ATN International, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ATN International First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker today. Kasa, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Today, we will be reviewing our first quarter 2022 earning results. With me here is Michael Pryor, ATN's Chief Executive Officer. Michael will provide an update on our business and strategy, as well as high-level overview of our quarterly results. I'll cover the relevant financial information and provide additional color where necessary. As a reminder, we released our first 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 detail on these measures and reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures, and for further information regarding the factors that may affect our future operating results, please refer to our earnings release on our website at atni.com. or to the 8K filing provided to the SEC. And I'll turn the call now over to Michael.

Michael Nutterman Thank you, Justin, and welcome, everyone, to our first quarter 2022 earnings call. ATN has entered a new growth phase, a phase marked by fiber and other advanced data network infrastructure for more homes, businesses, schools, communities, and even other communications providers. The networks we are building around the world today will have lasting impact. both for the communities we serve as well as for our business. And as an example of the importance and the opportunity in this work, I'd like to start out by sharing some comments from our customer, the Northeast Arctic School Board in Alaska, explaining their situation. Quote, we are located in the remote Yukon Delta region of Alaska. There is no infrastructure. Our region lacks even basic internet access. The region has high poverty, and the only reliable internet connections are to the school and the health clinic, if there is a clinic in the village. In some places, you cannot buy a home use internet connection at all. Access to the internet is always a main concern for parents. It is very hard to conduct remote learning when none of the students have an internet connection, end quote. At ATN, we deliver connectivity. And for many, as in this example, that means access to life-changing services such as telehealth, online education, remote employment, and more. Through these services, the lives of previously isolated people can be transformed. As mentioned on our last quarterly call, our new growth strategy is characterized by two key components to drive progress and serve our mission of digitally empowering people and communities so that they can connect with the world and prosper. The first component of this strategy is what we call glass and steel. At its core, glass and steel means building core digital infrastructure such as fiber, towers, and fixed and mobile data network capacity. The second component is being first to fiber. This means being first to bring fiber to a community, a neighborhood, a business, a tower, or a home. Historically, if you look at how fiber and other telecommunications networks have developed, you will see that commercial success is often achieved by those at the tip of the spear. By leveraging our ability to operate in rugged market environments, we can establish several competitive advantages early on and better position ourselves to obtain and retain leadership in a given market over the long term. This has worked well for us before in other build cycles, and indeed earlier in this cycle for places like Bermuda and Cayman. We believe our experience and approach places us in an excellent position to fully benefit from our industry's transformation, best serve our customers, and capture value for our shareholders. Taken as a whole, our growth strategy has significant benefits. We are enhancing our prospects, across our footprint with technologies well-suited for longevity and growth. We are tailoring our technical solutions for the attributes of each market. We will use any means necessary to provide customers with the high-speed, reliable data connections they need. In the majority of cases, this involves fiber to the premise, but it also includes advanced fixed wireless and hybrid fiber coax solutions and even lower latency satellite solutions. Today, we have more than half a million homes passed by our broadband services, up from about 260,000 a year ago. And of our more than 204,000 total broadband customers, we have about 50% who are served by networks with speeds of 100 megabytes or greater. This number has increased by roughly 50% compared to a year ago. We expect these metrics to continue to improve going forward, driven by our differentiated approach. ATN is not just leaning into the future. We are also leaning into what's best for the needs of the communities we serve. As those who are familiar with ATN understand, our motivation extends beyond just the bottom line. Over the years, our ability to positively impact traditionally overlooked communities has transformed into a motivator and purpose for our teams around the globe. We are proud of the differences we're making in people's lives and expect that to remain a positive driver of our momentum going forth. And as an update, we recently announced our intention to bring affordable and modern cloud services to rural areas, including tribal lands across the southwestern U.S., through a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services. To this day, many tribal government and other organizations in rural and remote areas do not have access to the cloud and its related benefits, including improved cost, lower latency, better security, and more. By working with AWS, we are able to provide this modern capability and help to deliver the same types of IT solutions offered in urban centers to businesses, schools, hospitals, and others in rural communities. I'll turn now to our quarterly results with Justin going into more detail shortly. In the first quarter of 2022, we grew our top line by 38% year-over-year and adjusted EBITDA by 64% year-over-year. This was mainly due to our market expansion in the U.S. and to network upgrades and additions across our international and domestic operating footprints. Our international segment is showing resilience and stability. In particular, our market leadership in the more mature Caribbean island markets has continued to deliver steady cash flows for reinvestment in markets with higher growth potential, including Alaska, Guyana, and the southwestern U.S., as well as for upgrades to our existing network infrastructure in our other markets. For this quarter, investors will note continued revenue growth, but at the same time, rising expenses. Most of the expense increase is a conscious investment in growth in areas such as marketing, sales, and product enhancements. We are proud of the teams we have put in place in these markets as they continue to excel and outperform the competition. Core to our work internationally, as well as in the U.S., is helping to bridge the digital divide. In Guyana, for example, we have been collaborating with Voices GY since 2020, providing GTT SIM cards and discounted mobile data services to refugees and migrants across the country so that they can access online learning. At the same time, and also in Guyana, we are actively working to help catalyze the growth of local entrepreneurship and innovation so that the Guyanese can benefit directly and more rapidly on the growth and demand for local content and services to support the expanding foreign direct investment activity in the energy sector and elsewhere. To cite a couple of examples along those lines, GTT partnered with the Office of the Prime Minister on an innovation challenge hackathon, where teams competed for prizes by creating environmental sustainability software solutions. We also partnered with the Guyana Economic Development Trust and Guyana STEM that runs programs to identify Guyanese innovation, award prizes, and provide mentorship to bring the innovations to life. Turning back to the U.S., our successful acquisition of Alaska Communications continued to fuel our domestic momentum in the quarter. In addition to contributing meaningfully to our top line, this new market also further powered our subscriber reach and network expansion. We did experience some typical seasonality in the quarter, but expect to show growth from this region, particularly in the latter half of the year as we connect more business and residential customers. We are excited to continue working closely with our colleagues on the last frontier to execute and deliver connectivity to more rural and remote locations. Taking a step back, our glass and steel and first fiber strategy is positioning us well to meet our three-year growth objectives, including three years of projected annual EBITDA growth, which we initially laid out for investors with last quarter's earnings release. We have continued to make solid progress towards our key strategic objectives, both in the U.S. and in international markets. And as a result, we are now in the process of further expanding our presence in markets like Alaska, the lower 48, and Guyana, while also serving our customers well, building on strong relationships and communicating our advantages in our more mature markets, such as Bermuda. Looking ahead, we intend to continue looking out for opportunities to enter and expand in those markets that fit into our core strategy and have high potential for cash flow durability. We are confident in our ability to excel in those regions that other operators typically shy away from and believe this will allow us to unlock more shareholder value going forward. So, with that color on the realities of the need for what we do and how it aligns to our strategy and execution, I'll hand the call back over to Justin to provide more detail on our quarterly financial results. Justin.