3, revenues down 28%, but operating income down 57%. Anything new to know about or just normal non-election year dynamics?" It is primarily non-election year dynamics.
You really see a lot of in election year spending in Q3, that is, those are revenue dollars that are highly accretive. And so when that disappears, you get real deleveraging. The other trends that I mentioned in the remarks continue to exist, but the primary reason for it is we had a very nice election cycle, and that did not repeat in 2025. Okay. Next question is CSI. "So in August 2025, CSI purchased Pine Drug Holdings and was issued a California pharmacy license with dispensing operations expected to commence later in the fourth quarter. You foreshadowed CSI entering California at the annual meeting. Is this a huge 2026 boost to CSI?" Another question today, "70% of CSI is IG. Is that a good proxy for the go-forward?
And then how is CSI still comping so nicely?" Some of this was covered a little bit in the remarks, but yes, we are now operating in California. We are in the early, early stages. I would expect that 2026 will have some business. Calling it a huge boost would be an overstatement there. You don't instantly get to scale. It takes time to build up teams and operations. We're excited to be kind of fully geographically penetrated, but it'll take a while. On the IG is 70% of CSI. Is that a good proxy for go-forward question? Look, we expect to continue to grow the IG area at a nice clip and in line with what we have shown in the past. I do think that there's the opportunity to incrementally go into other areas.
I think we can grow IG, but I think that there is the opportunity to expand a bit in terms of treatment lines. If we were to do that, it naturally would go down a little bit as a percent of the overall. I think, how is it growing so nicely? We are continuing to expand geographically and penetrate further into the markets that we've been at. We are really good at providing service for our doctors that we work with and getting patients on census and getting them treatments in really efficient periods of time and making everybody's life easier as part of that process. I think we've created an operational process that's working really well and I think has allowed us to continue to get referrals in this space because we really make our doctor partners' lives easier. Okay. Moving next.
The year to date through third quarter, operating cash flow is up despite GMG being such a drag. It now appears that GHC cash flows can grow, possibly even in a non-election year, and is the $80-$90 million CapEx guide a good proxy for 2026." Look, at a high level, and I addressed this a bit, but our growth excluding Graham Media Group, we expect to continue. And in election years, we expect Graham Media Group growth to show over the prior year. So the business that is less cyclical, I think we've had reasonable growth, and we expect reasonable growth to continue for the foreseeable future. And at some point, as those other parts of the business become bigger, they may offset the down years in non-election with Graham Media Group. And as far as the CapEx guide, we'll put out a good proxy for 2026.
I don't think there was anything extraordinary about 25. We had a couple of big projects that wound up, but you never know what new projects come up along the way as well. So I don't think it was abnormal, but there were a few projects that wound up. Okay. "Overall thoughts on immigration policy changes in terms of the impact on Kaplan International. KI growth appears to have slowed on the top line." Andy, I will kick that one over to you.
Yeah. And you're putting your finger on the exact reason that growth has slowed, which is we have immigration policies in a number of our student-receiving countries that have become more negative towards immigration. And countries are rarely opposed to student immigration. They oppose immigration more broadly. But student immigration is the lever that's easiest to pull when they feel political pressure.
So we're seeing that not just in the U.S. and the U.K., but also and even more dramatically in Australia and Canada. We've been at this for a long time, and these are cyclical. You can't really imagine a world in which Canada and Australia remain anti-immigration for a long period of time. These are huge countries with small populations. They need people. But politics plays itself out over time, and I think the immigration policy issues are going to persist over the course of some period of time into the future. The Chinese economy actually has resulted also in fewer students to U.K. pathways and some of our other businesses.
But you think about in the U.S., for example, presumably because of the lack of a trade agreement with India and the continuing negotiation, there are essentially no U.S. visa appointments available in India, which means that all the students who want to come to the United States, including a lot that we've recruited, can't come. And so those are just people who are willing to pay us and our U.S. university partners money that are stuck in India because we can't get them into the country. Australia, as I said, continues to tighten its regulations. But I would say KI, Kaplan International, has been really effective at finding solutions to problems and diversifying our student base. And we do have some advantages.
For example, Singapore is a net beneficiary of all of this because students who can't get into Australia or the U.S. or the U.K. are going to Singapore now, and we're picking that up. So it's a mixed bag. I expect we're definitely in a relatively tough period, but that's going to turn around over time.
Okay. Thank you, Andy. Next question. "Nice job on the refinancing and upping the credit line. Can you remind us on thinking of how much financial leverage you're willing to bear?" I think first, it's just important to say I think we're very comfortable with where our balance sheet is. Our net cash and securities position is referenced a little over $500 million at the end of Q3. And so we have a lot of optionality.
We are never going to be a company that really thinks about leverage as something that is an accelerant in a way that could add risk to our overall enterprise. That is just not how we operate, and if you're a shareholder or investor in the business, you should really understand that. I think the first thing that we do is, when we're looking at capital, what are the possibilities? We generate cash from operations, and we use those. But we also have a balance of securities that we could use to go and fund any acquisitions or large outflows of cash. We have a revolver that we can use for if there's a shorter-term reason to go and do something.
So if we went through all of those and we also or if it didn't make sense to leverage those for some reason, for the right deal, we would add incrementally to our current leverage profile, but I don't think we would add transformatively. And we don't really have a target that we operate against, but we're going to remain in a spot where we're very comfortable and sleep well each and every night. All right. "Given the rising demand for early childhood education, particularly in foundational literacy, math, and bilingual learning, does Kaplan see early age learning as a strategic expansion area? If so, what capabilities or partnerships is Kaplan considering to enter or scale in this segment?" Andy, I'm going to kick it over to you again.
Yeah. I mean, to the extent that by early childhood education, you really mean preschool, I don't see Kaplan.
That's not a current target market for us. There's so many other issues you're dealing with beyond the core educational issues, and we're not particularly expert at those issues. And maybe the time will come when we feel like we're ready for that, but that's not yet. Having said that, I think that we do think that the K-12 arena might be an appealing area for extension of our offerings. You may have heard we acquired a small private K-12 school in Florida this year called Ohana. And we're investing in that school, and we think it's an opportunity to learn from and contribute to a thriving K-12 school community. And so that gets us in the neighborhood of what you're talking about, but I think that early childhood education is probably not at the top of our list.
Couldn't have said it better myself. All right. The next question.
Do you see any hope that Congress will pass a bill to allow you and others to use excess pension funds for non-pension uses? Or do you think the 50% penalty for taking out pension funds will be with us for many years to come?" Well, I think the question had the phrase hope that Congress in it, which might provide an initial view of my answer. Look, we're not going to have the ability in any real way to help drive what Congress does. So in no way do we view a legislative solution to a pension overfunding as something that is in our realistic sphere of things that we think about.
So, our primary usage has been how can we leverage the pension funds to offer benefits to employees, improve the risk profile of pensioners, sometimes by bringing new pensioners into the fund from underfunded plans via transactions, and figure out are there additional pension eligible expenses which allow our treasury to have less. And so that less expense. So that is going to continue to be our playbook. There is, as the questioner references, there is a 50% excise tax on any withdrawals, and then you also pay local and federal taxes. So there is quite an amount of tax leakage associated with an overfunding withdrawal, which is why we have not taken that overfunding out and have instead looked for ways to operationalize it.
Until something tells us that there's a different path on that front legislatively, I think that will continue to be the path that we move forward on. Okay. Next question is, "How strongly have you considered selling your TV station business given the long-term secular concerns you have? You don't sound too hopeful about the business long-term, so why not sell it and use those proceeds to buy a different business? Thank you." I think, I'm not sure our view on the TV business and local broadcast, as I articulated here, is all that different than what the market's view would be. If you look at multiples in the space, they have come down over time, and the multiples in the space don't imply a big growth opportunity. So I'm not sure we're that misaligned with the market on the whole.
Look, if regulatory change happens, and I think I've said this before, we'll look if the landscape change, we'll relook at the landscape. And so that remains true today. We do have, when you think about a transaction, there are things that we think about in terms of we have a pretty low tax basis on that business. We own the properties outright, and I'm not sure the market gives you credit for those things. And last and most importantly, we have a good management team that's running it well and generating a lot of cash today. And the discount value associated with that cash in the next year or two is going to be a pretty low discount rate. So as the world shifts, we'll continue to look and watch.
We love our balance sheet, which gives us an opportunity to participate in any way that would make sense, but the landscape in that world is changing in a space that is getting harder and harder, and so, of course, we'll continue to be as possible regulatory change happens, we'll continue to evaluate if there's a different way in which we should participate in the space. Okay. Next question. "Would you consider opening a Framebridge studio in Northern Idaho, Montana, or Spokane where there's infrastructure and trades talent?" That is a question that I would not have the specific answer to. The Framebridge team would have a clear view on where they're evaluating, but I can tell you it needs to be within a reasonable distance to enough major markets where those retail stores can be serviced well enough, so that's a key factor along with labor pool availability. Okay.
Can you speak to the exceptional growth at GHC? Which businesses are stronger than others? Are there M&A opportunities, or do you see the business continuing to focus on organic growth? Does buying in minorities change how the business allocates capital?" Okay. There's a lot in there. Let me piece it apart into two different buckets, kind of the businesses and then capital allocation. Our capital allocation rubric has not fundamentally changed. We look at where is a dollar going to be spent that we think, in a perfect world, improves our moats and generates the best return on capital. And so that's really how we view things. We can do this in a variety of ways: organic investments, acquisitions, share purchases, dividends, and in many years we do multiple of those. Most years we do multiple of those things.
Most years, we don't necessarily do all those things, but most years, we do multiples of those things, and so I expect that will continue. On the M&A front, I think it is more likely that our capital will go into what we call bolt-on acquisitions internally. That tends to be more likely that it does that than kind of a brand new business in a brand new category, although we don't rule that out as a possibility, but the reason is when we do a bolt-on, it is in a business that we are in or complementary to already, so we tend to know quite a bit more. The management team that is going to run it are people that we know and have worked with, and oftentimes, there are some cost structure benefits to the new company, and it's better by being owned by us.
And so you put those things together, and kind of the risk-adjusted returns on capital usually look pretty good relative to a brand new business at the parent level. So I expect over time, more of our M&A-related capital that goes out would be on that bolt-on side, but not exclusively, but just more. On the buying in minorities, the other part of kind of that is also a capital allocation decision, and I view it as a slightly different form of share purchases. We are actually buying more for shareholders of the businesses that we own already. In some cases, it might just be one business. And so, while we did not have much on the share purchase front through Q3 in 2025, we did put a lot of capital out buying minorities and increasing the share of earnings for shareholders of those minority businesses.
And we may do that from time to time. There are not that many places where we don't own 100%, but there are some, and there may be opportunities that make sense at some point in time. And then the last piece of it, the growth at the company overall and which businesses are stronger than others, I find this a very challenging question to answer because different businesses have different characteristics to them. Look, I think that our scaled operations largely tend to have earning power coming from multiple different sources. And that, in my mind, is usually a good thing, not a bad thing, because if a bad thing happens at one of Kaplan's product lines or business units, it doesn't mean that Kaplan is going to have a terrible year.
If something were to, if we had a home healthcare or healthcare segment, the home healthcare rates for 2026 are actually modestly down from 2025. This is in an inflationary environment, but that's one part of the business, and it actually means that broadly, we expect to continue to be able to perform and grow through that. I think I would characterize it as our larger businesses that have cash coming from multiple different business lines tend to be things where you're going to see a level of kind of strength and durability. We have some very, very good businesses that are not the top of the scale as well. They just don't punch as high in terms of their weight. Okay.
Tim, please speak more on who is running the CSI business, why were they chosen, and their experience with CSI or healthcare in general." So I referenced in the remarks, there's a gentleman by the name of James Sheets who is the CEO at CSI Pharmacy. He is the founder of CSI Pharmacy. So he is a pharmacist by training, and he actually has been running the business since its founding and has continued to run the business after we acquired it about six years ago. So he is running it. He is continuing to run it, and I look forward to continuing to work with him to continue to grow the business over the coming years. So he knows that business better than anybody else at Graham Holdings, and he probably knows the space better than anybody else at Graham Holdings. Okay.
Can you speak further about what exactly is driving your strong ongoing healthcare revenues with or without acquisitions? Are there acquisitions you may be looking at in this area growing as fast as your organic revenue growth?" So the healthcare growth this year has been largely, if not exclusively, organic. We have continued to grow the business by really focusing on a high-level thesis of in-home care and both believing that that is a good trend societally for patients, for payers, for hospital systems, and it has favorable macro-demographic trends. And if you can build a business that you want to run effectively for 10, 20, 30 years or more in that space, you can take a long-term view. You can have excellent quality. You can have excellent operations, and you can build towards that, and that ultimately, you can hopefully take share.
And so that has been the mentality that we've had, and we've been on this journey in the healthcare services space for about 13 years or so at this point. And so I think you're just seeing the result of a lot of work by a lot of people and participating in the right sectors of the space. We expect that all of those macro trends I referenced before should continue to be true. And so hopefully, we'll be able to continue to grow on that front. From time to time, there will likely be opportunities to add inorganically as well. We've done that from time to time in the healthcare space. We will likely continue to do that from time to time in the healthcare space. And so I don't think it's an either/or though.
We should be able to grow organically, and we should be able to find inorganic opportunities from time to time. Right. For Catherine, "Will the bump from political advertising be muted for 2026 given the dynamics in your business, or will you still expect to see large election-year political spending?"
Hi. So the good news for broadcasters is that we're actually expecting record-breaking midterm spending next year. We're looking at it actually going to be the most expensive midterm on record and nearly half of it going to broadcasters. So one thing to keep in mind is that the spend is actually more concentrated to battleground states, and the good news for Graham Media Group is that we happen to be in one of those battleground states with Detroit, Michigan on record.
Last time, we ended up being with Detroit, the second highest political spending at our station in Detroit in the last election cycle. And so we expect, again, that to happen again next year. So between Detroit and what we're seeing in Houston and San Antonio with the Texas races, we expect a really great election year and a lot of political spending in our markets.
All right. We are excited about Michigan. So let's from Catherine's lips to the financial statements. Okay. Next question. "How does Kaplan protect itself or take advantage of AI?" Andy, why don't you take this one?
Sure. Well, that's a pretty tight summary of one of the core questions that we face.
One of the things for sure that in education, like really anywhere in the economy, the world is going to look a lot different in three years, five years, 10 years than it does right now. AI is going to change a lot about education. And so the job of any of the players in that space is to move as quickly as possible to where we think it'll be in the coming years. And we think we have a lot of we think we have a head start in that on a lot of fronts. And so that's a good thing for us. But we can also be sure that there will be players we've never heard of approaching things in ways we've never thought of who are trying to head to that spot as well or move that spot.
And so we've got to be very conscious of that and keep a sharp eye out for competitors. But adapting Kaplan for a world of AI is a central part of our priorities. And we really view AI's impact across the spectrum. So from on the one side, turbocharging productivity for individual employees or teams or functions. But on the other end of the spectrum, really enhancing and innovating on our products and services and building whole new product opportunities for students. And we've been rolling out solutions across the spectrum, including things like AI-powered staff assistance and academic content creation and admissions conversion on the sort of left side of that spectrum, and then tutoring and program support and grading and real-time learner feedback and all kinds of things to help student engagement and outcomes on the other side of that spectrum.
We're moving quickly on AI, and we feel like we're excited about the opportunities, but it's absolutely essential for us to constantly be surveying the landscape to see who's doing things that we've just never thought of that we've got to protect ourselves against. Yeah, how do we do it? By focusing on it every day.
I would just like to say that Andy and his team have really done an excellent job of having an AI-first culture at their organization. It's something that many of the other businesses at Graham Holdings are looking at them and admiring how they have been able to really incorporate it into their day-in, day-out operations to drive business value.
So one of the examples and benefits of having multiple businesses is sometimes you see one of our operations does things really well, and the rest of our operations can start to learn from that. And Andy and his team have been leading the way at the company on that front. The last question in the queue, so if others have questions, you should put them in now. But what does a managed decline scenario look like for GMG? So, Graham Media Group, Catherine and her team, are doing a really good job of running that business. And I would expect that we would generate meaningful amounts of cash over the short and medium term.
If the dynamics of the business persist and don't change, that ability to maintain and protect profitability will get more and more challenged because the trends of the business on fragmentation of audience, negotiated contracts are worse than they were five years ago and don't give any signs of getting better at the moment, so I think what we will need to look to do, perhaps in other changes in operations, is look to protect profitability as we continue to manage the business, and that's what we do in all of our businesses if they have down cycles. If we have a down cycle that we don't see an end to, we'll just continue to manage that as best we can and look for new opportunities to get into new business segments that could drive more durability.
We have a premium on making sure we're doing the right thing for our shareholders while managing the business and producing the best product that we can along the way. So I think a managed decline scenario is when we don't think the business is going to grow, we'll do what we can to protect profitability while still putting out a product that we could feel really proud of. Okay. "How does the company view its marketable securities holdings against paying down long-term debt? For example, are there market prices where it might prompt you to realize the taxable gains and pay back some or all of the debt?" Yeah. I mean, I think sort of a couple of questions embedded in there. The recent bond offering we did was priced at 5.625.
And so I would expect our return profile on marketables over any extended period of time. I think we would be pretty disappointed if we didn't beat that as a number. So if you just view it on a straight sort of rate basis. The second, as you referenced, we have large embedded gains within many of our securities. And so you would need to, whether it would be used for a debt paydown or something else, any usage of that. We think that usage would need to take into account the tax leakage associated with selling a security that had a large embedded gain. And I think from time to time, we'll find that. And if we do, then the securities are things that we would sell, and we've sold some from time to time as well.
It really is a decision around what is the return profile that we think we would get from the dollars that we would get as net proceeds, and how does that compare to our view of those securities and the tax leakage that you would get via selling them. And then a usage of that, whether it's debt or whether it's something else, is sort of a question tied to that return profile. Okay. Next question. "What does it take or what level of revenues or earnings is it required to move a company out of the other? Is Framebridge or Clyde's expected to move in the future?" It's an interesting question. For those that have been around for a long time, you may realize that healthcare was once in there, automotive was once in there, and manufacturing was once in there.
That's when I referenced that category changes. It's dynamic. It is a constant evolving mix of businesses over any extended period of time. Usually, something will move out of there from a reporting requirement basis. It needs to become its own segment. I would say that is the high-level governing philosophy that we would have on when something breaks out and becomes its own segment overall. There can possibly be other reasons that you would do that, but that would be the primary driving reason. Okay. "Most information you've given about the Framebridge opportunity, how big is the market?" Well, the custom framing market in the US, there have been some third-party publications from a few years ago that reference $7-8 billion in annual sales in the US.
I would expect, because of inflation and plus some of the things that we're doing to help start growing the market, that that number is a bit bigger than that today. So I think it would be not unreasonable to assume that today it's in the neighborhood of a $10 billion a year annual market. Our belief is that there is no brand in the space and that if you look at a lot of other markets, if you're a brand leader, you can end up owning some double-digit percentage of that market. So I think at the highest of levels, those are what our aspirations are with Framebridge. Okay. "Was a tax loss garnered on the World of Good shutdown? If so, any chance to use against sales of portfolio holdings?" Not really, because if they were operating losses, that reduces our taxable income in year.
So it reduces at that point in time. I don't want to exclusively say that there wasn't some modest amount, but nothing substantive associated with that. And the other thing I would note is we were able to sell some of the brands and receive some proceeds associated with that in both 2024 and in the first part of 2025. So there was some cash that came in as part of the shutdown as well. Okay. "Is there any concern with Graham's exposure to Berkshire Hathaway given Buffett's retirement?" Not really. Berkshire remains a pretty good business with a really strong balance sheet and cash coming in from a lot of places and excellent management that's been there for a long time and I suspect will continue to be so.
So we don't really have any concerns, any more concerns about exposure today than we did a year ago or five years ago and will probably a year from now. Okay. There are no more questions in the queue. So I would like to, at this point in time, wrap up our presentation and thank everybody for attending. Once again, we appreciate you attending the 2025 Graham Holdings Company Virtual Investor Day. Thank you.