ATN International, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ATN International Q3 2023 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 a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Justin Benicasa, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Kathy, and good morning, everyone. This morning, we'll review our third quarter 2023 results. I'm joined today by Michael Pryor, ATN's Chief Executive Officer, and by Brad Martin, our Chief Operating Officer. Michael will provide an update on the business and strategy and a high-level overview of our quarterly results. I'll cover our financials and provide additional color where necessary, and Brad is here for questions and answers to the session. As a reminder, we released our third quarter results press release yesterday afternoon after the market closed. Investors can find our earnings release and results presentation on our investor relations website. Our earnings release and the presentation 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 the 8K filing provided to the SEC. I'll now turn the call over to Michael for his prepared remarks.

Thank you, Justin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We're pleased with our third quarter performance as we continue to rapidly convert customers to our high-speed networks and work toward completing our three-year plan at the end of 2024. Let me start by sharing three key takeaways from our performance. First, we continue to execute well on all fronts. delivering higher revenue and EBITDA on solid subscriber growth in both the quarter and first nine months of 2023. Second, the infrastructure investments we've made in building out our broadband network provide the foundation for strong recurring revenues, durable discretionary cash flow, and long-term shareholder value. And third, as we approach the final year of our three-year plan, we remain committed to managing our balance sheet and spending levels to maximize free cash flow over time. So we launched our ambitious glass and steel and first to fiber platform strategy two years ago, accelerating the delivery of high speed data services to underserved consumers and businesses, primarily in rural areas. And reflecting on our third quarter and year to date results in the context of that plan, I'm proud of the financial and operational milestones our team has accomplished towards those objectives. Justin will provide an update on our financial results, but I'll begin with our operating metrics. We achieved robust high-speed broadband subscriber growth of 20% year-on-year, highlighted by strong contributions from our international market. Additionally, our international market saw a 13% annual increase in mobile subscribers. In the U.S., we continue to expand our network reach to high-speed data subscribers and to enterprise and government customers. At the same time, we are making progress on rationalizing our legacy network and reducing run rate operating costs. We recently were recipients or subrecipients of nearly 45 million in federal grants to connect people in underserved rural and tribal areas to high-speed internet networks. These program grants follow on the more than $155 million in grants awarded to us and our partners over the previous 12 months, and will subsidize the funding for fiber and fixed wireless high-speed network expansion in rural areas of the United States, including parts of Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. The network build funded by these and potential additional grants are likely to extend over the next several years, paving the way for us to expand our network reach and grow our customer and revenue base, even as the pace of our self-funded capital expenditures decrease as planned. And for those of you who are new to ATN, we derive about half of our revenue from customers in the U.S., principally from rural communities in the West and Southwest, and both urban and rural areas of Alaska. The other half of our revenue comes from Bermuda and the Caribbean, home to some fast-growing markets like Guyana. We're seeing strong mobile subscriber growth and a rapid uptake of high-speed broadband. Based on the positive dynamics and our approach to maximizing the long-term value of our capital investments, we are encouraged about the opportunities across our markets in the quarters and years ahead. ATN is all about high-speed data connections. We play directly into what is unquestionably one of the world's most durable secular growth drivers, the need to be connected anytime and everywhere. And the demand for that connectivity at increasingly higher speeds is only going to accelerate. Our network's reliability, consistency, and efficiency provide ATN with an essential competitive advantage in long-lasting assets, that will only benefit us as the drive toward greater connectivity continues.