ATN International, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to ATN International Q4 2021 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask the question during this session, you will need to press star then one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then zero. I will now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Justin Benicasa, Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Justin Benicasa Great. Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, we'll be reviewing our fourth quarter 2021 earnings results. With me here is Michael Pryor, ATN's Chief Executive Officer. Michael will provide an update on the business strategy and recently announced three-year growth plan and outlook, and I'll cover relevant financial information and provide additional color where necessary. As a reminder, we released our fourth quarter earnings press release last night after market closed, and investors can find the release and summary slides on our investor relations website. Before I turn the call over to Michael, I'd like to point out that this call, our press release, and slides contain forward-looking statements concerning our current expectations, objectives, and underlying assumptions regarding our future operating results. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Also, in an effort to provide useful information to investors, our comments today include non-GAAP financial measures. For details on these measures and reconciliations to comparable gap measures and for further information regarding the factors that may affect our future operating results, we refer you to our earnings release on our website at atni.com or to the 8-K filing provided to the SEC. And I'll now turn the call over to Michael.

Michael Heaney Okay. Thank you, Justin. And welcome, everyone, to our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. Especially appreciate you joining us in what seems to be a very busy news cycle. So as many of you know, ATN is focused on building a strong communications network and subscriber base in traditionally underbuilt or underserved market segments. This delivers high recurring revenues, durable cash flows, and long-term shareholder value. 2022 actually marks our 35th year as a company. And we took this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on the organization we have become, what our purpose is, and where we aspire to be in the future. It became clear to us during the process that what we actually do is much more than providing digital infrastructure and communication services. We provide access to opportunity in the global marketplace, a marketplace for both ideas and commerce. And where we can go includes greater reach, profitability, and growth, as well as greater positive impact for the people and communities we serve. In Alaska, for example, we recently provided high-speed data services to schools and students in some of the region's most remote and rural communities. We did this through a partnership with OneWeb's Low Earth Orbit Satellite Network, LEO Network. And as a result of our efforts, more Alaskan students now have access to the world's top online learning solutions, setting up these students and their communities for a more prosperous future. And we are not stopping there. In Alaska and in the lower 48, and we are working on numerous proposed projects, many of which are partially funded by government grants to bring fiber into poorly served communities. This includes tribal lands and other rural areas. And we're doing the same internationally, rapidly deploying fiber and other high-speed solutions to connect homes, businesses, schools, and towers in places like Guyana and the Cayman Islands. We are confident these are good investments because we've done this before. For example, when we embarked upon our Fiber Deep project five years ago in Bermuda and Cayman following a strategic transaction, we were able to significantly upgrade and expand our network reach and capabilities. These investments enabled us to deliver a stronger product suite to customers, secured our market leadership by growing subscribers and reducing churn, and ultimately enhanced operating cash flows and generated strong returns. This is what gets us going at ATN and why so many of us love what we do. Whether it be in the Caribbean or the United States, we bring the possibilities that come from connection. Those possibilities are things people take for granted in well-connected places. Competitive access to learning, to healthcare, to economic opportunity. The more than 2,300 employees in the ATN group of companies are making these opportunities and resources available to a broad economic and demographic strata. They're doing this in demographically diverse and geographically remote places worldwide. So to share our mission with you, it is to digitally empower people and communities so that they can connect with the world and prosper. And more powerfully, what we can make possible with our vision is to bring social and economic prosperity by providing people and communities with the best digital connectivity the world has to offer. The ripples from our work can have game-changing impact for generations to come. incredible operational and technical expertise and determination to deliver leading connectivity to these regions. It also requires the ability to cultivate respectful and rewarding relationships with the people who live there. The people of ATN excel in these skills and are uniquely equipped to bring this vision to life. So today, we are in the process of advancing several initiatives to secure our vision and long-term growth. On the domestic side, we are pivoting to a glass and steel fiber first build and operate platform strategy while phasing out our legacy wholesale wireless services. Internationally, we are investing in expanding our market leadership in the Caribbean as well as in higher growth markets such as Guyana. These actions will provide us with several new growth levers and cash flow generators. But before I expand on these, let's talk a little bit about the fourth quarter. During the quarter, we achieved significant top-line and EBITDA growth. These results were in line with our expectations and driven by, one, the integration of Alaska communications, and two, incremental growth in our international segment. In both domestic and international, we are investing for the future. In both segments, we see an opportunity to be first to fiber in multiple communities. bringing fiber-fed high-speed data services to consumers and businesses who are underserved. We have embarked on a multi-year program to seize this opportunity as highlighted in our earnings release, and I'll say more in a bit about where that can lead us. For now, let's go back to the results from the fourth quarter. So in addition to achieving double-digit revenue and EBITDA growth, some other highlights from this quarter included completing the integration of Alaska communications, bringing digital connectivity to more remote areas, and making important advances in our domestic fiber-first platform strategy. Today, we have close to half a million homes passed by our broadband networks, with an about even split between domestic and international. Going forward, we expect our broadband metric of homes passed with higher speed data services to increase steadily as we continue to execute against plan and provide a wider menu of services to our increasingly diversified customer base. Turning to international, during the quarter, our international operations remained highly reliable and delivered incremental sales expansion. This was largely due to our success in increasing our mobility subscriber account, as well as the rebound in tourism in the US Virgin Islands. Bermuda and the Cayman Islands have also continued to perform well for us, and we're proud of the teams we have built in these markets. And zooming in on Guyana for a moment, we see great potential in this market to grow high speed fixed and mobile data services, as well as overall revenue. We can accomplish this while maintaining our position as the leading provider of services for a growing business community with demands for ever more advanced services. As such, we are prioritizing the long term over the short term and investing to facilitate this growth. We find Guyana to be an especially exciting region right now. As some of you may be aware, this market has undergone significant changes over the past several years. particularly with the rapid development of oil reserves off the Atlantic coast. Today, Guyana has a rising GDP, improving economic climate, growing public and private investments, and expanding critical infrastructure, and a population that puts a high priority on education. We believe that these drivers have set the stage to make Guyana a compelling growth engine for us. We plan to continue investing cultivating relationships, and building up our regional expertise in this market to further compound our first mover advantages and to bring world-class connectivity to the Guyanese people. And moving back to domestic operations, our strategic acquisition of Alaska Communications led to an increase in our overall domestic fiber network and fueled our business momentum in the quarter. This acquisition has provided us with a stronger foothold in the U.S. and a more even split between domestic and international sales contributions. The acquisition also has accelerated our domestic pivot. We are well on our way to phasing out our legacy wholesale wireless business and transitioning into a glass and steel fiber-first platform strategy. This involves the synergistic and rapid expansion of our fiber connections to communications towers, adding to and upgrading our tower portfolio, and working with local communities to connect more businesses, schools, and households to high-speed data networks. This transformative pivot, which we expect to gather significant momentum in 22 and be substantially completed by the end of 2023, will provide us with improved operating leverage, stronger and more predictable long-term cash flow generation, and better risk management in our domestic options. So the Alaska acquisition has also greatly expanded our reach. We now have more than 250,000 domestic homes passed by broadband networks, representing about half of our company's total broadband homes passed. We also have approximately 5,900 fiber route miles 200 fiber-connected towers, and 275 owned tower sites in our domestic segment alone. We expect all of those metrics to grow as we execute on our plan. Beyond these key coverage expansions, we are also investing in increasing our base of higher-speed services through fiber and other solutions. This includes fiber and other infrastructure builds for our carrier services customers, is thus in line with our pivot to a more sustainable revenue mix in the U.S. And looking beyond 2021, we have recently set a three-year growth plan for our business, as we often do, but our latest growth plan, and we've shared some of our targets with investors in this release. These targets are significantly based on and in line with our commitment to advancing our fiber-first platform strategy. For example, We aim to achieve a revenue CAGR excluding construction revenue of 4% to 6% over the next three years, which should lead to annual revenue between $770 and $810 million in 2024. And we think we can improve our operating margins alongside that revenue growth, resulting in a target adjusted EBITDA CAGR of between 8% to 10% over the same three-year period. And following 2024, we expect CapEx to return to more normalized levels of, say, 10% to 15% of revenue. And we expect to do all this without increasing leverage, targeting a net debt ratio of less than 1.5 times by the end of 2024. So given our balance sheet strength, human capital, quality risk management controls, and long-term vision, We believe that we have adequate resources to accomplish these goals, inclusive of both organic and inorganic growth opportunities. And now Justin will cover Q4 and 2021 financial results. Justin. Great. Thank you, Michael.