Liberty Broadband Corporation

Welcome to the Liberty Broadband 2023 Q1 earnings call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference will be recorded on May 2nd. I would now like to turn the conference over to Shane Kleinstein, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon. 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 Trip Advisor with the SEC. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Liberty Broadband and Liberty Trip Advisor 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 OIBDA, information regarding the comparable GAAP metrics along with required definitions and reconciliations, including preliminary note and Schedules 1 and 2, can be found in the earnings press release issued today, as well as earnings releases for prior periods, which are available on Liberty Broadband's website. Now I would like to turn the call over to Greg Maffei, Liberty's President and CEO.

Thank you, Shane, and good afternoon to all. Today speaking on the call, we will also have Liberty Broadband's Chief Accounting and Principal Financial Officer, Brian Wendling, Ron Duncan, CEO of GCI, and Pete Pounds, CFO of GCI, will also be available to answer questions. I'd note also during the Q&A, we will be happy to answer questions related to Liberty TripAdvisor, but note Liberty TripAdvisor has not yet reported its Q1 results, so we will be unable to comment on the current quarter. So beginning with Liberty Broadband, in the first quarter, we issued $1.3 billion of a three and one-eighth charter exchangeable And we used the proceeds and some cash we had on hand to repurchase $1.4 billion of Charter's exchangeable debt that was due this year. Note that also, since we are under the 26% fully diluted ownership cap early this year, driven by Charter's annual compensation grants, we have not bought any stock back since January, any of the Charter stock back. We have not sold any into the buyback since January. We expect to resume sales into charters buyback pursuant to our stockholder agreement, though we do anticipate lighter buybacks this year at charter due to investments by the company. With the near-term liabilities addressed, our plan is also to resume LBRD A and K buybacks using the majority of our after-tax proceeds from those charter sales. And looking at charter itself, we had solid operating results. We added 76,000 new Internet subs in the quarter, good growth given the current broadband environment, and that was a sequential improvement through Q1. Mobile continues to be an area of continued strength. Spectrum One is resonating in the market. I'd note beginning in the fourth quarter, these free lines associated with Spectrum One will be converted to paid, and we expect them to drive margin improvement and a tailwind to EBITDA growth. So we added 686,000 mobile lines in that first quarter, nearly double what we did last year. Cable's share of mobile ads, total mobile ads, continues to increase. It's estimated to be 55% in the first quarter versus 35% in the fourth quarter. We overall reported good financial results. Revenue was up 3.4%, and EBITDA was up 2.6% during a period of heightened investments. Broadband revenue was up 5%, benefiting from both ARPU and customer growth. Broadband ARPU alone was up 4%. We are pleased with some of the progress that is underway at Charter on key initiative investments that Chris and his team have made, including on the network upgrade, the rural build, and mobile convergence. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Brian to discuss the financial results in more detail.