Charter Communications, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Jessa, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Charter's second quarter investor call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Thank you. You may begin your conference.

Good morning and welcome to Charter's second quarter 2019 investor call. The presentation that accompanies this call can be found on our website, ir.charter.com, under the financial information section. Before we proceed, I would like to remind you that there are a number of risk factors and other cautionary statements contained in our SEC filings, including our most recent 10-K and also our 10-Q file this morning. We will not review those risk factors and other cautionary statements on this call. However, we encourage you to read them carefully. Various remarks that we make on this call concerning expectations, predictions, plans, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and may cause actual results to differ from historical or anticipated results. Any forward-looking statements reflect management's current view only, and Charter undertakes no obligation to revise or update such statements or to make additional forward-looking statements in the future. During the course of today's call, we will be referring to non-GAAP measures as defined and reconciled in our earnings materials. These non-GAAP measures, as defined by charter, may not be comparable to measures with similar titles used by other companies. Please also note that all growth rates noted on this call and in the presentation are calculated on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise specified. On today's call, we have Tom Rutledge, Chairman and CEO, and Chris Winfrey, our CFO. With that, let's turn the call over to Tom.

Good morning. Our core connectivity business is strong. We continue to execute well, and we continue to benefit from consolidating cable operations under our centralized operating strategy in the ways we expected, including lower customer churn, fewer service transactions per customer, and improving customer satisfaction. resulting in industry-leading growth of over 1 million customer relationships year over year and Internet customer growth of over 1.3 million year over year. In the second quarter, we had a net gain of over 200,000 customer relationships, with customer growth of nearly 4% over the last 12 months. We added over 250,000 Internet customers, and we also added 208,000 mobile lines, accelerating as our high-quality, attractively priced mobile product is beginning to resonate with customers and penetrate the marketplace. We grew cable-adjusted EBITDA by 5.4%, which combined with our lower cable capital expenditures yielded strong year-over-year cable-free cash flow growth of over 50%. That's nearly over 40% when including our investment in Spectrum Mobile. We remain focused on a number of service-oriented initiatives and we have a clear pathway to drive higher customer satisfaction and retention with positive growth and financial effects. Our insourced and high-quality workforce is driving an improved customer experience. In the second quarter, well over 90 percent of phone call volume was handled by our in-house agents, with billing and service-related calls down by 10 percent year over year. And over 80 percent of truck rolls were handled by our in-house field techs, with total truck rolls down near nearly 7% year-over-year. Our call center virtualization plans remain on track. We've gone from 13 billing instances to one front-end service environment, meaning better quality service and lower costs. Our self-installation program is also ramping quickly, with customer self-installations now representing over 40% of our sales volume. Our online selling and service platforms are also becoming increasingly successful. All of these initiatives are having meaningful impact on our core business, including enhanced customer experience by allowing customers to interact with us on their terms, either through digital platforms or highly skilled employees, reducing selling friction and service transaction volumes, all of which reduce our cost service per customer relationship now and for many years to come. We're using our transactional selling machine and improving brand recognition to generate sales of our Spectrum Mobile product with the ultimate goal of driving faster overall relationship growth. With over half a million Spectrum Mobile lines at the end of the second quarter, we're pleased with the progress we've made since launching in September of last year. In late May, we expanded the availability of Bring Your Own Device program to all of our sales channels with a positive impact on sales. Previously, our Bring Your Own Device program was only available by visiting select Spectrum Mobile stores. Now customers can purchase Spectrum Mobile while bringing their own device through all of our sales channels, including our inbound, retail, online, and direct channels. Later this year, we'll expand the availability of Spectrum Mobile service to our small and medium business customers. Mobile remains a key focus of Charter, and we continue to work on broadening our mobile capabilities. We also remain focused on opportunities to continue to develop our core asset, our hybrid fiber coax wireline network and its capacity, and we have a cost-efficient pathway to do that. Our infrastructure today delivers low latency service and superior capacity and speed, and we have a scalable relatively low cost upgrade path that allows for further low latency superiority, 10 gig symmetrical speeds with DOCSIS 4.0, also called full duplex, and expanded network throughput. Specifically, over time, we can expand our network from 750 megahertz to up to three gigahertz to meaningfully increase our total throughput and capacity, all of which positions us to continue to be the network of choice for a wide array of applications such as gaming, 8K video, developing high capacity, low latency products such as virtual reality, and medical and educational use cases. And we're doing that on a development path that is faster and more cost efficient than can be achieved by our competitors. So now I'll turn the call over to Chris.