Liberty Latin America Ltd.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Daniel Neva, VP, Chief Commercial Officer of Liberty Networks.

Good morning and welcome to Liberty Latin America's first quarter 2024 investor call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the investor relations sessions of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. Following today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question and answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Today's remark may include forward-looking statements, including the company's expectation with respect to its outlook and future growth prospects, and other information and statements that are not historical fact. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Liberty Latin America's most recent file annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly report on Form 10-Q, along with associated press release. Liberty Latin America disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information to reflect any change in its expectation or in the conditions on which such statements or information is based. In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to the most comparable GAAP financial measures, which can be found in the appendices to this presentation, which is accessible under the investor session of our website. I would like now to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Ballonaire.

Thank you, Daniel, and welcome everyone to Liberty Latin America's first quarter results presentation. I'll begin with our group highlights and an overview of our operating results by reporting segment. Chris Noyes, our CFO, will then follow with a review of the company's financial performance. After that, we will get straight to your questions. As always, I'm joined by my executive team from across the region. and I will invite them to contribute as needed during the Q&A following our prepared remarks. As a point of housekeeping, we will both be working from slides, which you can find on our website at www.lla.com. Starting on slide four and our highlights, we grew our high-speed internet and post-paid mobile basis in the quarter, adding 45,000 subscribers in total. Once again, we added broadband subscribers across all our reporting segments, with particularly strong performance in Jamaica and Panama. In mobile, there was some impact from migration and ECF subscriber losses in Puerto Rico, which I will cover later. But this was more than offset by growth in Costa Rica, where we recorded our best net ads for two years, as well as strong performances in Panama and Jamaica. We reported adjusted EBITDA of $374 million in the quarter. This included double-digit growth in Panama and Costa Rica and high single-digit growth in cable and wireless Caribbean, positioning as well to drive improved group growth in the second half of the year. In addition, performance in Puerto Rico is poised to improve both sequentially and year-over-year in the second half as well. This reflects our comments of 2024 as a tale of two halves. We are seeing growth in nearly all our operations in the first half and in all operations in the second half. We continue to aggressively buy back our stock as we repurchase about 5% of our outstanding shares and a significant part of our outstanding 2024 convert. We intend to take advantage of any dislocation in trading levels in the future. To that end, our board has authorized an additional $200 million of capacity for our buyback to the end of 2026. Finally, we passed a major milestone in Puerto Rico in early April as we completed the migration of mobile customers to our new mobile core and IT platform, ahead of the timeline set out on our last earnings call. We are excited that we can now move forward with our plans to create a leading converged player in that market. We will cover the impacts of the migration activities on Q1 performance and the factors that we anticipate will now drive improved performance in more detail during today's presentation. Turning to slide five, I'll begin our operating review with Cable and Wireless Caribbean. On the left of the slide, we present our internet and mobile postpaid additions. In the first quarter, we delivered consistent performance across both product categories, led by Jamaica, which is our largest market in this segment. In addition to our FMC commercial strategy, which we have previously highlighted, we have also increased fixed pricing across the majority of our markets by an average of 3.5% so far this year. Moving to the center of the slide, this commercial momentum combined with a solid start to the year for B2B helped drive 3% rebase revenue growth for cable and wireless Caribbean in the quarter. Overall, we delivered a strong start to the year. Looking forward, we intend to take further price increases consistent with inflation and continue to see an opportunity to reduce our cost base through additional operating efficiencies related to For example, the shutdown of our copper network, further vendor consolidation, and digitalization of our business. Moving to slide six in our CNW Panama segment. Starting on the left of the slide, we delivered a solid quarter of internet subscriber additions, supporting healthy growth in our fixed product revenue. We continue to have an underweight market share position, but having a strong network with 95% of our footprint, having high speed and predominantly FTTH, which should support further growth in coming quarters. In mobile, we reported a return to post-paid gains and subscriber momentum should be buoyed in Q2 with the addition of customers from Digicel, whose concession ended on April 20th. Moving to the center of the slide, we saw our top line increase by 2% in the quarter. Growth was driven by B2B and fixed products, which were up by 10% and 6%, respectively. In mobile, revenue declined by 5%, driven by prepaid subscriber losses over the past 12 months, partly offset by improved ARPU. We expect performance to improve through the year, driven by subscriber ads. We also anticipate price increases in both fixed and mobile consistent with inflation and the value of our product offerings. The prepaid business here has one of the lowest RPUs in the region and we expect to climb the value ladder in the second part of this year. Finally, the integration of Claros operations in Panama is now complete and we will see the year over year benefits continue to drive adjusted OEBIDA growth through 2024. Turning to slide seven and Liberty, Puerto Rico. Starting on the left of the slide, we delivered another quarter of internet and total RGU additions driven by 2Play and 3Play digital offers. Our momentum in fixed remains robust. In mobile, our subscriber performance was impacted by the final stages of migration and withdrawal of ECF funding for schools in Puerto Rico. we saw lower gross ads as our sales force focused on migration activities rather than new sales. This is now turning, and we are starting to see some commercial green shoots with improved additions sequentially through March and April. As we flagged in our previous earnings announcement, we were also impacted by the withdrawal of ECF funding for schools in Puerto Rico. This drove 22,000 subscriber losses in Q1 and we anticipate a further headwind of approximately 40,000 subscribers in Q2. Our proof for these customers is less than half our average across the base. In the center of the slide, we show the revenue mix by product in Puerto Rico. We reported a 10% decline year over year, driven primarily by lower mobile equipment sales due to the impact of migration activities on gross ads. We plan to drive equipment sales in the second half. Chris will cover the financial puts and takes in greater detail within his section. In Puerto Rico, while we are incurring increased costs related to the final stages of customer migration and transitioning to new IT systems and a wireless core network, we believe we have the right strategic assets and team to be successful. We expect adjusted OEBIDA expansion in the second quarter, but the full effect of synergies and cost savings should show up in the third and fourth quarter this year. We expect that synergies, operating cost improvements, and top-line sequential growth with FMC will drive adjusted OEBDA to more than $45 million per month at some point in the second half and sets us up for significant expansion in adjusted OEBDA for 2025. Turning to slide eight and Liberty Costa Rica. Starting on the left of the slide, we delivered a robust fixed subscriber performance in the quarter against what continues to be a challenging competitive backdrop in Costa Rica. In mobile, we reported our strongest quarter in two years with more than double the prior year's quarter's postpaid additions and showing continued momentum in postpaid. As previously mentioned, we have conducted 5G trials and are prepared to be at the forefront of this development. Moving to the center of the slide, we reported 8% rebase revenue growth in the quarter, led by growth in mobile. We continue to grow our B2B operations from a small base in the market. On a reported basis, revenue was 18% higher in the quarter. Adjusted OEBDA grew by double digits as we are improving cost efficiencies and taking price increases, while still remaining one of the lowest cost providers in the country. Finally, to slide nine in our Liberty Networks segment. This is a great business with exceptional cash flow generation. However, there's some volatility from quarter to quarter driven by non-recurring and often non-cash factors. On the left side of the slide, we present revenue for current and prior year quarters. We have shown the impact of IRU amortization to highlight that this non-cash revenue is decreasing and our underlying business is growing. We expect the IRU aspect to continue falling over time and therefore create a headwind for near-term reported revenue. Enterprise has been the faster area of growth, up 9% on a rebase basis, driven by increased volume market share as we drove sales of our value-added services in cloud and cybersecurity solutions, focused on mission-critical operations for our customers. In other words, customers are trusting their most valuable operations to Liberty Networks. Wholesale revenue also grew steadily, excluding the impact of additional non-cash IRU amortization in the prior year period. We continue to build our network capabilities, and as highlighted in the lower right of the slide, we have expanded our presence in Central America with the opening of two new points of presence this year. These strategic locations mark another step forward in our company's growth strategy. This new point of presence will serve as vital hubs for our services, providing IP transit, connectivity, and MPLS capabilities to our customers in the region, reinforcing our commitment to delivering high-quality, reliable network services while extending our reach. Finally, in the center of the slide, we show our usual revenue graphic. However, we also wanted to highlight the strong financial performance of the business. Our Liberty Network segment has an adjusted OEBIDA margin above 50%, and given its relatively low capital intensity, a mid-40s operating fee cash flow drops. To summarize my presentation, with the completion of the Puerto Rico migration, we finally have our last major integration behind us. and our operations are headed in the right direction with improved commercial offerings and strong and secure networks. We are positioned for meaningful expansion in our financial results, which when combined with our share repurchases, should deliver stakeholder value. With that, I'll pass you over to Chris Noyes, our Chief Financial Officer, who will talk you through our financial performance before we take your questions. Chris?