Charter Communications, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Charter's first quarter 2022 investor call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After this 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 will now hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Stefan Anninger, sir, you may begin.

Good morning, and welcome to Charter's first quarter 2022 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, 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 grow our business by offering superior converged connectivity products. During the quarter, we added 129,000 customer relationships and 185,000 internet customers. Customer relationship churn remains low due to current consumer behavior, while connect activity opportunities also remain low as a result. We continue to see very strong mobile line growth with net additions of 373,000. Over the last year, we've grown our mobile lines by nearly 50%. We now have over 4 million total mobile lines. Financials were also strong in the first quarter. First quarter revenue and EBITDA each grew by 5.4%. And when excluding a one-time payment, free cash flow grew by 9% year over year. As always, we remain focused on our primary goal of driving customer growth and market share, leading to higher free cash flow. We're doing that in a number of ways, including expanding our footprint with good returns on investment, upgrading our network to ensure that we're offering the latest and fastest high-quality connectivity services, and continuing to invest in high-quality customer service. And finally, investing in the mobile business to drive convergence of fixed and mobile connectivity products and earn a higher share of monthly household communications spend by saving customers money. Our rural construction initiative is also progressing as planned, and we've started to work in all 24 of the states where we won Rural Digital Opportunity Fund bids. Our multi-year, multi-billion dollar rural construction project will deliver gigabit high-speed broadband access to more than one million unserved rural customer locations across the country. Through RDOF, we'll add over 100,000 miles of new network infrastructure to our approximately 800,000 existing miles over the next five or so years. And our construction is not limited to RDOF commitments. We continue to build in other rural areas and are pursuing opportunities to receive other broadband stimulus funds. In addition, we regularly expand our network to additional residential SMB and enterprise passing wherever it's economically attractive. 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 by growing customers in unserved and underserved areas. Demand for our customers for greater connectivity speeds and data throughput continue to grow at a very fast pace. During the quarter, internet customers who did not buy traditional video from us used approximately 700 gigabytes per month, more than 35% higher than pre-pandemic levels. Nearly 25% of those customers now use a terabyte or more of data per month. To meet that growing demand, We're both expanding the capacity and reallocating capacity within our network. And the technology to both expand and reallocate plant bandwidth is developing rapidly. Today, we're implementing high splits, or what we prefer to call spectrum splits, which allocate more plant capacity to the upstream. All use our DOCSIS 3.1 infrastructure. In turn, we're able to offer our customers higher symmetrical speeds and multi-gigabit speeds. Additionally, by expanding and reallocating plant capacity, we reduce our network augmentation capital spending, including node split spending going forward. The vast majority of our deployed modems are already spectrum split capable, allowing us to provide faster service to our existing customers without swapping out their CPE. We've been increasing the number of spectrum splits projects in our service areas, and we'll continue to do so. As the technology develops further, we'll shift our strategy dynamically to further expand the capacity of our plant and reallocate bandwidth as necessary to meet customer needs by deploying additional technologies, including DOCSIS 4.0, which will allow us to deliver even greater capacity, offering consumers the fastest and lowest latency connectivity products in a highly capital-efficient way. Driving customer and market share growth and free cash flow. In mobile, we continue to improve and enhance our products in a number of ways, differentiating our offering, helping to drive customer growth, and improving mobile business economics. In April, we began the market rollout of Mobile Speed Boost. Mobile Speed Boost allows Spectrum Mobile customers to receive speeds up to 1 gigabit per second on their Spectrum Mobile service devices when inside their homes, even when their provisioned wireline internet speed is less than a gigabit. The rollout of our first trial of our CVS small cells in full market area continues to progress nicely. In the first quarter, we completed the build-out of our mobile core network for the upcoming trial. We expect the trial to begin in the middle of next year and to offer faster speeds, a better all-mobile experience, all the while saving us costs. Ultimately, with our mobile product, we're offering to consumers a unique and superior 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, we capture well less than 30% of household spend on wireline and mobile connectivity within our footprint. So there's a large opportunity for us to increase market share by saving customers money. And through our latest offering, we can do that, which in turn raises, connects, reduces churn, and drives customer growth. Before turning the call over to Jessica, I wanted to make a few comments about the joint venture with Comcast that we announced earlier this week. Our joint venture will provide video delivered by apps, a competitive app store, on TV applications, and is capable of aggregation, navigation, search and curation, billing, and content security. It will give consumers, new devices, and content providers new opportunities to create customer relationships on a platform designed to help them sell video effectively. Comcast has created excellent IP for this venture, and we have high expectations that we can work together to continue its development and distribution. We have a history of success in our mobile JV operating systems, demonstrated by the fact that between our two respective mobile businesses, We added more mobile lines in the first quarter this year than the rest of the mobile industry added collectively. Now I'll turn the call over to Jessica.