ATN International, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ATN International Second Quarter 2022 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. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Justin Benicasa, Chief Financial Officer of the company. Please go ahead, sir.

Great. Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Today we'll be reviewing our second quarter 2022 earning results. With me here is Michael Pryor, ATN's Chief Executive Officer. Michael will provide an update on the business and strategy as well as high-level overview on our quarterly results. I will cover the relevant financial information and provide additional color where necessary. As a reminder, we released our second quarter earnings press release last night after market closed. Investors can find the release and summary slides on this call or 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 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 provided to the SEC. And I will now turn the call over to Michael for his prepared remarks.

Thank you, Justin, and welcome everyone to our second quarter 2022 earnings call. We delivered solid results in the second quarter, driven by strong performances across our business and geographies. In line with our three-year plan, we are making progress in several business areas to lay the foundation for our long-term growth and expansion. A few highlights from the quarter help to illustrate this point. We have completed our initial year of operating Alaska Communications. We are pleased to announce that full integration is complete, with the acquisition expanding our overall US footprint and adding roughly 50% to our total segment revenues. And I am grateful for the work of the ATN and Alaska teams in achieving this milestone. It was a large and complex undertaking, and we don't take success for granted. We've won a grant for approximately $10 million to deliver connectivity to homes and businesses in an area of Northern Arizona. Third, we invested more in increasing our infrastructure footprint and subscriber count in a number of markets, and in particular, Guyana. And last but not least, we announced yesterday that we have entered into an agreement to acquire the largest private broadband provider in New Mexico, about which I will say more shortly. As noted on prior calls, 2022 marks the first year under our new growth strategy. This strategy is underpinned by our twin pillars of glass and steel and being first to fiber. Glass and steel represents our goal to build and own modern core digital infrastructure, while being first to fiber expresses our commitment to being the first to bring high-speed connectivity to a market. Our growth strategy complements and enhances our differentiated approach, focused on entering and servicing rural and remote markets with high connectivity demand. Many of these markets are characterized by lower socioeconomic demographics or harsh natural environments, creating a critical need for our solutions. Our deep experience, robust operating platform, and preference for partnering with local stakeholders allows us to enter many of these markets and deliver lasting change. This approach also has positive business implications. By focusing on serving customers first and providing an essential service, we can cultivate sticky relationships with lasting, durable cash flows. These cash flows are the lifeblood of our business, allowing us to reinvest in other growing markets that meet our criteria for traditionally under-built environments with low penetration. As mentioned, we recently won a grant for approximately $10 million in support of our Southern Apache County Fiber to the Home project. This funding will allow us to deliver the promise of fiber to more than 11,000 residents and 4,000 homes and businesses in Southern Apache County. This is an area of the US that is currently suffering from significantly higher unemployment and poverty than the national average. And we are hopeful that the dramatic improvement in the availability of high-speed connectivity our project will deliver will help to alleviate those conditions. High-speed connectivity can have a very positive impact on communities like this today by offering access to life-changing opportunities, such as remote employment, the ability to sell goods or services through e-commerce marketplaces, distance learning, and telehealth. By focusing on what's most important and putting our customers first, we have continued to make solid progress across our key metrics. At the end of the second quarter, we had passed approximately 570,000 homes with our broadband networks and had approximately 9,400 fiber route miles across those markets. We've also had approximately 205,000 broadband subscribers with 52% of those subscribers utilizing or capable of being connected to our higher speed services. And turning briefly to quarterly results, in the second quarter of 2022, we grew our total revenues by 45% year over year and adjusted EBITDA by 55%. This was mainly due to our expansion in the U.S. alongside network upgrades and customer additions across both our domestic and international operations. Our international segment remains reliable and highly productive. We continue to focus on maintaining and improving our market share in more mature markets and leveraging those cash flows to reinvest in other markets that are earlier in their growth cycles, such as Alaska, Guyana, and southwestern U.S. These cash flows are also providing us with the flexibility to further upgrade our existing network infrastructure in other key areas. Our international segments mobile business also continued to perform well. At the end of the second quarter, our total segment mobile subscriber base was approximately 349,000, a 9% increase from a year ago, and with a faster rate of growth in the post-bate portion of that base. In the US, Alaska continued to be a steady and solid contributor, consistent with what we have seen over the past several quarters. We're generally happy with the progress made at this one-year mark of the acquisition, having, as I mentioned before, successfully integrated operations, and that helps us achieve greater synergies, increase market share, upgrade our capabilities, and improve resiliency. Going forward, we expect to increase the pace of investment and commercial activity as we look to satisfy more unmet demands. We also have remained strategically active in the U.S. with our recent announcement to acquire Sacred Wind, the largest privately owned broadband company in New Mexico. We expect Sacred Wind's operations to integrate with those of our existing operations in that region. And this acquisition is aligned with our broader corporate strategy. It's also in line with our strategy in continued transformation toward becoming a leading provider of broadband fiber and other infrastructure-based services to the carrier, business, government, and consumer segments in and around our longtime operating area in the Southwestern and Mountain West regions. We expect the combination to expand our footprint, our capabilities, and our development pipeline in the region. This investment will also further our mission of delivering positive social impact within the communities we serve. which includes those living in the tribal lands of that region. We are excited to be working with the team at Sacred Wind, and we look forward to providing more customers in New Mexico with affordable and reliable broadband connectivity. I would also like to congratulate our team in Arizona for their work with rural and remote tribal communities near the Grand Canyon. After completing our middle mile and local fiber build, we began delivering connectivity services to these communities in the second quarter. We are pleased to see the positive impact of our solutions in these communities and, notably, their school systems. So, in summary, we have continued to make good progress in both U.S. and international markets, growing our network footprint with state-of-the-art broadband connectivity and increasing our overall subscriber count. Our glass and steel and fiber first strategy are complementing our existing business capabilities well, and we are confident in our long-term success profile. Overall, we expect the investments that we've made in the first half of 2022 to support our annual and multi-year EBITDA growth projections. So with that, I'll hand over the call to Justin for our financial results.