Charter Communications, Inc.

Please stand by. Your program is about to begin. If you need assistance during the conference today, please press star zero. Hello and welcome to the Charter Communications second quarter 2022 investor call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question and answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephan Aniger. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and welcome to Charter's second 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 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. 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. Our business continues to grow despite an unusual macroeconomic environment. During the second quarter, we added 38,000 Internet customers when excluding an unfavorable impact related to the discontinuation of the Emergency Broadband Benefit program and additional definitional requirements of the Affordable Connectivity Program. Customer relationship churn remains historically low due to current consumer behavior and connectivity remains low, primarily due to the low activity environment. At the same time, we continue to see very strong mobile line growth with line net additions of approximately 350,000. And over the last year, we've grown our mobile lines by nearly 50%. We now have over 4.3 million total mobile lines. Financials were also strong in the second quarter. Second quarter revenues grew by 6.2%, and EBITDA grew by 9.7%. Looking forward, we remain well-positioned. Our fixed and mobile broadband service continues to converge technically and operationally. We offer them along with all of our other high-quality products at attractive prices. Our growth is driven by offering value-rich packages that differentiate us from our competition at prices customers can afford regardless of the economic environment. and we plan to continue to do that. To continue to improve our service, we are focused on evolving our network. Data usage continues to grow at a very fast pace. During the second quarter, internet customers who do not buy traditional video from us used over 650 gigabytes per month. Nearly 25% of those customers now use a terabyte or more of data per month. And even with the rise of of work from home, peak usage patterns still prevail, with the vast majority of data usage occurring during the evening hours. Our network is built to handle that peak demand and delivers consistent speeds regardless of the time of day. With our dense HFC network, we deliver gigabit speeds today everywhere we offer service. And in the near term, we're implementing spectrum split upgrades, which expand our plant capacity and allocate more bandwidth to the upstream, all using our DOCSIS 3.1 infrastructure. In turn, we'll be able to offer our customers higher symmetrical speeds and multi-gigabit speeds in the downstream. Our long-term network evolution path includes DOCSIS 4.0. Recent testing using DOCSIS 4.0 technology simultaneously delivered over 8 gigabits in the downstream and over six gigabits in the upstream in a four amplifier cascade to a single modem. We will develop this technology even further, but the test demonstrated that we can successfully drive bidirectional multi-gigabit speed offerings across our entire network in a very capital efficient manner without the major disruption to our customers and operations that other kinds of upgrades require. so we can deliver a future-proof network that delivers the most compelling connectivity services in a capital and time-efficient manner, and in turn offer those services to consumers at highly attractive prices. But we're not only working to improve speeds and latency in our network, we're also working to improve network quality and reliability, reducing service transactions, driving longer customer lives, and reducing churn. We're doing that through better maintenance practices using artificial intelligence, telemetry, and machine learning technologies to drive what we call operational intelligence. We're now able to ingest, aggregate, correlate, and analyze millions of data points from our network, offering us intelligence about the health of our network, services, and anomalies in our network that are critical to the customer experience. In the past, this type of real-time network intelligence did not exist. and substantial human effort and manual analysis were required to manage our network, which was time-consuming and brought only limited insights and required thousands of service transactions. In many cases, our intelligence now allows us to avoid network outages and disruptions altogether, maintaining the plant more efficiently with far less activity and cost and fewer outages in service transactions. Our mobile business is growing at an extremely rapid pace, We remain the fastest growing mobile provider in the nation, and we continue to improve and enhance our products in a number of ways, differentiating our offerings, helping to drive customer growth, and making our mobile business economics, which are good, even better. Ultimately, with our mobile product, we're able to offer consumers a unique and superior fully converged connectivity service package while saving customers hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. And our share of household connectivity spend, including mobile and fixed broadband, is still very low. In fact, we capture 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 offerings, we can do that, which in turn raises connects, reduces churn, and drives overall customer relationship growth. In addition, our mobile business will drive meaningful EBITDA for charter even at our existing and very attractive mobile price points, giving us EBITDA growth simply by growing our mobile customer base. We're underpenetrated and our opportunity is large. Charter remains uniquely positioned to deliver superior services at superior prices, offering consumers the most attractive products for their connectivity needs. Our services remain the best choice for consumers, giving us the opportunity to continue to grow our business at a very healthy pace. Now I'll turn the call over to Jessica.