Charter Communications, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Charter's second quarter 2021 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'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Stefan Anninger. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Charter's second 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 filing, 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.

Thank you, Stephan. Our operating strategy continues to deliver good customer growth and even better financial growth. While second quarter residential customer activity remained lower than normal, residential sales activity is slowly picking up. And because churn continues to be so low, those trends are having a meaningful impact on our net additions and even larger impact on our financial growth rates. Our commercial business also saw improvements in the second quarter. Small business sales were up versus second quarter of 2019, and enterprise sales continued to steadily improve. Advertising also improved with second quarter revenue exceeding second quarter 2019 levels, driven by our advanced advertising products. So our view is the economy is improving and our business trajectory is normalizing. For the full quarter, we added over 330,000 customer relationships with customer growth of 4.2% year-over-year. We also added 400,000 internet customers in the quarter and 1.5 million over the last year for year-over-year growth of 5.5%. We added 265,000 mobile lines and we grew our adjusted EBITDA by 11.8% and our free cash flow by over $200 million year-over-year. We remain focused on driving customer growth by offering high-quality products and service under an operating strategy which works well in various market conditions. We've spoken significantly about wireless convergence and the capital-efficient nature of our expanding network capabilities and products. A key piece of our strategy also includes treating service as a product itself and giving our customers the flexibility to manage their spectrum services and interactions with us whenever and however they want. We are improving the quality and efficiency of our interactions with customers by expanding our customer self-service and self-care capabilities and digitizing and modernizing a number of elements our customers' field and network operations groups can use. Those efforts improve the customer experience and the quality of our products while reducing transactions with customers, lowering churn, extending average customer life, and reducing costs. We've responded to digital and self-service trends in several ways. Today, over 20% of our residential relationship sales are generated through our online channel with fully automated provisioning and installation scheduling and zero touch by charter. And close to 85% of our sales take advantage of our self-installation program reducing costs and driving higher customer satisfaction. Today, customers also choose their preferred medium of interacting with us when they have questions or service issues, including digital chat, phone, online, in person at one of our stores, or via the Spectrum app. Our ability to avoid and manage network impairments has improved significantly over the last several years by using machine learning pinpoint potential service degradation in real time, and often in advance, allowing us to avoid disruption altogether. We're now coupling that information with customers' preferred communications to proactively notify them of maintenance and restoration. Today, over 60% of our customers engage with us exclusively via digital means when they have a service question or issue. Customers that still want to interact with us via phone can do so And service from our call centers continues to become more efficient, given new tools we're deploying, which enhance our ability to properly answer questions and solve, for the first time, customer calls. And the fact that our call center workforce is US-based and fully insourced with employees who have training and career paths here at Charter enhances that. In aggregate, All of our efforts have reduced total customer transactions, including billing and service calls, repeat service calls, truck rolls, and network impairments, all of which improve the quality of our products. We're executing well, yet we remain early in the process of optimizing our service as a product. So together with our network and product capabilities, we remain confident in our ability to grow our customers, EBITDA, and free cash flow for many years to come. That confidence stems from a number of factors, including the demand for our connectivity products, including the long-term growth rate in usage on both wireline and wireless networks, our ability to deliver unique, fully converged connectivity service package, while saving customers hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year. And our share of household connectivity spend, including mobile and fixed broadband, is still low, From a passings perspective, we remain underpenetrated to our long-term opportunity. Finally, our capital-efficient path to expand network capability and improve the quality of our products in a manner that is more capital-efficient than our competitors gives us a structural advantage to compete over the long term. Ultimately, our strategy is founded on the principle of providing superior services at highly competitive prices. Now I'll turn the call over to Chris.