Charter Communications, Inc.

Gentlemen, this is the operator. Please stand by. Today's conference will begin momentarily. Until that time, your lines will be again placed on a music hold. Thank you for your patience. Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Charter's first quarter 2021 investor call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and 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 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stefan Anninger. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to Charter's first quarter 2021 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 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. 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.

Thanks, Stephan. We continue to execute well in the first quarter, even in an environment with lower consumer move activity. We added over 300,000 customer relationships during the quarter with growth of 5.8% year over year. We also added 355,000 Internet customers in the quarter and 2 million over the last year for a year-over-year growth of 7.3%. We added 300,000 mobile lines, and we grew our adjusted EBITDA by 12.5%, and our free cash flow by nearly $500 million for 35%. COVID has continued to have an impact on our operations, but as the economy reopens and normal activities resume, we expect more sales opportunities to develop during the second half of the year, and we remain confident in our ability to grow our customers' EBITDA and free cash flow at healthy rates given the investments we've made in our network, which enable us to offer superior products and services. While the last year has focused on our successful operations and execution through the pandemic, May 18th will mark the fifth anniversary of the closing of our transaction to acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Since then, we've added more than 7 million Internet customers, and our annual EBITDA has expanded from $13.6 billion to over $19 billion. And our enterprise value has increased by $100 billion. Since the start of 2016, we've invested over $40 billion in infrastructure and technology. And over the last five years, we've extended serviceability to approximately 5 million homes and businesses. We've also committed to extending our network to reach more rural areas. Over the next six years, we expect to spend at least $5 billion offset by $1.2 billion in RDOF subsidies to reach over 1 million unserved consumer locations with gigabit Internet speeds. And we're actively exploring additional opportunities to further expand our rural build potential. Since our transactions closed, we've also enhanced the quality and efficiency of our operations. We've hired thousands of new employees into good jobs by bringing all of our work back to the U.S., and we committed to a minimum wage of $20 per hour to provide the best service possible, which fuels our growth. Since close, we've prepared the launch of mobile broadband products at scale, and our customers now have the fastest and least expensive mobile and wireline broadband products available in the market. Importantly, we continue to improve our connectivity products as demand for data in the home continues to grow at a very rapid pace. During the first quarter, we continued to see significant growth in data usage per Internet customer. On average, non-video customers used about 700 gigabytes per month in the first part of the quarter. And for the full quarter, average usage by non-video customers was up nearly 20% year over year. Close to 20% of our non-traditional video Internet customers now use a terabyte or more of data per month. The growth in demand for data is and will be driven by a number of factors, including the growth in IP video services, including video conferencing and gaming, also the growing number of IP devices connected to our network, which now totals nearly 450 million devices, and new and emerging products and services that are being developed as we speak, such as e-learning or telemedicine and 4K, virtual reality or holographic formats, for example. We're continuously increasing the capacity in our core and hubs and augmenting our network to improve speed and performance at a pace dictated by customers and the marketplace. We have a cost-effective approach to using DOCSIS 3.1, which we've already deployed, to expand our network capacity to 1.2 gigahertz, which gives us the ability to offer multi-gigabit speeds in the downstream and at least one gigabit per second in the upstream. In additional, In addition, we have DOCSIS 4.0 and other emerging technologies to cost-efficiently offer multi-gigabit speeds in both the downstream and in the upstream, serving the heavy data usage needs of our customers with quality connectivity services. While we have a great network asset, which is fully deployed and has a capably efficient path to deliver even higher capabilities, Our strategy is founded on saving customers money while providing state-of-the-art products. Mobile and wireline broadband are converging into a single connectivity service package, which is delivered over a combination of mobile and fixed networks. Our share of household connectivity spend, including mobile and fixed broadband, is low, and we remain very much underpenetrated relative to our long-term opportunity. An average household served by the big three mobile broadband competitors with two plus lines of mobile broadband and wireline broadband spends approximately $200 a month on its telecom services. Today, Charter only generates $33 a passing and $65 a customer of that $200 of combined monthly spend on mobile and wireline broadband service. By choosing Charter as their full-service connectivity provider, Customers can save hundreds, even thousands of dollars per year with better product capabilities and service. And so our goal is to do the same with mobile in our service area as we did with Wireline Voice, where we made Charter the predominant Wireline phone carrier by reducing consumer telephone bills by over 70%. Meaning Charter can grow for a long time because we remain underpenetrated and our growth will reduce customer costs. Now I'll turn the call over to Chris.