Liberty Broadband Corporation

Good day ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Liberty Board Band 2021 Quarter 2 Earnings Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a questions and answer session. At this time, if you have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded August 10th. I would now like to turn the conference over to Courtney Chun, Chief Portfolio Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that this call includes certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in the most recent forms 10-K and 10-Q filed by Liberty Broadband and Liberty TripAdvisor with the FCC. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Liberty Broadband and Liberty TripAdvisor expressly disclaim any obligation or undertaking to disseminate any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statement contained herein, to reflect any change in Liberty Broadband or Liberty Trip Advisors' expectations with regard thereto, or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based. On today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for Liberty Broadband, including adjusted OIDDA, information regarding the comparable GAAP metrics, along with required definitions and reconciliations, including preliminary note and schedules one and two, can be found in the earnings press release issue today, which is available on Liberty Broadband's website. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Liberty President and CEO, Greg Buffay.

Thank you, Courtney, and good morning to all our listeners. Today, speaking on the call, we will also have Liberty Broadband's Chief Accounting Officer and Principal Financial Officer, Brian Wendland. Also during Q&A, we will answer questions related to Liberty TripAdvisor, who hosted their earnings call today. earlier this morning. Ron Duncan, the CEO of GCI, and Pete Pounds, the CFO of GCI, will also be available to answer questions. So let me start with the numbers at Liberty Broadband itself. We continue to participate in charters buyback, holding our fully diluted ownership at 26%. From May 1st through July 31st, we received $1.1 billion of proceeds. We use these proceeds plus additional cash held at LBRD to repurchase 7.5 million LBRDK shares for $1.3 billion over the same period at an average price per share of $167.17. This is a very attractive look-through price for Charter compared to the approximately 560 per share versus yesterday's close of 770 per share. As we said before, Liberty Broadband is a very attractive levered play on Charter, and you can see that. In our results, year-to-date, our LBRD repurchases plus strong performance in charter have accreted our NAV per share almost 17% compared to charter's growth of 15% over the same period. As we mentioned last quarter, we expect LBRD repurchases on an annual basis to match or exceed the after-tax proceeds from our charter share sales. Notably, the Board also increased the buyback authorization at Liberty Broadband to $2.5 billion. So turning to Charter itself, which had another quarter of great results, residential revenue was up 6.9% and still over 6% adjusting for last year's COVID impacts. Adjusted EBITDA was up 11.8%, the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit EBITDA growth at Charter. We had another strong broadband quarter with net ads of 400,000. up meaningfully compared to the second quarter of 2019, pre-COVID. In mobile, Charter added 265,000 new lines and is approaching a $3 million total lines after only three years of offering the service. We are seeing nice rebounds in the segments that were most affected by the pandemic. Notably, Charter is participating in a recovery of the advertising market, and advertising revenue is up 65% over 2020 and 4% over 2019. We also see a continued recovery in commercial revenue with strong growth of 5.6%. So with that, let me turn it over to Liberty Trip Advisor. And in Trip Advisor, leisure travel is back. The U.S. continues to lead with our hotel auction revenue nearly reaching 2019 levels in the second quarter and trending positively throughout the quarter. Europe has picked up recently with hotel shoppers reaching approximately 75% of 2019 comparable levels, up 45% from the first quarter. Consolidated monthly revenues as a percent of 2019 revenues continues to trend up, growing from 46% in April to 66% in June. $25 million in the second quarter, up $51 million from our first quarter results. This was driven by the revenue recovery as well as cost disciplines that were instituted during the pandemic. The majority of our 2020 fixed cost savings are expected to remain in place in 2021. Trip during the pandemic has been building the tools to be even more relevant as travel resumes. We are differentiating our offerings and experiences in dinings. We've rolled out a redesigned Trip app, and we continue to invest in TripAdvisor Plus subscription service. We expanded the TripAdvisor Plus to all customers, U.S. customers, in June, and we've entered into new partnerships to enhance the value proposition, including partnering with the first major OTA, Trip.com Group, adding car rental benefits through Hertz, and flight discounts through Dollar Flight Club. You should expect we will continue to enhance the supply offering of TripAdvisor Plus through further OTA and direct hotel partnerships. And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian to discuss the financials.