Charter Communications, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Charter's fourth 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 will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that 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 today, Stephan Eninger. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Charter's fourth 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 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 curfew 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, Chris Winfrey, our COO, and Jessica Fisher, our CFO. With that, let's turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Stephan. We continue to execute well in the fourth quarter with solid customer growth and strong financial growth. In October, we launched our new Spectrum Mobile multi-line pricing and packaging, which allows Spectrum Mobile customers to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year on their personal communication spend. We had our strongest mobile quarter ever with 380,000 line net ads. For the full year 2021, we added 940,000 new customer relationships, and we added over 1.2 million Internet customers for growth of over 4%. We also grew our mobile lines by 1.2 million. Finances were also strong in 2021. We grew full-year revenue in EBITDA by 7.5% and 11.4% respectively, and free cash flow grew by 23% year-over-year to $8.7 billion. As we look forward to the rest of this year, we remain focused on several strategic priorities and goals, including product development and network evolution, our rural construction initiative, and driving customer growth and penetration. And although the business environment in which we're operating remains unusual, we believe our goals and priorities will continue to foster our growth and prepare us well when the marketplace returns to historical levels of marketplace activity and sales. Fundamental to our success is the delivery of products and services that are superior to what our competitors can offer. Delivering more speed and throughput to our customers remains a key area of focus. In December, Internet customers who did not buy traditional video from us used over 700 gigabytes per month, more than 35% higher than pre-pandemic levels. And nearly 25% of our non-video Internet customers now use a terabyte or more of data per month. So we continue to see very high demand for throughput by our customers. In order to increase the capacity of our network for next-generation products and services, we've developed a multifaceted approach to our network evolution comprised of a number of technologies which will be deployed where they make the most sense strategically and economically, delivering the very fastest speeds and lowest latency at the lowest cost and time to deploy. In 2022, we'll increase the number of projects to deploy high splits in our service areas. High splits are powerful cost-efficient upgrades that use our existing DOCSIS 3.1 infrastructure and allow us to comfortably offer gigabit speeds at symmetrical speeds and multi-gigabit speeds in the downstream. Additionally, high splits will significantly reduce our network augmentation capital spending, including node spending. We also continue to actively develop our DOCSIS 4.0 technology plant architecture and rollout, which will allow us to cost-efficiently offer higher multi-gigabit speeds in the future. We recently ran a DOCSIS 4.0 test using frequency division duplexing, and we successfully delivered over 8 gigabits in the downstream and over 6 gigabits in the upstream. And there's more to come from that technology. Other areas of product development in 2022 include speed boosting our Wi-Fi connections while Spectrum Mobile customers are on their Spectrum Mobile devices connected to any Spectrum Wi-Fi access point enabled for mobile service. We also just turned on 5G C-band for all Spectrum Mobile customers who have a C-band enabled device, which means they can get faster 5G speeds while on the go. Both are Both of the speed boosting enhancements I just mentioned are included in our mobile pricing at no extra charge. We're also rolling out our 5G hybrid mobile network operation using CBRS small cells in a full market area, allowing selected participants to connect to our CBRS small cell access points when they're outside of Wi-Fi coverage. By furthering the convergence of our fixed and mobile broadband service, we not only improve the economics of our mobile business, but improve the customer experience. In fact, for the last 10 quarters, Global Wireless Solutions has ranked our mobile service the fastest in the country because we combine our internet and mobile connectivity together with our state-of-the-art Wi-Fi service. Another key piece of our long-term strategy is treating customer 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 continue to work on 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 of our customer field and network operations groups. Our rural construction initiative also remains a key focus. Our multi-year, multi-billion dollar construction project will deliver gigabit high-speed broadband access to more than 1 million unserved rural customer locations across the country. Through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, or RDOF, we will add over 100,000 miles of new network infrastructure to our approximately 800,000 existing models over the next five years. We're also in the midst of hiring more than 2,000 employees and contractors to support our rural expansions. But our rural construction initiative is not limited to RDOF commitments. We'll continue to build in other rural areas as well, and we will pursue opportunities to receive broadband stimulus funds, including the American Rescue Plan Act funds and funds from Infrastructure Investment Act and Jobs Act. We'll also extend our network past homes in areas adjacent to our subsidized builds that our network does not currently reach today. Ultimately, our rural construction initiative is not only good for the millions of rural customers that will finally have access to fast and reliable Internet, but it's also good for Charter and its shareholders. The expansion of our footprint will help us drive additional customer growth and financial returns. Finally, as we look to the balance of the year, we remain focused on driving customer growth, market share growth, and penetration by offering high-quality products and services at attractive prices. Our network allows us to deliver a unique, fully converged connectivity service package while saving customers hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. And our share of household connectivity spend, including mobile and fixed broadband, is still very low. In fact, as slide four in the presentation shows, we only capture about 27% of household spend on wireline and mobile connectivity within our footprint. So there's a large opportunity for increasing us to increase the market share with superior products, saving customers money, and through our latest offering, we can do that. An average household mobile broadband spend with two lines of mobile broadband and wireline broadband is approximately $200 a month. With our new multi-line pricing and packaging launched in October, a Spectrum customer can purchase our internet product and two lines of our unlimited mobile product with faster service for nearly 50% less and save at least $700 a year. So far, we've seen a very strong response to our offering, with our fourth quarter being our strongest quarter for mobile lines net ads yet. In fact, despite a very competitive environment, we continue to gain lines at a very rapid pace because of the value in our bundled service offering, which drives more EBITDA and free cash flow per customer and per passing and value for shareholders. Now I'll turn the call over to Jessica.