Charter Communications, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Charter's fourth quarter 2019 investor call. 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 will need to press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephan Anager.

Good morning and welcome to Charter's fourth 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 filed 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 that 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. Joining me on today's call are Tom Rutledge, our Chairman and CEO, and Chris Winfrey, our CFO. With that, let's turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Stephan. Our operating strategy continues to deliver strong results, and we remain focused on driving customer growth by delivering superior services and value to our customers, improving the quality of our operations by reducing unnecessary service transactions and truck rolls per customer, delivering sustainable free cash flow growth by driving EBITDA growth while reducing capital intensity, and finally, positioning our company for long-term customer relationship growth with current and new products by continuing to evolve a fully converged network that delivers high-speed, low-latency, seamless connectivity services inside or outside customers' homes and sedentary environments around the move. In 2019, we created over 1.1 million new customer relationships, substantially more than 2018. We added over 1.4 million new internet customers, also more than 2018. We grew our full-year cable-adjusted EBITDA by 6.6% in a non-political advertising year. And combined with our lower cable capital expenditures, our 2019 cable-free cash flow grew by over 100% year over year. We expect that our cable EBITDA growth, combined with our declining capital intensity and disciplined capital deployment strategy, will drive continued strong Our mobile business is a strategic extension of our core connectivity capabilities today and in the future, and it continues to grow. We now have well over 1 million mobile lines in service with over 900,000 of those added in 2019 at an accelerating pace. In 2019, we saw a substantial reduction in service transactions for customer relationships. And those improvements were reflected in lower per relationship repair calls, trouble call at truck rolls, and billing calls. We also performed fewer physical installation truck rolls, giving growing levels of self-installation activity. Looking forward to 2020, we're well-positioned to continue to reduce service activity per customer, given a higher level of customers inspecting pricing and packaging, the completion of our insourcing program, and increasingly experienced insourced call center and field operation workforces, the overall improving quality, reliability, and maintenance of our network, greater levels of online service activity, self-service activity, and growing levels of self-installation activity, as I mentioned, which in the fourth quarter exceeded 50% of sales. So in 2020, the lower levels of overall service activity for customer relationship should continue improvements in customer satisfaction, lower churn, and a reduction in cost to service customers for customer relationship. Our in-home connectivity product set also continues to improve with 85% of our residential internet customers now receiving minimum internet speeds of 100 megabits or more and nearly half receiving We continue to offer 400 megabits, our ultra product, and our gigabit speed tier across our entire footprint. We made our network capable of providing gigabit service everywhere we operate using DOCSIS 3.1 technology over the course of 13 months for $450 million in plant capital. Through our 10G plan, we also have a cost-efficient pathway to offer multi-gigabit speeds and lower latency to consumers and businesses that continue to attach more devices to our network, use more and more data on a daily basis, and are demanding greater network responsiveness and reliability. During the quarter, we also continue to deploy our advanced home Wi-Fi capabilities to new markets beyond Austin, Texas, including Dallas, San Antonio, and portions of Southern California. Our advanced Wi-Fi capability provides enhanced security, privacy, and app-based control over all IP devices in our consumers' homes, while simultaneously delivering a superior customer experience through better in-home Wi-Fi coverage and managed Wi-Fi solutions through dynamic band switching and channel optimization within the band. So far, our deployment has gone well, and we plan to roll out this capability throughout our entire footprint. Our Spectrum mobile business continues to grow quickly, and we added over 280,000 lines in the fourth quarter, more than we added in the third quarter. While it's still early, we believe that our results so far indicate our mobile product drives core connectivity, customer satisfaction, and will generate standalone profitability at scale. We also continue to test dual SIM technology using CBRS Spectrum by a small sales monitor on our own, high-capacity two-way network. Our tests continue to go very well. We continue to add features and functionality to our Spectrum mobile product, and in the first quarter, we plan to offer 5G mobile service. Now we'll turn the call over to Chris.